Monday, July 2, 2007

uhhh...

Michael Silver is actually one of my favorite "professional" football writers. He's very upfront about his biases, and is usually the one of the last guys writing for SI to start sucking dicks left and right. That being said, this article is absurd, and i'm not sure why it even exists. It's a ranking 1-32 of owners in the NFL. I guess you can't write an article about anything anymore and get people to read it unless you rank everything power-rankings style. This really doesn't bother me that much, except for that anytime a writer does the "rank everything" article, the next week's column is 90% dedicated to posting "reader responses" to the ranking column. Invaribly, nearly every single response is exactly the same "OMG Your so dumb! how CAN you rank (my team) below (team I don't like)? Their so bad didn't u see them loose to Tom Brady last season?" A Stupid Shithead from Deluth.

Anyways, back to this article. Silver ranks all the NFL owners. But what does he rank them by? How much they win? How much money they make? Nope. He just ranks them (using an advanced science, I'm sure) and writes one good thing and one bad thing about each owner.

I don't really give a shit about these except for him ranking Daniel Snyder at number 5.

If anything, Snyder tries too hard to build a winner. In January '06, when Snyder wooed former Chiefs offensive coordinator Al Saunders with a three-year deal worth more than $2 million annually, it seemed like a great move on paper. Instead, Saunders' philosophy clashed with that of head coach Joe Gibbs, which was one reason the team fell from a playoff appearance in '05 to a 5-11 finish last season. Snyder's zealous mentality also enables Gibbs and VP of football operations Vinny Cerrato to overpay for free agents like Adam Archuleta, Antwaan Randle El and Brandon Lloyd, none of which helps the on-field product.

So he hired a rusty, one-time great coach in Gibbs, spends overspends money and first round draftypicks willy-nilly on players like the previous years' Super Bowl MVP (worst SB MVP ever) and continues to lose year after year despite having the largest payroll? Sounds like great ownership to me!

But hey, at least he's trying.

hahahahaha

Snyder will get it right eventually, if only because he won't settle for anything less -- a quality far too owners possess. And he is pulling in an enormous profit in the meantime, thanks to his innovative marketing strategies.

Yep, he sure is doing a great job of marketing one of the most historically popular teams in the NFL. It's like if I inherited the Yankees, for example; I could completely trash the farm system, overpay for marginal talent, (wait this sounds familiar!) and not win the big one for years, and I bet I could still make a shitload of money in the process. It's kind of like saying "look how good of a job that guy is doing making money from this enormous diamond mine! He's a great businessman!"

He's also more of a team player on the league level than you might imagine, as evidenced by his willingness to go along with the revenue-sharing plan that ensured labor peace in the spring of '06.

Team player = one of the best NFL Owners

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