JonCJG
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 2,175
- Reaction score
- 162
POSTED 9:05 a.m. EDT, September 26, 2006
DID LEAGUE PUSH TEXANS TO PASS ON BUSH?
There's a theory quietly making the rounds among league insiders regarding the decision of the Houston Texans to pass on Reggie Bush with the first overall pick in the 2006 draft.
As the theory goes, the NFL wanted to help rejuvenate football in New Orleans, and the league realized that the best way to make it happen would be to finagle a marriage between the Saints and Bush. So, as the theory (it's actually more like a "hypothesis," but we've always considered that word to be a tad effeminate) goes, the league made some back-door promises to the Texans, such as support for future Super Bowls or some other way to help owner Bob McNair make more money and/or eventually persuade the locals to name half of the town after him.
In exchange for getting Bush, Saints owner Tom Benson would have then made promises to the league regarding keeping the team in New Orleans for a set amount of time and/or generally keeping his mouth shut and his head low (with the exception of the post-game victory "dance" on the new Superdome FieldTurf).
Though it's all pretty intriguing on the surface, we're not buying it. For several reasons.
First, the Texans' decision came about far too quickly in the days prior to the draft. If there were a conspiracy at work, the NFL would have been planting the seeds very early on in the draft season, so that no one would have been suspicious of any chicanery once the Texans went another way. Or a trade would have been brokered between the Texans and the Saints so that, at a minimum, the Houston franchise would receive some competitive compensation for its decision to give up the No. 1 spot in the draft. Since there was no trade, the notion that the Texans stayed put at No. 1, drafted a guy who wasn't their first choice, and paid him like the
No. 1 pick makes little sense.
Second, we think that a key component of any such deal would have been a guarantee that former Texans G.M. Charley Casserly would be hired to fill the job in the league office previously occupied by Art Shell. Casserly's stated reason for resigning, after all, was his desire to pursue (and presumably to land) that vacancy. The fact that he didn't get it (the job went to former Falcons exec Ray Anderson) suggests strongly to us that there was no secret deal. And that leads directly to our third point.
Third (duh), Casserly is generally known in league circles as a guy who likes to talk. So if there was some type of a secret deal for the Texans to pass on Bush so that he could land in New Orleans, Casserly eventually would have said something to someone about it by now, especially after the preseason and/or the first week of the regular season, when the volume started to increase on the question of whether the Texans screwed the pooch by not pouncing on Bush. (Then again, there's also the chance that Casserly was intentionally cut out of any discussions regarding this specific matter, given his reputation for being a little loose in the lips.)
Bottom line -- if some type of fix were in on this one, it would have been far more polished. Or maybe the genius of the whole thing is that it was designed to not be polished, so that it would never appear to be an inside job. . . .
We're still not buying it. If the NFL were in the business of dictating draft order, there's a far more direct way to make it happen, via the league office's direct pipeline to the 17 guys who wear the white hats and the now form-fitting black-and-white horse racing shirts.
GRUDEN, BUCS IN LAWSUIT-AVOIDANCE MODE?
The Poobah recently celebrated his 15th anniversary of passing the bar exam (on something less then 15 tries), and the past decade-and-a-half of practicing law has transformed yours truly from an inherently gullible and naive wide-eyed goofball into a thoroughly cynical and suspicious, um, goofball.
But I'd like to think that even the younger, less wrinkly, and more trusting version of the middle-aged guy who bangs out this page every day would be at least a tad curious about the insistence of Bucs coach Jon Gruden on Monday that, after being bruised and battered for the entire afternoon, quarterback Chris Simms suffered a ruptured spleen late in the game -- after he'd been taken by the training and/or medical staff to the locker room for observation.
As one industry source has remarked in an e-mail sent to us this morning, and as we firmly believe, the Bucs are by all appearance in lawsuit-avoidance mode in connection with any eventual claim that the trainers and/or the doctors failed to take prudent actions to yank Simms from the game at a time when it was or should have been obvious that he was not fit to continue.
"I was concerned about him throughout the whole game, as was our medical staff," Gruden said. "But he persisted on being able to play and he was confident he could perform and fight through it. . . . All indications were that he could play."
Translation: "We did nothing wrong."
For anyone out there who doesn't think that the Bucs are subtly (or, perhaps, not-so-subtly) circling the wagons on this one, it's time to wake up and smell the balance sheet. Multi-billion-dollar businesses don't have in-house lawyers simply because the title looks good in the glass case on the wall next to the elevators. Lawyers on the company payroll are in place to take action, when needed, to protect the organization against legal risks. Why? Because liability costs money, and for-profit operations generally are designed to bring in as much of it as possible, and to pay out as little as justifiable. So, in the immediate aftermath of the Simms incident, the safest course for the team (i.e., company) is to insist that he was fit to play and that the hit that caused the specific injury came only after the training staff and/or medical staff had checked him out in the locker room and found that there was no problem.
But based on everything we've seen and heard, there's no way in the world to pinpoint when the injury occurred. So why would Gruden be trying to perpetuate the notion that it was a late-game hit and that there was no proof that he was in any type of physical danger?
Though we've yet to watch the tape of the game, we heard on Monday from multiple league and industry insiders who contend that Simms' struggles were obvious in the fourth quarter. By all indications (and we'll watch the game tonight and offer up our own conclusion), the guy apparently put on a Rocky Balboa type of a performance down the stretch.
But that brings us back to issue at hand. We think the team knows that it screwed up, and we think that the team fears legal action against it and/or its medical staff if Simms is unable to play football again -- or if the interest in him is diminished when he hits the free-agent market next
March due to the injuries that he has sustained.
From Simms' perspective, it's far too early to be thinking about those kinds of issues. But from the perspective of the team (i.e., company), it's not too early to be worrying about it -- and to be putting the wheels in motion to mount a successful defense.
DID LEAGUE PUSH TEXANS TO PASS ON BUSH?
There's a theory quietly making the rounds among league insiders regarding the decision of the Houston Texans to pass on Reggie Bush with the first overall pick in the 2006 draft.
As the theory goes, the NFL wanted to help rejuvenate football in New Orleans, and the league realized that the best way to make it happen would be to finagle a marriage between the Saints and Bush. So, as the theory (it's actually more like a "hypothesis," but we've always considered that word to be a tad effeminate) goes, the league made some back-door promises to the Texans, such as support for future Super Bowls or some other way to help owner Bob McNair make more money and/or eventually persuade the locals to name half of the town after him.
In exchange for getting Bush, Saints owner Tom Benson would have then made promises to the league regarding keeping the team in New Orleans for a set amount of time and/or generally keeping his mouth shut and his head low (with the exception of the post-game victory "dance" on the new Superdome FieldTurf).
Though it's all pretty intriguing on the surface, we're not buying it. For several reasons.
First, the Texans' decision came about far too quickly in the days prior to the draft. If there were a conspiracy at work, the NFL would have been planting the seeds very early on in the draft season, so that no one would have been suspicious of any chicanery once the Texans went another way. Or a trade would have been brokered between the Texans and the Saints so that, at a minimum, the Houston franchise would receive some competitive compensation for its decision to give up the No. 1 spot in the draft. Since there was no trade, the notion that the Texans stayed put at No. 1, drafted a guy who wasn't their first choice, and paid him like the
No. 1 pick makes little sense.
Second, we think that a key component of any such deal would have been a guarantee that former Texans G.M. Charley Casserly would be hired to fill the job in the league office previously occupied by Art Shell. Casserly's stated reason for resigning, after all, was his desire to pursue (and presumably to land) that vacancy. The fact that he didn't get it (the job went to former Falcons exec Ray Anderson) suggests strongly to us that there was no secret deal. And that leads directly to our third point.
Third (duh), Casserly is generally known in league circles as a guy who likes to talk. So if there was some type of a secret deal for the Texans to pass on Bush so that he could land in New Orleans, Casserly eventually would have said something to someone about it by now, especially after the preseason and/or the first week of the regular season, when the volume started to increase on the question of whether the Texans screwed the pooch by not pouncing on Bush. (Then again, there's also the chance that Casserly was intentionally cut out of any discussions regarding this specific matter, given his reputation for being a little loose in the lips.)
Bottom line -- if some type of fix were in on this one, it would have been far more polished. Or maybe the genius of the whole thing is that it was designed to not be polished, so that it would never appear to be an inside job. . . .
We're still not buying it. If the NFL were in the business of dictating draft order, there's a far more direct way to make it happen, via the league office's direct pipeline to the 17 guys who wear the white hats and the now form-fitting black-and-white horse racing shirts.
GRUDEN, BUCS IN LAWSUIT-AVOIDANCE MODE?
The Poobah recently celebrated his 15th anniversary of passing the bar exam (on something less then 15 tries), and the past decade-and-a-half of practicing law has transformed yours truly from an inherently gullible and naive wide-eyed goofball into a thoroughly cynical and suspicious, um, goofball.
But I'd like to think that even the younger, less wrinkly, and more trusting version of the middle-aged guy who bangs out this page every day would be at least a tad curious about the insistence of Bucs coach Jon Gruden on Monday that, after being bruised and battered for the entire afternoon, quarterback Chris Simms suffered a ruptured spleen late in the game -- after he'd been taken by the training and/or medical staff to the locker room for observation.
As one industry source has remarked in an e-mail sent to us this morning, and as we firmly believe, the Bucs are by all appearance in lawsuit-avoidance mode in connection with any eventual claim that the trainers and/or the doctors failed to take prudent actions to yank Simms from the game at a time when it was or should have been obvious that he was not fit to continue.
"I was concerned about him throughout the whole game, as was our medical staff," Gruden said. "But he persisted on being able to play and he was confident he could perform and fight through it. . . . All indications were that he could play."
Translation: "We did nothing wrong."
For anyone out there who doesn't think that the Bucs are subtly (or, perhaps, not-so-subtly) circling the wagons on this one, it's time to wake up and smell the balance sheet. Multi-billion-dollar businesses don't have in-house lawyers simply because the title looks good in the glass case on the wall next to the elevators. Lawyers on the company payroll are in place to take action, when needed, to protect the organization against legal risks. Why? Because liability costs money, and for-profit operations generally are designed to bring in as much of it as possible, and to pay out as little as justifiable. So, in the immediate aftermath of the Simms incident, the safest course for the team (i.e., company) is to insist that he was fit to play and that the hit that caused the specific injury came only after the training staff and/or medical staff had checked him out in the locker room and found that there was no problem.
But based on everything we've seen and heard, there's no way in the world to pinpoint when the injury occurred. So why would Gruden be trying to perpetuate the notion that it was a late-game hit and that there was no proof that he was in any type of physical danger?
Though we've yet to watch the tape of the game, we heard on Monday from multiple league and industry insiders who contend that Simms' struggles were obvious in the fourth quarter. By all indications (and we'll watch the game tonight and offer up our own conclusion), the guy apparently put on a Rocky Balboa type of a performance down the stretch.
But that brings us back to issue at hand. We think the team knows that it screwed up, and we think that the team fears legal action against it and/or its medical staff if Simms is unable to play football again -- or if the interest in him is diminished when he hits the free-agent market next
March due to the injuries that he has sustained.
From Simms' perspective, it's far too early to be thinking about those kinds of issues. But from the perspective of the team (i.e., company), it's not too early to be worrying about it -- and to be putting the wheels in motion to mount a successful defense.