Tagliabue vacates Bountygate player punishments

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/8736662/paul-tagliabue-vacates-new-orleans-players-bounty-penalties

 

Anything that highlights Roger Goodell being nothing but the owners' useful idiot is fine by me.

 

That's the job of a commissioner of a major league. He's(she's) the owners' employee. Until the unions bargain for a say in the hiring of a commissioner, he(she) will always be a puppet. If the owners didn't like Stern he'd have been gone long ago.
Has there ever been such a person as a players' commissioner?

 

Goodell being treated by media outlets like an impartial figure gets on my last nerve. Always glad to see him on the losing side of something.

 

In some ways, Judge Landis was. While everyone remembers him for banning the Black Sox, he also would take some players' sides in disputes with owners. Such as in the late 30s, he made some players free agents because teams were conspiring to keep them in the minors. Tommy Henrich was one of them.

 

That's a very good question.

 

I think he was as good a Commissioner as baseball could have expected at the time. He was a better Commissioner than the owners really wanted.

He was brought in to deal with the gambling problem that infested base, of which the Black Sox scandal was the worst and best known but not only. Some argue he was excessively harsh in solving that problem, but no one can reasonably argue that wasn't extremely successful in carrying out that charge.

Landis was surprisingly fair to the players side on many issues. IMO more so than most subsequent Commissioners. He tried, but was defeated by the owners, to defend the rights of the minor league teams.

Had Landis acted to end segregation he would be not just the best Commissioner of all time, but the greatest non-playing contributor of all time. It is unfortunate that he did not, but it would have been quite a leap for an old man raised in an era of segregation to have taken on the owners (who seem to have been almost unanimous in opposing integration) on this issue.

Sorry for going off-topic.

 

So, you approve of little or no punishment for coaches and players operating a bounty system to injure opposing players?

 

The coaches got crushed. That's what Tags said, it was their fault. He probably reached this conclusion mostly because they don't have a union backing them, but there is no way to included coaches in the group that got "little or no punishment."

 

Terrible, terrible, terrible. Let these guys off scott free? And undermine a current commissioner in the process? Tagliabue, of all people, should have known better.

 

Tagliabue may have a broader view than you, Mark. I think he felt that courts might rule the suspensions violated the CBA, opening up a huge new can of legal vulnerabilities. As I understand it, he took the position that the players were acting under a system set up by management.

 

Wow, and here I totally thought Paul Tagliabue would be harsh on players who step outside the law.