Commissioner Tagliabue Press Conference/ League Meeting, New York
October 30, 2002

PT: We covered a lot of ground this morning with close to four hours of work from 9 to 1:30 with very little downtime.  I opened with a midseason review both of the game on the field and the business operations, and started that with a tribute to Al Lerner, who obviously we lost last week.

I just spent some time visiting with his son, Randy Lerner, who will take over as the managing owner of the Cleveland Browns, and he and I and Carmen Policy will be getting together in the very near future to talk about the ongoing operations of the Browns and the stability that is represented by continued ownership by the Lerner family. 

Most of you know the way the game has been this year. It’s been extraordinarily competitive, high-scoring, wide open; a lot on pace to set some records in certain areas in terms of touchdowns and scoring that we haven’t seen in three to four decades; a great blend of talent; Emmitt Smith eclipsing Walter Payton’s rushing record; performances by veteran players such as Jerry Rice, Brett Favre, some of the others. 

We saw some of it this past weekend: Donovan McNabb on Monday night; in the Atlanta-New Orleans game with Michael Vick and Aaron Brooks; and great players on defense as well like Ray Lewis and Brian Urlacher and so on.  So we’re very pleased with the season. 

We also reviewed where we are in terms of our playing rules, particularly the rules we have in place with respect to unnecessary roughness and those that focus in some degree on defenseless players which are defined principally as being quarterbacks or wide receivers in the act of catching a pass or attempting to catch a pass. 

Those rules were clarified in the mid-‘90s.  The very strong report from the Competition Committee in our annual meeting in March of ’95 made the point that it’s the coaches’ responsibility to make sure that the game is played within the rules.  It appears that we’ve done an excellent job in implementing all these policies and rules with respect to the quarterbacks. 

As you know, we had issues in the mid-‘90s and we’ve extended the rules to prevent helmet hits to the chest and the neck area and the chin…and we’ve had some issues with respect to wide receivers with helmet-to-helmet hits.  We haven’t changed our policies on suspension, but we’re not going to tolerate hits that go over the line, especially after players have been warned on repeated occasions and coaching staffs have been warned on repeated occasions that players have to bring their tactics and techniques within the rules of the game. We went over some of that, with Gene Upshaw participating in the discussion, which he’s done on many prior occasions with the Competition Committee. 

Gene was here to continue discussions we’ve had about minority hiring and diversity both in the coaching ranks and in the front office and expressed his interest again in being available as a resource to teams who are looking for talent in those areas.  And as both a former player and a head of the PA, many of his colleagues and close friends and coaching acquaintances are people he knows one heck of a lot about so he’s a terrific resource, has been in the past, and will continue to be in the future. 

We’re going to come back to those subjects later in the meeting either today or tomorrow.  And we had the Super Bowl presentations on behalf of New York and Washington.  These were preliminary presentations which present a policy question which would involve a change of our traditional policy of not having Super Bowls in northern cities with open-air stadiums.  The presentations on a dramatically improved Giants Stadium and proposed Jets Stadium were excellent and very informative for the membership, many of whom are operating in state-of-the-art stadiums and therefore are interested in seeing what might be done to have a state-of-the-art stadium in the New York area. 

Dan Snyder made a presentation about the attributes of the nation’s capital as a host for a Super Bowl there and of course he has a state-of-the-art stadium that could be quite outstanding in quality for hosting a Super Bowl game. 

We also summarized a consensus that’s developed in the last two meetings in the Super Bowl Advisory Committee, which has about 10 team representatives on it, in terms of planning for future Super Bowls.  We have many many cities that are seeking to host a Super Bowl and the Committee’s consensus centers on three points. 

The first is that for the 2007 Super Bowl, which is the next one available after Detroit, the priority should be to play the game in a warm weather city.  That should be a city with an outstanding stadium and a track record of having hosted Super Bowls and it may be, but we won’t know this till next year, but it may be that Miami and Tampa Bay will emerge as the leaders to host that Super Bowl. 

Secondly, the committee is supportive of in-depth study of the possibility of Super Bowls in New York and or Washington but there, are in the opinion of the Committee, many ifs that still need to be addressed and studied starting with the cold-weather game conditions that could exist in an open-air cold-weather environment, and, especially with respect to a possible Super Bowl in New York, the need for a Super Bowl-quality stadium to host the game.  But we’re going to continue to work with the committee and the New York and Washington team owners addressing those issues. 

The third area around which there is a committee consensus is that a priority should be given to playing a Super Bowl in the Los Angeles area if there were a significant renovation of the Rose Bowl which is under discussion and that the membership should be prepared to give very serious consideration to a Super Bowl at the Rose Bowl, whether or not there is an NFL team in the LA area.  LA obviously is another warm-weather city.  We’re going to come back and discuss those points again and get more input from the membership. 

The timeline for making decisions on the Super Bowl and taking membership votes on future Super Bowl sites – the earliest would be at our May meeting next year.  That’s a possibility depending on how quickly we can move.  It could slip to October of the next year, a year from now. 

So that, kind of in a nutshell, is what we did in four-and-a-half hours.  There is a possibility that we would make decisions at the May meeting next year, with that being dependent on everyone getting a lot of work done, and it could be that it slips to next October.  Within the committee we’ve been talking about two, 2007 and 2008, but those discussions are preliminary.  I think it would be two, conceivably more.  There could be a third if it slipped to October of next year. 

On security in New York and Washington:

PT: Jonathan Tisch addressed that on behalf of New York and in his presentation representing New York City and Company, the conventions visitors bureau.  He pointed out that New York has one of the finest police departments in the world.  There have been a tremendous number of critical events here – gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, the World Economic Forum that was switched from Davos to here, the U.S. Open, the World Series last year attended by President Bush.  So all of America faces security challenges and New York and Washington have been in the lead in addressing those challenges both with local law enforcement and federal law enforcement.  So we don’t see that as a differentiating issue with respect to New York or Washington.

On cities in the running to host the Super Bowl:

PT: We have so many cities right now interested in hosting the game that, and this was discussed at some length at the meeting with the Super Bowl Policy Committee that we had in September, we should be in a position by next May or October to have good candidates based upon concrete proposals without having to speculate or offer games in anticipation that concrete proposals would be developed.

On the positives to New York hosting a Super Bowl:

PT: That’s certainly one of the attractions of New York.  I’ve said and I think most of the owners recognize that New York is the economic, cultural, entertainment capital of America, and probably the world.  It’s such a tremendously diverse city in terms of population that the impact of a sporting event in New York, both a positive for the city and a positive for the league having the event, can be quite extraordinary.  Now the question is how do we put into place arrangements to get it right.

On what his role is in deciding where the Super Bowl is played:

PT: I’m the commissioner and my job is to do the heavy lifting and put options in front of people and try to build consensus around those options.  I don’t have a vote.  The Super Bowl has been an area where we’ve had different voting procedures than we have on most of our other business.  It’s a unique link between our league’s interest and civic and community interests, so my role is basically to present all the alternatives in the most positive way possible and to consider a wide range of candidates and let the owners do the evaluating and the voting.

On the likelihood of having a New York Super Bowl in 2007 or 2008:

PT: I couldn’t answer that question today.

On financing improvements to Giants Stadium:

PT: They are working on that.  Financing stadium improvements is something that we have a lot of experience with.  There’s not a lot of mystery as to what has to be done.  And the Giants are very hard at work at doing that and have been for some months if not years.

On helping New York get the bid for the 2012 Olympics:

PT: I have no stance on the matter.

On Johnnie Cochran and Cyrus Mehri and initiatives involved in hiring coaches:

PT: We want to look at it carefully and thoughtfully.  Our staff had an excellent meeting with them last week.  There was good dialogue.  I think they acquired a better understanding of what we are trying to do and what we have done. 

I’ve spent almost a lifetime working on these kinds of issues.  As a lawyer I represented civil rights groups and equal employment litigation.  I advised clients.  I hired people in a lot of different contexts.  And to me, and I think Gene Upshaw, we have a pretty common view that the critical thing is to identify good talent in an environment where there is a lot of highly competitive talent.  But it gets tricky because people are moving from one level to another level when you’re talking about head coaching.  And even in the front office, the hope would be that you could promote people up from salary cap position, through the personnel ranks, into a GM position. 

So you have to make the judgment from among those people who are performing one job in a very high quality way, whether it’s a Herman Edwards or a John Fox just to name two recent examples that have moved up to that level, can they handle the new responsibilities?  We all know that some seem to be able to do it. 

Others aren’t so successful.  So it’s identifying the talent and envisioning the talent in a new role.  And then a lot of context, references are very important because, again this is a point that Gene emphasized, within an organization you want to have an alignment of perspective, philosophy, interest among the owners, the front office, the coaching staff, the players, and that takes a good understanding of how someone will operate as part of that broader team. 

So identifying talent, getting references, we’ve tried to do a lot of that with things that we’ve done in the last five or six years.  That’s something that continues to be a priority.  What other initiatives we might have is something we are going to be discussing later in this meeting.

On Tyrone Willingham’s success at Notre Dame facilitating the hiring of black coaches:

PT: That’s a little bit like asking did Vince Lombardi’s success facilitate the process of hiring Italian head coaches.  It’s about merit, it’s not about whether someone is Italian, white, African-American.  These are individual talents.  You don’t have them if you’re a member of one group or a member of another group.  They are about judgments of individuals.  So that’s my reaction on one level. 

On another level we are trying to change some imbedded patterns in our society and I think Tyrone Willingham’s success can be very important just as Randall Cunningham’s success as a quarterback was important in changing some perceptions whether it was in youth football, college football, the NFL and so on.  We’ve spent a lot of time in the last five years, I have personally and our committees have, speaking with coaches like Denny Green, Ray Rhodes, Mike Holmgren, others, about the relationship of college head coaching to NFL coaching.  Many of our teams have hired form the college ranks, both at the head coach and the assistant coach level – Jimmy Johnson, Butch Davis just a couple of examples.

Many of the African-American coaches in the league come out of the college ranks partly because people think they are outstanding teachers who teach at the college level and can teach at the professional level as we’ve got a system of free agency and turnover that requires additional teaching and player development.  You get some of those coaches going back into college football to get the experience that Denny Green had at Northwestern and Stanford and then came back to the NFL, something we’ve spent a lot of time talking about with the coaches I’ve just mentioned along with Bill Walsh. 

Those are the kinds of things that we need to address and see if we can do something that accelerates the process.  And I think Tyrone Willingham will be a plus in that context and not a minus.

On a coordinator who has enjoyed the success of a Marvin Lewis not getting a head coaching job:

PT: The same reason someone like Bill Arnsparger stayed as a coordinator for many years.  You’ve got thirty-two jobs and hundreds of people pursuing them.  I’m not quite sure what your question is quite frankly.  There are 32 opportunities.  The question is whether we are identifying candidates in a diverse enough way, with enough outreach with respect to all kinds of coaches, minority and non-minority, to have the best people in the pool.  That’s the challenge. 

We’ve tried to do a lot, we’ve done a lot in the last five years in that area.  George Young’s legacy will include the coaching seminars that he created and that we are still running.  His legacy will include the video interviews that we’ve done of coaches and disseminated to teams during the hiring process.  And the question is whether there is more that we can do that produces additional positive results. 

On whether the owners are concerned about a possible lawsuit:

PT: No owner has yet spoken to me about the subject matter.   So I don’t know.  I don’t think they are frankly because I think we’ve done a lot in this area, we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress.  I don’t think the issues are legal issues, I think the issues are business issues and operation issues.

On how minority ownership plays into the equation:

PT: You tell me what we should be discussing there other than identifying people who have five or six hundred million dollars to spend on a sports franchise.  I’ve met with African-Americans and Hispanics who have had an interest in NFL teams.  We’ve reached out to them any time we’ve heard about potential interest.  It ultimately becomes a question of whether you want to commit your money to an NFL franchise or, just to take one example, do what someone like Bob Johnson did, which was develop BET and then sell it to VIACOM, and then run a major division of VIACOM. 

So, there again, I don’t mean to be opaque, but I don’t know what the issue is in respect to ownership.  If someone has the money, would we like to have them as an owner?  Yes.  I read with interest the story about the Mexican businessman who seems to have a serious interest in buying the Anaheim Angels, but not many of those people have emerged.

I think a bigger issue is the front office and how do you get more Ozzie Newsomes and Ray Andersons.  That’s an area that I think we need to be more proactive in addressing.  The ownership issue really comes down to who has assets and interest.

On the financial state of the NFL’s television networks:

PT: We’ve spent a lot of time talking with the networks and internally looking at where they are, and not just the networks with whom we have contractual relationships, but much more broadly the changing landscape of television, the growth of multi-channel television through digital and other technology. 

Television is clearly changing.  The NBA had to make some basic changes in the way it presents itself on television, forswearing the broadcast television coverage it had had in earlier years.  We don’t know where we are yet.  We’re in the middle of contracts, which are working quite well.  Our ratings have been very strong, advertising sales this year have been very robust, generally in sports television and with respect to the NFL.  But the future is going to be very different from the past.  Fortunately we’ve got a little time to assess where to go.

On Emmitt Smith breaking Walter Payton’s career rushing yards record:

PT: I met with Emmitt in June or July several times in anticipation of the season and I was thrilled to see how much he valued Walter Payton as a role model, on the field and off the field, and how close he has become with Connie Payton.  Emmitt is very modest.  He gives a lot of the credit to Walter Payton, but he has had inside himself tremendous drive and that’s Emmitt Smith, not Walter Payton.  He has had that drive on the field as well as off the field.  When he completed his degree a number of years ago he treated it as one of the great accomplishments of his life because it was important to him and to many young kids across America.  So you couldn’t find a better person than Emmitt Smith to take Walter Payton’s place at the top of the list.  We tried to reach him on Monday and ended up leaving a very long phone message.  I’m looking forward to seeing him in the very near future.

On not being present when Smith broke the record:

PT: I had committed to be in Canada for the Bills celebration of “Canada Day” and we paid some tributes up there to the Canadian Military Forces who are in Afghanistan, side-by-side with American Forces.  We paid tribute to the Canadian fans who support the Bills.  Those were important commitments, so I wasn’t there for the game, but obviously watched it with great interest on television.  I had monitor in front of me at Ralph Wilson Stadium, which had the Cowboys game on pretty much full time as I watched the Bills game.