THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511260194
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: JIM DUCIBELLA
LENGTH: Long : 137 lines
There once was a time when pro football fans and media concerned themselves only with rating the players. That's all changed within the past month, given Art Modell's Cleveland Browns moving to Baltimore and Bud Adams' Houston Oilers on their way to Tennessee, and who knows who headed who knows where.
Ron Reid of the Philadelphia Inquirer decided it was time to rate the owners, both as businessmen and human beings. Here's his list:
1. NATURE'S NOBLEMEN (best owners, good people): Dan Rooney, Steelers; Alex Spanos, Chargers; Robert Kraft, Patriots. Rooney has taken up the mantle worn by his father, Art, and is respected by players, coaches and everyone else in the league. Spanos is a similar kindly sort who had the wisdom to hire Bobby Beathard as his general manager. Kraft paid too much for the Patriots and has a bad stadium but has yet to take his team and run.
2. MERE MORTALS (marvelous owners): Jack Kent Cooke, Redskins; Wayne Huizenga, Dolphins; Eddie DeBartolo, 49ers. The 83-year-old Cooke may be an unfeeling patriarch toward some of his family members, but he has done well by Redskins fans. Huizenga, when he bought the Dolphins, showed considerable class in his treatment of Don Shula, unlike Jerry Jones' handling of Tom Landry in Dallas. DeBartolo has run a first-class operation ever since he dumped Joe Thomas as his general manager. No owner treats players with more consideration.
3. SATANIC SCOUNDRELS (shrewd owners): Al Davis, Raiders; Jerry Jones, Cowboys. Davis, of course, started all this franchise shifting, and his vendettas against ex-Raiders players (Marcus Allen, Kenny Stabler) and coaches (Art Shell, Mike Shanahan) have been disgraceful. But his teams have won three Super Bowls and a staggering number of lesser games. Jones' disdain for the NFL rules on shared earnings has been well-documented, and his signing of Deion Sanders was an egregious flouting of the salary cap. His feral leer probably will be coming soon, to a Super Bowl near you.
4. PRINCE CHARMINGS (pedestrian owners): Jeffrey Lurie, Eagles; Wellington Mara, Giants; Ralph Wilson, Bills. All three usually mean well, but invariably give one pause. Lurie's tortured trek toward signing Ray Rhodes followed shabby treatment of Dick Vermeil and other candidates. Mara once asked a player for a frank assessment of his ownership, got an unfavorable answer, and fired the player the same day. Wilson has suffered in silence through four Super Bowl losses. He also gave his daughter a job as a team scout.
5. BLASE SQUARES (generic owners): Pat Bowlen, Broncos; Lamar Hunt, Chiefs. Bowlen predicted his team would be back in the Super Bowl two seasons ago, because he signed wide receiver Anthony Miller. The Broncos, however, had no defense. Hunt wisely has given control of football operations to Carl Peterson. Hunt also fired a coach (John Mackovic) after a winning season.
6. CONFIRMED NERDS (oblivious owners): Mike Brown, Bengals; Rankin Smith, Falcons. Brown's prime motivation has been to save money, before and after the salary cap. Smith's stewardship in Atlanta has been a history of bad decisions, bad hires and worse fires.
7. CLASS ACTS (bumpkin owners): Leon Hess, Jets; Tom Benson, Saints. Hess is a misguided 81-year-old who believes Rich Kotite will end 25 years of losing seasons and take the team to the Super Bowl. Benson is a cornball who likes to dance inanely on the sideline after games. To his credit, he has stuck with his coach longer than most of his peers would have.
8. STRANGE BIRDS (turkey owners): William Clay Ford, Lions; Georgia Frontiere, Rams; Ken Behring, Seahawks. Ford has tolerated decades of mediocre finishes without being seriously bothered by any of them. Frontiere, the wicked stepmother, drove her stepson, Steve Rosenbloom, out of the NFL with some of the most stupid interference ever witnessed. She also took the Rams from division champion to perennial doormat in about three seasons. Behring fired Tom Flores, a coach who had won two Super Bowls, and has been looking into moving his team to Los Angeles.
9. BORN LOSERS (numbskull owners): Robert Irsay, Colts. Bill Bidwill, Cardinals; Adams and Modell. Irsay has been vilified in print by his own mother, who called him ``a devil on earth'' in a Sports Illustrated story a few years back. Bidwill was the league's lamest owner even before he moved his team from St. Louis to Phoenix.
10. INSUFFICIENT TENURE, data or anecdotes worth reporting: Wayne Weaver, Jaguars; Jerry Richardson, Panthers; Malcolm Glazer, Bucs; Roger Headrick, Vikings; Edward McCaskey, Bears. The Green Bay Packers are a municipally owned nonprofit corporation. What dinosaurs.
HUDDLING WITH ... NBC's Dick Enberg, Phil Simms, Paul Maguire
Are the NFL's famous rivalries dying out? If so, why?
Simms: You could build rivalries because it became personal over a period of a couple of years with the same core of players from one city playing the other. It's hard to do that now, because once you get pretty good as a football team and you get 10 good football players, once their contract comes up, somebody's going to come in and raid that core of good players you've accumulated and drafted and taught.
Maguire: What it is now is if you take your child to a game, you don't say, `Let's pick out a player we're going to root for.' Now, it's `Let's pick out a uniform and root for a uniform.' It's all about the money now. There's no loyalty anymore; not to the team, not to the town, not to anyone.
Dick, you recently had a conversation with former Cleveland Browns Jerry Sherk and Walter Johnson, neither of whom, I presume, is happy about Art Modell's plans to skip town.
Enberg: Johnson said, ``It's as if someone went into my personal biography and took out 11 years of my life and ripped it right out of my book.'' As badly as other people may feel, those who represented a city for all that time, represented a franchise, represented a name - the Browns - suddenly that's not going to be the same part of their lives. Of all the people that are deeply hurt, they are most of all.
Well, already there's talk about replacement teams coming to Cleveland to fill the gap. Do you think the name ``Browns'' should stay there, and the name ``Colts'' remain with Baltimore?
Enberg: Strongly.
BARRY'S WORLD: Cowboys coach Barry Switzer stopped his news conference to note that a radio reporter looked like the Son of Sam.
``Has anybody ever told you that before?'' he asked.
During the same news conference, Switzer referred to one of his starting defensive linemen as ``Kevin McCormack.''
It's Hurvin McCormack.
Finally, a couple of days later, Switzer noted that his son Doug would be playing an important college football game as quarterback for Arkansas Pine Bluff against ``William Morris.''
Say what?
``Oh yeah, that's a talent agency, isn't it?'' he said. ``I mean William Brown. Yeah, it's William Brown.''
Come again? Switzer's son played against a college called Morris Brown.
BLUE DARTS: Rumor has it that league owners aren't about to approve another expansion just to accommodate Los Angeles. ``My personal feeling is that we shouldn't expand any more than we already have,'' says the Patriots' Robert Kraft, who is concerned the quality of play will decline if the talent is spread too thin (it's not already?) ``I think the preference would be to have (an existing) team move there.'' ... And here's Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt on buddy Bud Adams' moving the Oilers to Nashville: ``I want what's best for Bud,'' Hunt said. ``But I also want what's best for the league. The Oiler fans have not been unsupportive. I'm not happy about any of this - it makes the league look bad.'' ... Talks aimed at an extension of the current collective-bargaining agreement are at a stalemate because too many owners are concerned about the increasing demand by players for signing bonuses. In a league that traditionally has frowned on giving out guaranteed contracts, players are attempting to get as much up front in signing bonuses as possible. Amazing. When the salary cap was introduced last year, players said they were sold out by the union. Now, owners are the ones complaining that it's costing them too much. ... Doug Pelfrey, the Bengals' kicker, approached an official against the Raiders and complained that the footballs were not inflated to regulation 13 pounds. According to Pelfrey, the official said, ``What do I look like, a physicist?'' by CNB