Cook: Goodell offers propaganda instead of honest answers
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The NFL owners are doing it for you. The lockout of their players? The fight over more than $9 billion in annual revenues? The threat of no professional football in the fall? It's all for you.
So says NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
"We can't continue to have the rising costs of operating the league and shifting it to our fans."
Please.
Like the owners will order an immediate 10 percent decrease in ticket prices once they get a new, favorable (for them) collective bargaining agreement with the players and promise not to raise those ticket prices for five years.
Sure, they will.
Does Goodell really think the fans are idiots?
Listen, I have nothing against greed. I don't think anyone does. It's the American way, right? We'd all take more if we could get it. I mean, are we stupid?
But couldn't Goodell at least be honest about it?
Couldn't he have said the owners are tired of the cost of the players' salaries and benefits eating away at their enormous profits?
Now that would have made Goodell's interactive teleconference with Steelers season ticket holders Thursday interesting.
Goodell took 16 questions in 30 minutes during what was billed as an "NFL Fan Forum," the 17th such Q-and-A he has done since the lockout began. Sure, it was self-serving for the commissioner and the owners, strictly propaganda, if you will. But everybody knew that going in. And I shouldn't say it wasn't interesting. Mixed in among the predictable questions about the possibility of an 18-game regular season, Super Bowl ticket allocation and the inconsistent way the league dealt with on-field disciplinary issues last season and seemed to target Steelers linebacker James Harrison were a couple of gems.
No, nobody asked Goodell how he could suspend Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger for four games when he wasn't charged with a crime.
I wish somebody had.
But the two questions still were good.
Goodell danced around one.
First Published May 20, 2011 12:00 am
