The owner of the Indianapolis Colts announced that he would vote against approving a potential bid by the investment group Rush Limbaugh has partnered with to buy the St. Louis Rams.
The statement by Jim Irsay potentially could influence other NFL owners who have yet to make a statement either in support of or against the Limbaugh bid. The NFL requires three quarters of the owners — 24 out of 32 teams — to approve any potential sale of a team. Now that Irsay has come out against the bid, just eight other owners would need to say no to put the kibosh on Limbaugh's bid.
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Irsay, who's team currently employs an African American head coach, Jim Caldwell, emphatically rejected the notion that Limbaugh is the type of owner the NFL is looking for:
“There are certain privileges for certain things in life that you might want to pursue that may not be appropriate,’’ said Irsay. “I myself couldn’t be in favor of voting for him.’’
Irsay reiterated comments earlier in the week by DeMaurice Smith, the head of the NFL player's union, that Limbaugh was a divisive figure and wrong for a league which 75% of the players are African-American.
“I’m very sensitive to know that there are scars out there. I think as a nation we have to stop it. Our words do damage, and it’s something that we don’t need. We need to get to a higher level of humanity, and we have.
“Again, I come from a different era and I look at the artists - what John Lennon, Marvin Gaye, and those guys were singing about it. We’ve been doing a slow crawl to some of the things that they talked about, but like I said we don’t need to go the other way.
“We can’t go the other way where there isn’t forgiveness, understanding, those sorts of things, but we’ve got to watch our words in this world and our thoughts because they can do damage.’’
The owner of the New England Patriots, Bob Kraft, declined to address the potential bid by Limbaugh's group which includes Dave Checketts who is part of a group which owns the St. Louis Blues of the NHL.
However, Roger Goodell, the NFL's Commissioner, implied but did not definitely say that the league would be damaged if Limbaugh became owner of a team.
"I have said many times before that we are all held to a higher standard here," the commissioner said. "I think divisive comments are not what the NFL is all about. I would not want to see those kind of comments from people who are in a responsible position within the NFL. No. Absolutely not."
Limbaugh denied making racist comments about NFL players including a now-infamous remark about Eagles quarterback Donovan McNab which led to Limbaugh being fired from a job as commentator for ESPN Countdown back in 2003.
As recently as two years ago, Limbaugh had compared the NFL to gang warfare without the weapons.
The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it."
Limbaugh can deny making all of these comments but videotapes and web caches don't lie. As the Indianapolis Star pointed out, the last quote came directly from Limbaugh's own website.
Snip.
A number of players, including Bart Scott of the Jets and Mathias Kiwanuka of the Giants, have said that they would never play for a team owned by Limbaugh, regardless of how much money they received:
"A lot of us took it as more of a racial-type thing. I can only imagine how his players would feel. I know I wouldn't want to play for him. He's a jerk. He's an ---. What he said (about McNabb) was inappropriate and insensitive, totally off-base. He could offer me whatever he wanted, I wouldn't play for him. ... I wouldn't play for Rush Limbaugh. My principles are greater and I can't be bought."
Opposition to the Limbaugh bid has been swift. Prominent African-American leaders like Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton have condemned the bid and asked Commissioner Goodell and the NFL to reject the divisive Limbaugh.
Not that Limbaugh needs any more opposition from outside the NFL community; he has plenty of potential enemies already.
Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank echoed Goodell's comments and noted the league and the union had a similar stance.
Blank also said he wouldn't expect Limbaugh, if the deal went through, to tone down his lucrative radio show to avoid running afoul of the league.
"I find that highly unlikely."
I like those odds.
UPDATE: The New York Times released a new column on its website about a half hour ago by Lynn Zinser which hints that NFL owners were anonymously commenting about how bad the Limbaugh bid would be for the league.
You could see this story coming like a boulder rolling down a very large hill, Rush Limbaugh being the boulder and N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell being the park ranger who stands at the bottom saying, “Maybe that boulder will stop rolling on its own and not flatten the luxury ski lodge we’ve built down here.”
It was Tuesday when Goodell realized his ski lodge was in jeopardy, that not only was the Limbaugh boulder not going away, it was picking up steam as players and the head of the union started howling about Limbaugh’s potential bid to buy the Rams. Did anyone think Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson wouldn’t join that chorus? The sun still rises in the East, right?
So Goodell finally spoke up and Jim Irsay, the owner of the Colts, helped him throw a very large tree in front of Limbaugh, Goodell saying Limbaugh’s divisiveness is not what the league needs and Irsay going public with his refusal to vote Limbaugh into the club. Jason Cole writes on Yahoo.com that other owners were saying the same thing anonymously, and Dan Wetzel of Yahoo.com said this was the inevitable conclusion because Limbaugh has made his living on the kind of controversy the N.F.L. wants nothing to do with. As Rick Morrissey writes in The Chicago Tribune, yes, you could see this coming from a long way away.
Cole has some excellent insight into the Limbaugh bid. Cole reminds readers that the NFL has been extremely fickle about which billionaires it has admitted to its club regardless of their political affiliations:
The possible short-circuiting of a bid is nothing new for the NFL, which vets prospective owners just as thoroughly as players. Just ask Howard Milstein, a New York City real estate mogul and then-part owner of the NHL’s New York Islanders, who in 1999 tried to buy the Washington Redskins. One of the problems for Milstein is that he was litigation happy, willing to drop a lawsuit the way strippers drop their clothes.
In that way, Limbaugh is in a similar predicament. The NFL doesn’t need his money; it has plenty of billionaires willing to buy teams.
Furthermore, it doesn’t need somebody who will thrive on insulting the audience. Now, before you think this is a political comment, the same goes for the left. If you think the NFL wants Michael Moore(notes) as an owner, think again. Film producer Harvey Weinstein, talk show host Rachel Maddow and the Dixie Chicks probably aren’t too welcome, either.
Sometimes it isn't what you say but how you say it for these owners that gets them in trouble. For all its bravado as the most powerful sports league, the NFL is an extremely cautious organization. John Madden once called the league "vanilla" back when I interviewed him in the mid-80's. It was unclear whether Madden was talking about the trepidation of the owners and the league or that it was a lily-White organization or both.
Cole cited the example of an anonymous owner who indicated the last thing the league needs now is bad publicity.
Said another owner who didn’t want to be identified: “We don’t need to go there. Look, we haven’t even started to go through the process with the Rams who they’re going to sell to. We’re months away from knowing anything. But really, we don’t need that.”
For all the hard-hitting and violence of the NFL, the reality is that the league likes the benign a lot more. It’s like when singer Glenn Campbell had his show in the 1970s and was going against the likes of the Smothers Brothers. When Campbell’s producers urged him to take on political topics, he refused. He wanted his show to be an escape, not an agitator. As a result, he had much higher ratings.
And folks, the NFL is all about ratings (duh). This isn’t even about how the players or the NFL Players Association or anybody really feels about Limbaugh. It’s about providing an escape from the likes of Limbaugh. Keep the people happy as they watch and, most importantly, spend. The NFL is the Disney World of sports and just as Disney makes sure that none of the paying customers wear anything out of line, the NFL restricts folks from saying anything out of line (just ask Jerry Jones).
As long as the NFL doesn't bring back Up with People for the Super Bowl halftime show, I can't complain. It sure looks like the players, the union, and certain owners are doing everything they can both publicly and privately to hope that Limbaugh just goes away.
Fat chance that will happen, but when the NFL says no to OxyRush, the swelled head will try to spin it as some kind of victory like he never wanted to be part of such a socialist outfit. Inside, little boy Limbaugh will be crying because all those other kids were mean to him. What a shame.
UPDATE 2: As bad as Jason Cole ripped OxyRush, that is nothing compared to what Jim Litke a columnist for AP said about the corpulent conservative:
It’s hard to imagine a room full of rich, mostly middle-aged white Republicans turning thumbs down on one of their own.
But wherever their real sympathies lie, NFL owners still value business more than principle. And when they looked at Rush Limbaugh, apparently what they envisioned was another Marge Schott—somebody who was going to cause them more trouble than he’s worth.
So barely a week after the talk-radio king announced he was partnering with St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts in a bid to buy the league’s St. Louis Rams, it fell to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to not-so-subtly inform Limbaugh that he was wasting his time.
That snip was Lorena Bobbitt-like. Tell 'em Jim!
Litke then accuses the radio host who has made over $400 million of being intellectually lazy:
Since Limbaugh mocked Chicago’s bid committee when it got knocked out in the first round of balloting for the 2016 Olympics, what does it say that his own attempt to buy into the NFL’s boys club likely won’t even come to a vote? Only this: He didn’t bother to do his homework, as the McNabb episode and his forced resignation from ESPN suggested; or else, he’s not above pulling a cheap publicity stunt to get his name back in the headlines for a few days.
In a recent interview with NBC, Limbaugh was asked how much of what he said was strictly for entertainment purposes and how much of it he actually believed. Toward the end of a rambling answer, Limbaugh said, “Everybody that listens agrees with me.”
Or maybe not.
Not that the detractors will ever stop Limbaugh. As the above quote indicates, OxyRush lives in his own little world, complete with visions of grandiosity and paranoia. In typical Republican misdirection and projection, he accused his opponents of using made up and fabricated quotes to smear him.
So poor Rush is getting the Faux Noise treatment (in his mind). It couldn't happen to worse excuse for human DNA.