NFL Knows Importance of Sharing Profits

Football fans noted recently that the rules of baseball had enabled the New York Yankees to win the championship again this season, extending a run that has taken them to the World Series 36 times in the last 78 years.

Nothing remotely similar can happen in the NFL, where for 50 years the billions of dollars in television revenue have been shared equally by all franchises.

That has kept any NFL team from dominating for long. And most years, it has kept many teams in contention.

Look at the standings again this week.

It’s about time to conclude that the Yankees are a national disgrace.

Their insistence on hanging onto nearly all the revenue they generate in heavily populated New York is one of the biggest things wrong with big league sports in America today.

Over the years, the Yankees have learned neither fairness nor unselfishness nor even good business sense from the NFL team in their town, the New York Giants, whose wisdom and selflessness are largely responsible for the truth that in this half of the century, football has overtaken baseball as the national pastime.

Early in television’s ascendancy, the 1950s, Giant owners led the campaign to share most NFL revenue equally, empowering small markets like Green Bay and eventually Jacksonville and Indianapolis, among others, to compete for championships.

And revenue-sharing has produced the league-wide parity that has increased pro football attendance and TV ratings again this year.

For half a century, every NFL club with an able owner has had a chance to win--and they’ve all had the financial resources to compete for division championships, conference titles and league titles, delighting the many football fans in the many communities where their teams have been in contention.

By contrast, the annual races in baseball have been and still are a joke--or a disgrace.

With rare exceptions, only the rich can compete in baseball--where revenue sharing is minimal--and the Yankees, sitting in the nation’s biggest and richest city, are the richest.

The losers are baseball fans everywhere else.

Of course the Yankees are the baseball team of the century. With brighter owners, they would have been in all 78 of the most recent World Series, not just 36.

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Gray area: Football fans in recent days have apparently joined baseball fans in condemning a television announcer, Jim Gray, for grilling former ballplayer Pete Rose.

The astonishing thing is the extent of the outrage expressed against Gray, who, over the years, has tenaciously interviewed many football people without provoking a public outcry.

In recent years, dozens of public figures, from Congressman Henry J. Hyde and President Clinton to Denver Coach Mike Shanahan have been similarly approached by media representatives without provoking similar outrage.

For example, even Shanahan’s two Super Bowl championships--in the last two years--couldn’t save him from the badgering he has had to endure this year from Colorado reporters.

It’s when the media asks, however, that the public learns.

Sure, Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame, but that shouldn’t protect him from interrogation.

The charge that Gray chose the wrong time and place is unrealistic. When else is Rose available for intensive questioning on a national broadcast?

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Better team lost: Occasionally in an NFL game, the team that plays the better football loses.

In a strange 24-21 game last Sunday, for example, the winners were the 6-1 Tennessee Titans, who led in the first quarter, 21-0, but scored only three more points.

I’d say the losers, the 6-1 St. Louis Rams, were the better team.

In the end, after three touchdown passes by quarterback Kurt Warner, the Rams pulled within a missed 38-yard field goal of overtime.

For Warner, it was a learning experience.

He is basically an NFL rookie and in the first quarter, when he lost the ball twice on fumbles, he often played like one.

For the first time in his life, he was facing the kind of powerful, hostile pass rush he never saw in the Arena League or even in NFL Europe. You can only learn how a rush like that feels by getting it, and Warner got it.

And learned.

His three touchdown passes came next.

And in the final minutes, he led the Ram drive that had everything but a field goal.

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Cheering and cheating: One of the more enduring sights Sunday in Nashville’s new Adelphia Coliseum was Tennessee Titan Coach Jeff Fisher leading the cheers.

To be sure, he wasn’t the first NFL coach to do that to a visiting team.

Most hometown coaches and players try to induce their crowds into yelling, thereby drowning out the signals by the opposing quarterback.

That’s cheating, of course.

And in Nashville, it worked beautifully, as usual, when the Rams jumped offside repeatedly on plays that the league labels false starts.

Thus, Warner could only get in three scoring passes, one to wide receiver Isaac Bruce and two to running backs Marshall Faulk and Amp Lee.

The inability or unwillingness of the NFL to solve its stadium-noise problem--which is not an impossible problem in the electronic era--stands as a continuing indictment of the league’s 31 club owners.

The most revealing thing about it came up last week when the Rams developed an electronic way to blot out the Nashville noise, and when, immediately, the Titans ran to the league office to countermand the plan.

In other words, the Titans wanted to cheat.

To win, they needed to, it turned out, because in the last three quarters, on most series, they ran twice, passed once, and punted.

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Can defense win? The Miami Dolphins also played dull, conservative football last Sunday, extending Coach Jimmy Johnson’s season-long campaign, and again their defense was sound and aggressive enough to prevail in Oakland, 16-13.

What Johnson is trying to prove this season is that you can win a Super Bowl in a passing era with a defensive team.

Even before quarterback Dan Marino was injured, the Dolphins played with stubborn conservatism, usually running instead of passing, leaving the decision up to Miami linebacker Zach Thomas and his teammates.

And so the 1999 Dolphins have been hardly more explosive with Marino than with his backup, Damon Huard.

Johnson’s defensive work against a good Oakland offensive team no doubt encouraged him to believe he’s now still on a winning tack.

But it’s a large order.

There are still at least three good NFL passing teams, Washington, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, and almost certainly, Johnson will see at least one of them in the playoffs.

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Watch Manning: The past played the future in Indianapolis on Sunday, and the future won.

Quarterback Troy Aikman and running back Emmitt Smith of the Dallas Cowboys were outscored, 34-24, by what is possibly the AFC’s best passing team, the Indianapolis Colts.

The field leaders of the Colts are second-year quarterback Peyton Manning and first-year running back Edgerrin James, whose work was again carefully coordinated in the Colt offense by offensive chief Tom Moore and his line coach, Howard Mudd.

By contrast, Aikman and Smith often seemed to be playing in different offenses.

The Cowboys tried to run Smith on first-down plays, and frequently were so successful they also ran him again on second down, confining Aikman to a third-down offense.

That’s the hard way against a team with a passer as effective as Manning, who in the Colt offense uses James correctly as a counterpuncher when the defense gears up for pass plays.

With the new players, the Indianapolis front office, operated by CEO James Irsay and President Bill Polian, could be changing the face of the AFC.

Do you want a classic test of defense against big-time pass offense?

Watch the Kansas City-Indianapolis game today.

If Miami Coach Johnson can get away to see it, he’ll love it.

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Selected Short Subjects:

* The Chicago Bears’ rookie quarterback, Cade McNown, threw three second-half touchdown passes last Sunday, which was more than Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas threw in his rookie season. That first fall, Unitas was waived out of the NFL and spent most of the season playing sandlot football. So who’s surprised that McNown and the other rookie quarterbacks this year are struggling?

* The Hall of Fame selection committee has voted for Green Bay’s Lambeau Field as the NFL’s all-time best stadium. Second: Washington’s old RFK Stadium--where on a winter day, the outdoor press box hardly was the nation’s second best, or even 30th best, for football writers. Third: Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium.

* The East-leading Washington Redskins have been starting the same 22 players all season, reaffirming that in most NFL games, injury luck is decisive.

* One explanation for the Rams’ failure to use a hurry-up offense, which would have been the percentage offense in Sunday’s fourth quarter, is that they’ve had enough trouble installing a basic offense this year with a new quarterback and other new hands.