NFLPA President Eric Winston said team owners "need to be held to a higher standard" in terms of conduct after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell this week allowed Colts owner Jim Irsay to deliver Indianapolis' Super Bowl pitch. Irsay was arrested in March for allegedly operating a vehicle while intoxicated and is yet to face any league discipline. Winston, appearing on NBCSN's "Pro Football Talk Live," said, "I don't understand why the discipline for an owner of one of these 32 teams that hold the shield of the league is compared to a 22-year-old kid. That's what I don't understand, is why are we trying to compare? To me, there should be a much higher standard for an owner, there should be no doubt because I think he represents that team, and that's what we've always said about the shield, right?" He added of Irsay, "This guy is an owner of a National Football League team, and to me that should mean so much more and in a way that he should be held to a much higher standard. ... Players are looking very closely at this situation. They're looking and they're waiting to see what happens" ("PFT Live," NBCSN, 5/22). ESPN's Cris Carter said of Irsay, "I believe he should be held to a higher standard. I believe the league office will hold him to a higher standard." ESPN's Mike Greenberg added, "I think this is the right way to go. I think that you should let the system play itself out. I think that you should let the situation be resolved legally, then sit back and, looking at the totality of the events, make a decision on how the league will react" ("Mike & Mike," ESPN Radio, 5/23).
NEW STADIUM SMELL: PRO FOOTBALL TALK's Mike Florio wrote the NFL's decision to "give the Super Bowl to Minnesota in the first year that the team’s to-be-opened stadium was eligible to bid for the game has sent a clear message to all other NFL cities that may be considering giving public money to the construction of a new stadium: If you build it, the Super Bowl will come." There’s another message that is "being sent to the potential Super Bowl cities that already have their stadiums: If you’ll be going up against a city with a new stadium built in part by taxpayer dollars, don’t bother." If enough other cities "decide to pass on making a pitch for Super Bowls when new stadiums built in part by public money are in the mix, the bids in those years suddenly won’t be as good as they otherwise would be" (PROFOOTBALLTALK.com, 5/22).
ON THE DEFENSIVE: In S.F., Ann Killion writes of the lawsuit filed by former NFLers against the league over use of painkillers, "Another lawsuit, another black eye for the NFL." Will the "mountains of lawsuits, bad press and embarrassing disclosures have an impact" on the league's popularity? Youth football participation has "dropped in recent years and more and more parents have serious concerns about sending their children into such a sport" (S.F. CHRONICLE, 5/23). The SPORTS NETWORK's John McMullen wrote a settlement "in which both sides acknowledge some fault" will be the eventual outcome of the suit. The "most desirous one, however, is that each side doesn't make the same mistakes moving forward" (SPORTSNETWORK.com, 5/22). In Cincinnati, Paul Daugherty wrote it is "not the league's fault that some of its former players were given what they say were illegal, pain-killing narcotics" because all of us "have control over our own bodies. Even football players" (CINCINNATI.com, 5/22). In DC, Mike Wise writes we "keep hearing" from the NFL that "football is healthy." We "mostly keep listening." We "won’t stop watching, just as our ancestors wouldn’t stop smoking -- until they began dying of lung cancer." Professional football "seems impregnable now, able to withstand any level of criticism -- from the halls of medicine to the halls of Congress" (WASHINGTON POST, 5/23).
