Thread: Broncos Gameday Thread: Broncos vs 49ers 08/19/17

Who makes up the committee?

The NFL’s description of the committee doesn’t offer any formal nominating procedures or term limits; this is the current make up of the committee:

Chairman: Rich McKay (President, Atlanta Falcons)

John Mara (Owner, New York Giants)

Stephen Jones (Owner, Dallas Cowboys)

Mark Murphy (President, Green Bay Packers)

Ozzie Newsome (former NFL Player; General Manager, Baltimore Ravens)

Rick Smith (General Manager, Houston Texans)

Marvin Lewis (Head Coach, Cincinnati Bengals)

Mike Tomlin (Head Coach, Pittsburgh Steelers)

Bruce Arians (Head Coach, Arizona Cardinals)

Tom Coughlin (Advisor, NFL Operations)

John Elway (General Manager, Denver Broncos)

http://www.foxsports.com/nfl/story/f...mmittee-110216

Originally Posted by Von Kinger

I think he's saying the enforcement was right, but the rule sucks?

Prexactly. That's my usual position in these conversations with spiker, but I evidently don't convey it well, because my criticisms of the rules as written seem to come across as criticisms of the people charged with applying those rules "without fear or favor." The last thing anyone wants is individual refs taking it upon themselves to "fix" the rules, but that sadly means the Competition Committee regularly screws them as hard as anyone else. Like, everyone is now forced to ask "wtf IS a catch?!": The difference is your answer and mine don't have game consequences that leave thousands of fans creaming for our blood WHATEVER we say.

Originally Posted by Joel

Prexactly. That's my usual position in these conversations with spiker, but I evidently don't convey it well, because my criticisms of the rules as written seem to come across as criticisms of the people charged with applying those rules "without fear or favor." The last thing anyone wants is individual refs taking it upon themselves to "fix" the rules, but that sadly means the Competition Committee regularly screws them as hard as anyone else. Like, everyone is now forced to ask "wtf IS a catch?!": The difference is your answer and mine don't have game consequences that leave thousands of fans creaming for our blood WHATEVER we say.

I'm still mad at you - you are my sworn enemy now.

Originally Posted by spikerman

Who makes up the committee?

The NFL’s description of the committee doesn’t offer any formal nominating procedures or term limits; this is the current make up of the committee:

Chairman: Rich McKay (President, Atlanta Falcons)

John Mara (Owner, New York Giants)

Stephen Jones (Owner, Dallas Cowboys)

Mark Murphy (President, Green Bay Packers)

Ozzie Newsome (former NFL Player; General Manager, Baltimore Ravens)

Rick Smith (General Manager, Houston Texans)

Marvin Lewis (Head Coach, Cincinnati Bengals)

Mike Tomlin (Head Coach, Pittsburgh Steelers)

Bruce Arians (Head Coach, Arizona Cardinals)

Tom Coughlin (Advisor, NFL Operations)

John Elway (General Manager, Denver Broncos)

http://www.foxsports.com/nfl/story/f...mmittee-110216

Your oppression ends soon!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Originally Posted by spikerman

Live ball fouls by both teams. What's the issue?

(Again) both things Kinger said. Like if a scatter-armed QB bounces a pass off one of his linemen for an illegal touch, so one of the opposing pass rushers just starts knocking guys down and jumping on their throats: He gets disqualified, but the yardage doesn't change because "the fouls offset; replay the down." And when one team commits FOUR fouls, INCLUDING a personal, yet all that's dismissed because the other team's guilty of a SINGLE hold, that's not truly fair.

Originally Posted by spikerman

Don't commit a foul and there's no issue.

If the other team commits one too there's still no issue—in fact, you can commit as many fouls as you like, because it'll all be wiped away when the whistle blows.

Originally Posted by Jaded

They should at least have a representative.

Agreed; I thought the NFLPA already had one, but apparently I was thinking of a different committee, because they're not on the quoted list. I'd go with one rep from each team, an NFLPA rep and a ref rep, but that's just me.

Originally Posted by Von Kinger

I'm still mad at you - you are my sworn enemy now.

Duly noted

Originally Posted by Von Kinger

A personal foul being offset by holding seems unjust. Or just adding up the yards that one team jacked up compared to the other and having one offset so much seems unjust. I guess Joel's principle would be that it needs to be more commensurate. IDK. One could argue that the current rule doesn't sleep down the speed of the game as the yard calculus ensues.

You would then have to take into account whether the first foul prolonged the play that led to the other fouls, and so on. Let's say a holding call by an LT prevented a sack, and then there was a pass thrown and a WR was hit in the head. If not for the holding foul, the personal foul wouldn't have occurred, so shouldn't the holding call have a stiffer penalty in that case?

Obviously, it would be virtually impossible to meter out justice based on what I described, but you can't just go with the type of penalty. While you don't often see four on one side and one on the other, it seems to me that the current approach gets it right more times than not.

Originally Posted by Jaded

They should at least have a representative.

They do, he brings in the appetizers.

Originally Posted by Jaded

They should at least have a representative.

There definitely needs to be a couple of refs to tell the owners, GMs & HCs that they're nuts to think that they can consistently make the kind of judgement calls that they're ask to make. Just about every time they make a major rule change, they then have to make adjustments for the next several years because the committee didn't realize the problems that the original overhaul created.

Best example is every time they make a major change to open up the passing game, mostly by making the pass interference rules more strict, DB start getting flagged every time they look at the receiver crosseyed. Once they realize that the fans are getting upset because their team's DBs can't do anything to stop the opposing O during a game winning drive because just about anything they do is going to get called, the committee loosens the rules back up. If a couple of refs being on the committee could convince them to stop doing nonsense like this, I guarantee you the entire fan base would be happier.

Originally Posted by FanInAZ

There definitely needs to be a couple of refs to tell the owners, GMs & HCs that they're nuts to think that they can consistently make the kind of judgement calls that they're ask to make. Just about every time they make a major rule change, they then have to make adjustments for the next several years because the committee didn't realize the problems that the original overhaul created.

Best example is every time they make a major change to open up the passing game, mostly by making the pass interference rules more strict, DB start getting flagged every time they look at the receiver crosseyed. Once they realize that the fans are getting upset because their team's DBs can't do anything to stop the opposing O during a game winning drive because just about anything they do is going to get called, the committee loosens the rules back up. If a couple of refs being on the committee could convince them to stop doing nonsense like this, I guarantee you the entire fan base would be happier.

This sounds like umpteen debates I've had with spiker about the defenseless player rule.

In a sad but real sense, that's the ultimate purpose of all NFL officials up to and including the Commissioner: To justify the owners' idiocy du jour and take the resulting fan and media heat, so the owners can pretend it's all out of their hands and they're just as mystified and helpless against the evil zebra tyranny as we are.

NFL officials, and the Commissioner in particular, are in a weird place where they're expected to be impartial arbiters of disputes between owners (whether or directly or via their teams) not because they're beholden to none, but beholden to ALL, so (in theory) no single owner has any more sway over them than any or all others. I mean, if you'd had to get through an interview with 32 bosses to get hired, would you side with, say, Al Davis or EVERYONE ELSE?

Originally Posted by Joel

This sounds like umpteen debates I've had with spiker about the defenseless player rule.

In a sad but real sense, that's the ultimate purpose of all NFL officials up to and including the Commissioner: To justify the owners' idiocy du jour and take the resulting fan and media heat, so the owners can pretend it's all out of their hands and they're just as mystified and helpless against the evil zebra tyranny as we are.

NFL officials, and the Commissioner in particular, are in a weird place where they're expected to be impartial arbiters of disputes between owners (whether or directly or via their teams) not because they're beholden to none, but beholden to ALL, so (in theory) no single owner has any more sway over them than any or all others. I mean, if you'd had to get through an interview with 32 bosses to get hired, would you side with, say, Al Davis or EVERYONE ELSE?

The commission is less impartial arbiter and more CEO/Chairman of the board, with the owners being the board members. He speaks for ownership.

Originally Posted by Tned

The commission is less impartial arbiter and more CEO/Chairman of the board, with the owners being the board members. He speaks for ownership.

A CEO (and Chairman of the Board in particular) tends to have his own significant ownership stake, but Goddell doesn't: Green Bay preschoolers own more of the NFL. He DEFINITELY speaks for ownership, because he's not part of it, but serves at its pleasure.

When I say he's impartial I mean in the sense that he serves the owners collectively rather than individually. Every billionaire boys club has consensus rules to protect members' investments both from external threats and internal abuse, and the Commissioners nominal independence provides a veneer of public legitimacy for that. The Spy- and Deflategate punishments weren't a bunch of extravagantly wealthy old men ganging up on one of their number for cheating all the rest, it was the NFLs Defender of Decency "protecting the shield." When the owners decided they didn't want to lose a highly lucrative player over a little thing like beating a woman unconscious, the Commissioner duly announced the decision once they'd informed him of it, and when the backlash and boycotts began hurting their bottom line badly enough they duly sent the Commissioner out to announce they—er, "he" had reversed himselves.

Who came out of all those deals looking like a slimy toad? Not Kraft, nor even Bisciotti, even though it was widely documented that he did a full court press on Goodell to limit Rices suspension to just two games, and, when Jim Harbaugh urged the team to immediately release Rice, flatly rejected that suggestion. According to ESPN,

To understand why Ravens executives rushed to defend Rice, who had his worst year as a pro in 2013 with an average of 3.1 yards per carry, one needs to consider how important he had become to the franchise in general and, in particular, to Bisciotti.

Highlighted by me for emphasis, but: No kidding, ESPN....

None of that's to rehash, reopen nor relitigate Ray Rice or Cheatriotgates, only to illustrate that the NFL owners pay the NFL Commissioner handsomely to be the dirty face of their dirty work. When fans, media and political leaders began calling for more heads than Rices to roll, they weren't sizing up any owners for the chopping block: Only Goodell. And had it been necessary for him to fall on his sword "for the good of the league," well, that's what he's so well paid to do, and the owners would simply have chosen a new owner, made a show of cleaning house and announced with great public fanfare that "Our long National Football League nightmare is over."

I realize I'm probably being naïve, choosing so remember my fathers NFL through from the rose-colored perspective of innocent youth, but it certainly SEEMED different when Rozelle was alive, at least until the cancer sidelined him. Sure there was stuff like the drug issues of Hollywood Henderson and Lyle Alzado (to name but a few) and, ironically, the best RB to ever play for the Ravens or any other NFL team reportedly had (many) of his own instances of violence against women, ultimately dealt with in much the same way as Ray Rice dealt with his: Kiss, make up and convince the victim to retract everything.

If there were multiple NFL stars in prison for murder though, I definitely didn't see that.

I can't help asking if Ray Rice was really a bigger star than Paul Hornung (I know which got into Canton without paying admission) or betting on NFL games was really that much worse than knocking out a woman half his size: Because an immediate indefinite suspension is a more severe punishment than a 2-game suspension upgraded to indefinite solely due to public outcry—the public agreed strongly enough that they were instrumental in ending Hornungs suspension.

Yet it goes without saying that the NFL was not the billion-dollar organization Rozelle built WHILE he was building it, and with great wealth comes great unaccountability. Many people likely disagree with part or all of that, but it's why I have ZERO respect for this Commissioner, and I'd wager dollars to donuts I'm in vast company on THAT.

Originally Posted by Joel

A CEO (and Chairman of the Board in particular) tends to have his own significant ownership stake, but Goddell doesn't: Green Bay preschoolers own more of the NFL. He DEFINITELY speaks for ownership, because he's not part of it, but serves at its pleasure.

Actually, it's very common for directors to have no ownership or very insignificant ownership. It all depends on the company, private or public, and many other factors.

Anyway, as I'm posting between work, I don't have time for the debates over nothingness. Next you will be telling why I'm wrong if I say water is wet.

Your right, Goodel is an independent arbiter. That $30-40 million the league pays him is just to insure he represents the players and fans equally or more than the ownership.