Jerry Jones thinks Roger Goodell is an overpaid buttinsky and mall cop and wants him to be served a great whopping helping of chicken-fried crow.
Fine. If Goodell gets a paycheck haircut, what care we? If he gets shown the door, not a problem. He went from amiable servant of the people to arrogant and bullying poop-emoji in quicksilver time, and one does not cross the boss too many times without being crossed off the list.
But the NFL'S ALREADY burgeoning list of issues has increased by one – the Los Angeles Sinkhole – and the man who presented that one was, yes, Jerry Jones.
Jones is the one who whipsawed the deal by which the St. Louis Rams moved west to solve a problem that wasn't rather than run point on the San Diego Chargers/Oakland Raiders stadium time share plan that would have definitively solved two others – all because he liked Stan Kroenke's portfolio a lot more than Dean Spanos' billfold or Mark Davis' rubber band.
But he also saw to it that Spanos would not be left in the cold and helped broker the deal that allowed him to go to L.A. anyway.
And what did all that Jerry arm-wrenching work do for his partners? It made Los Angeles the world's most football-resistant town.
The citizens have voted with their feet and made the Rams an uncool thing and the Chargers a veritable slum. They choose with great and careful thought to avoid both the Coliseum and StubHub Center as though the game-day giveaway was an anthrax-coated trucker's hat – not because they hate the Rams and Chargers, or because they love the Raiders so much, but because when push comes to shove, Californians say no by not caring.
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And let's be honest here – disinterest is worse than hatred.
There are those who have called this an embarrassment to the league, but that misses the target. The league is 32 men, of which only a few control the rest as long as everyone gets paid. And the strongest of those men wasted the Los Angeles "opportunity" and gutted the fan bases of two teams just for a real estate deal and because he just liked rolling with other billionaires.
And if the Raiders don't hit the ground at a dead sprint in Las Vegas, there may be a third – although in fairness that is not so much Jones' work as it is Davis' persistence and ability to find tactical geniuses to guide him to what he wanted, even if it doesn't turn out to be what he needs.
In short, whatever happens in the Goodell-v.-Jones battle, you have no rooting interest save perhaps mutually assured destruction. We can all live better with that as a possibility.
