Goodell's NFL 'honesty' proposal is brilliant
Posted: Friday, March 07, 2008 4:59 PM
I’m not sure that any professional team sport has ever had a directive like the one NFL commissioner Roger Goodell delivered today. He wants teams to promise not to cheat.
According to this Mike Maske story from The Washington Post, “Goodell pledged to impose more severe penalties on teams and employees who violate rules governing competition. He also proposed a measure requiring team employees to report ‘actual or suspected’ violations and another that would require each team's principal owner, top football executive and head coach to stipulate annually, under the threat of league discipline, that they complied with the rules and reported violations.”
This is really extraordinary. To my knowledge, no other commissioner of a team sport has made a similar request. The assumption has always been that cheating is part of the game. The rules are spelled out and it’s up to the officials to catch anybody who breaks them.
People who get away with cheating – with the one exception of drug cheats in baseball – have generally been applauded for their exceptional skills. Some, like Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton and a host of other pitchers who cut, scuffed or loaded up a baseball, have even been enshrined in their sport’s Hall of Fame.
It’s not just baseball, though. In the good old days of the NFL, before players wore gloves, some quarterbacks would tape filed-down thumbtacks to their fingertips when the weather went to arctic extremes. It was illegal, but the nubs of the tacks allowed them to grip the football.
More recently, when the home team had to provide brand-new, unused game balls, some teams would rough them up in the clothes dryer or even practice with them and then repaint the laces white before the game so they’d look new. The reason was that unused footballs are slick and hard to grip.
Before that, teams had special balls for the kickers that had been worked over in various ways and were inflated to pressures not allowed.
To combat such practices, the NFL took over control of the game balls.
Still, there are plenty of other ways to cheat in football, and teams and players do whatever they can to get an edge, whether it’s spraying their jerseys with something to make them slick or sneaking a little stickum for their hands.
In basketball, there are endless ways to hold your man without getting called. In hockey, the list of tricks is endless.
The players and coaches in every sport have always justified it by saying, “It isn’t cheating if you don’t get caught.” And you’ve all heard the line, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.”
That’s why Goodell’s proposal is so revolutionary. Goaded into action by the Patriots’ act of video spying – an act that was almost certainly not limited to one game against the Jets – the commissioner has apparently put the league’s competition committee on notice that he wants new and stringent rules; he actually wants the cheating to stop.
Among his proposals is the one that asks team owners and officials to confirm that they didn’t cheat. He also wants to require team personnel to rat out any cheating they see in the organization.
It’s so obvious, you wonder why nobody thought of it before. After all, in golf, players are told that if they break the rules, they’re required to report the breach themselves. I’ve seen plenty of cheating in friendly games on the local courses, but you hear about case of cheating on the PGA Tour once every other generation. When you demand accountability and build it into the ethos of the game, you may just get it.
I can see how Goodell came to this conclusion. You have to assume that the Patriots have systematically cheated for years, which is why he destroyed all the evidence after slapping the enormous penalties he did on them. You also have to assume that other teams also cheat – maybe not as creatively or as well as the Patriots, but still as well as they can manage. Rather than reopen a can of worms that could devastate the game’s image, he decided to look to the future and not to the past.
If you make everybody swear not to cheat, you remove the excuse about it not being cheating if you don’t get caught. If you make honesty and fair play the cornerstone of your game, you negate that old chestnut about honest players not trying hard enough.
It’s a revolutionary concept – and long overdue.
