As Raiders rush to Las Vegas, try not to laugh at Roger Goodell's stance against gambling

Yahoo ^ | March 27, 2017 | Dan Wetzel

[C19fan]

Roger Goodell recently declared the NFL remained opposed to legalized sports wagering. The NFL commissioner’s reasons were trite, outdated and mocked by experts, but when has that ever stopped the NFL from doubling down (gambling term) on a policy?

If Goodell says the league is opposed to sports wagering, then you rest assure that …

… Welcome the Las Vegas Raiders …

… Yeah, there is nothing that $750 million can’t buy.

Whatever. Goodell is just the talking head for the league. His bosses voted Monday by the tune of 31-1 that the Raiders should move from Oakland to Las Vegas because the good people of Clark County got suckered into the latest NFL tax boondoggle. Join the club.

[C19fan]

Pure virtue signalling. The NFL luvs the ratings from people who might have no rooting interest in games but laid some bucks legally or illegally. The NCAA is just as bad. They have some "Don't Bet On It" slogan for the b'ball tournament. The only reason people bother paying attention is to see how their bracket is doing.

[discostu]

The NFL has always had a very weird relationship with gambling. For ages they wouldn’t even acknowledge that Vegas existed, Vegas couldn’t put its tourist ads during NFL games, and NBC couldn’t even advertise their show Vegas. Meanwhile one of the first things discussed on the NFL network after the conference round is done is the Vegas Line. Heck used to be each of the pre-game shows talked about the Vegas Line every week. So actually this move to Vegas makes the situation less weird, at least they now admit the city exists.

[AppyPappy]

And take Oxy instead of smoking weed.

[gdani]

The NFL loves to deny the influence of gambling on its product. But it is exactly why they keep tweaking things like instant replay. You don’t want to upset the gamblers.

[C19fan]

The reason the NFL has injury lists is gambling.

[Defiant]

What the NFL needs is some competition. Football on a Sunday, watching the best in the world, is a great way to spend leisure time. The problem is the NFL keeps diminishing the value of its own product. The TV timeouts and BS rules are a big part of it. But the main attraction is the competition between cities that create rivalries that are storied through the ages. That has a value. Move the teams around in search of cities that will use public funds to subsidize billionaires and what do you do? You harm that product. Who cares about the LA Chargers and Vegas Raiders? Maybe a few diehards, but Oakland and San Diego will not root for those teams because they were once in that city. I grew up in St. Louis. Do I root for the Atlanta Hawks or the Baltimore Orioles because those franchises were once in St. Louis? Hell no. And for the fans of other teams, it isn't quite the same.

I had an idea for a league that would create true rivalries and could eventually overtake the NFL. The league would divide itself into territories. If you want 16 teams, there are 16 territories. To play on the team in a territory, you have to have graduated from high school in that territory. To be fair, territories are divided based on the number of football playing kids who graduate from high school annually in that territory. Now you are talking, when you have Southern California take on Alabama/Mississippi region in Birmingham. Think you can't get 100,000 for that? Think that won't get a HUGE tv contract from one of the networks?

In a few years, such a league would overtake the NFL and make the franchise value of Dean Spanos and Mark Davis next to nothing. The NFL can go down the drain, and I would be ecstatic.

Obviously, there are all kinds of arcane rules you'd have to come up with about people who move around while in HS and people from other countries, etc. but the concept would be region vs. region. Instead of rooting for a jersey and a team only because 52 people from elsewhere play there games there, you would actually be rooting for your HOME team. It would make football GREAT again.

[discostu]

Nobody has any loyalty to a randomly defined region, especially because many of those regions will include locations that already don’t like each other. And teams move, it’s part of sports in America. The people in the old city might not root for the team anymore, but if there were enough of them to matter the team wouldn’t have moved in the first place.

[WVMnteer]

The weirdest thing in the history of sports television is that Jimmy the Greek was on tv every week for years as a “football” expert. He was not allowed to acknowledge lines.

Hence, he said things like, “I like the Vikings BIG this week, Brent....”

[hanamizu]

I like the idea of relegation. Pro soccer and rugby use it. Team that finishes last is relegated to the minor leagues. Best minor-league team is promoted to majors. Baseball could do it easily. It would motivate owners to do better or their franchise might lose a lot of its value. For it to work, football would have to have a viable minor league system, but it could be done.

It would also eliminate construction of huge, expensive sports palaces. The Rams wouldn’t be able to build a new multibillion dollar stadium if they might find themselves in the minors next year.

[gibsonguy]

I guarantee the fact that the NFL is run by far left a-holes is hurting them. They are threatening Texas with sanctions if they pass the bill that will keep dudes out of girls locker rooms and showers despite the fact that Stadiums are exempt.

[discostu]

Relegation doesn’t actually accomplish very much. The sports are still divided into the haves and have nots, the only difference is it create as a group that has a little too much for the lower league and not enough for the upper and bounce back and forth between leagues. And it doesn’t eliminate the sports palaces either, the sheer quantity of teams, and subsequently smaller audience, does that... at least for some teams. Top echelon teams can still get some massive stadiums.

[WVMnteer]

Have you paid any attention to the Premiere League?

It has stadiums to rival anything in the US now.

Some of them (Arsenal) have been privately financed, but Premier League teams have unique ways of generating income in a hurry - like selling their stars. Also, all the teams seem to owned by Arab billionaires, which I doubt is something that would be applauded here.

[Rufii]

One reason I prefer college football to the pros is that it still has true rivalries. Players on college teams have to be students, and are therefore stakeholders—to use a trendy 21st century term—in the community. And the teams aren’t going anywhere. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish are not going to move to Las Vegas unless the school relocates there.

[hanamizu]

Have you paid any attention to the Premiere League?

---

To be honest, no. I’ve been watching Premiership Rugby this season. The stadiums are about the size of our minor-league baseball fields. There’s just something about paying some kind of penalty for coming in last—instead of being rewarded by first-round draft picks. I see relegation “encouraging the others”.

The idea of an owner stripping his club of stars so he can sell it, might be less attractive if the owner finds himself selling a minor league team. Don’t see the owners going for the idea though.

[Defiant]

I disagree. People who root for a team just because it is in their city will root triply hard for a team whose players come from that area. If you have one player on a team that came from the team’s home town, it is constantly mentioned. Imagine if they all did.

[Defiant]

I also think that football should have a minor leagues. There are so many good football players, and some of them who are not ready at 22 might be superstars at 25. Happens in other sports all the time. But in football, the ones who don’t make a team at 22 are pretty much done. Some hang on, but without actually playing it’s hard to get better. Look at Kurt Warner and how easily he might never have actually played a down.

[Defiant]

And schools have fan bases that are mostly local and like to come back to their little community. Imagine if the fan base were 20 million per team. A team in a large geographic area could play home games at several venues. Thus the Midwest Brawlers, covering several states, like MO, KS, IA, NE, SD, ND, could play their home games in St. Louis, KC, Omaha, and a few other places, and when the game was close by, everyone in a 3 hour drive would go.

Once the new league took off, it would expand from 16 to 32, and the regions would all split. Then you'd be even closer to the action. NY could be its own region. New England its own. NJ/Philly another. Western PA/Ohio. Regional differences would make life interesting. Some regions would have dozens of wide receivers and fewer big tight ends. Others might have big slow lineman but fewer DBs. Regional demographics would make the teams have their own character. It would be fun.

[Reily]

Question: To have this fan base of “local loyalty” would people tolerate lower quality athleticism in pro football?
Would they even notice?

[Defiant]

I don't think athleticism would be worse. The best in the world would still play, they would just have to play for their region. Where it might present a problem would be where a region had 5 of the best QBs or corners or whatever. Some of the best might, in that scenario, not make a team. Maybe there would be a way to allow those people to go elsewhere while still keeping the regional concept. We could probably figure something out.

Same thing happens, at a much lower level, at high schools every year. Some kids get screwed because there is someone even better than them. Over time, that evens out but some individuals lose out.

There are so many good football players graduating from college every year that there would not be a decrease in overall level of play. Each region would have lots of great players to choose from.

Of course, this is a very unlikely proposal. It would take a lot to get off the ground, but there may be enough bored billionaires out there to come up with something like this. The NFL has really gotten out of control.

[Redwood71]

Oh, this is hypocritical!!!

The National Football League’s feigned indignation about gambling is a joke. A conservative estimate is that $80 billion to $100 billion is wagered on NFL games each year, only a fraction legally. People place their bets through bookies, office pools, fantasy football, and the like. This gambling clearly boosts attendance and TV revenue, the mother’s milk of the sport. When you have money in a game, your interest is intensified.

The National Football League’s actions belie its supposed contempt for gambling. For example, the league requires teams to state before games what players may have to sit out because of injury and what players are questionable. That information only benefits gamblers. And does the league complain that newspapers run the point spreads on the games? Of course not.

In the early 1920s, one George Halas turned to Charles Bidwill, a bootlegger, gambler, racetrack owner, and associate of Chicago’s Al (Scarface) Capone’s mob, to finance the Chicago Bears. The Bidwill family now owns the Arizona Cardinals.

In 1925, bookie Tim Mara bought the New York Giants. His heirs still have half the team.

Notorious gambler Art Rooney took over the Pittsburgh Steelers. His family still controls the team; the Rooney empire is purportedly breaking up so that the racetracks and casinos won’t be mixed with the football team.

The Cleveland Browns were owned by crime syndicate bookmaker Arthur (Mickey) McBride, head of the Continental Racing Wire, the mob’s gambling news service. In 1961, the team was sold to Art Modell, who, among many things, was a partner in a horse-racing stable with one Morris (Mushy) Wexler, whom the Kefauver Committee named one of the “leading hoodlums” in McBride’s wire service.

The late Carroll Rosenbloom, a high roller with a major interest in a mobbed-up Bahamian casino, owned the Baltimore Colts and Los Angeles Rams at different times.
His second wife and widow, entertainer Georgia Frontiere — who had been married five times before latching on to Rosenbloom — inherited control of the Rams and moved them to St. Louis when she got a stadium 96 percent funded by taxpayers. And there is still a real question as to how Carroll R. drowned when witness say they saw two men in wet suits holding him under the surf.

The Youngstown DeBartolo family, long involved in casinos and racetracks, owns the San Francisco 49ers. In the late 1990s, Edward DeBartolo Jr., then head of the 49ers, paid a Louisiana governor $400,000 to get a riverboat casino license.

The late Pete Rozelle, Rancho Santa Fe resident and onetime head of the NFL, deftly tiptoed around team owners’ mob/gambling ties. Rozelle stepped on players suspected of consorting with gamblers (but never told them not to associate with their mobbed-up team owners).

The San Diego Chargers were founded by longtime gambler Barron Hilton, who had both a business and personal relationship with Los Angeles attorney Sidney Korshak, who was described by law enforcement officials as “the link between the legitimate business world and organized crime.” A later owner was Eugene Klein, another Korshak friend with mob and gambling associations.

The late Al Davis, a former Chargers coach who wound up owning the Oakland Raiders, was a business associate of San Diego casino owner Allen Glick. Davis’s survivors still control the Raiders. Several Chargers players got into deals with Glick.

So this love affair with gambling and organized crime and the NFL has been going on since the league was created and before. And I’m getting tired of writing about it. There’s a lot more. And the NFL’s approach is really hypocritical!!!!!

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