NFL Week 10: Jeffrey Lurie lauds Paul Tagliabue; Fox remains shameless in promoting Trump

When I began my career as a sports writer in 1990, my job included occasional NFL coverage. There was another relative newbie on the NFL scene: Paul Tagliabue, who’d served as one of the league’s Washington-based lawyers, was one year into his stint as the commissioner of what was the No. 2 sport in America.

Polls in the 1970s showed that football was the country’s favorite sport, but anyone who lived through the 1980s knows that it was Mike Ditka, the Fridge, and the Bears’ Super Bowl Shuffle, as well as Joe Montana’s 49ers and the Cowboys’ second iteration as America’s Team that entrenched the NFL as supreme.

Tagliabue supercharged that process.

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Super Bowl commercials and halftime shows provided the broad-based appeal that helped the Big Game supplant Christmas as America’s least controversial national holiday, if not its most popular. He exported the game to Europe, by drips and drabs, where now there are more than 13 million fans.

By the time Tagliabue retired in 2006, he had established industry dominance for NFL owners over their workforce, ensuring labor peace; he had set parameters for ever-more-lucrative media rights deals; and he had welcomed new ownership in Dallas, New England, and Philadelphia, pumping fresh blood into what has become the most valuable sports league on Earth. By the turn of the century, despite the best efforts of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Michael Jordan, the NFL was king. Tagliabue was the kingmaker.

Tagliabue died Sunday morning at 84 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. On Sunday afternoon, the four expansion teams whose addition he oversaw observed moments of silence in his honor before their games. He’d also grown the league to 32 teams, or more than 14%.

His initiatives coalesced in a touching manner Sunday morning. The NFL hired Tagliabue on Oct. 26, 1989. Two weeks later, the Berlin Wall fell. The NFL played its first regular-season game in Berlin on Sunday morning.

Tagliabue always had vision.

When Tagliabue retired, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said:

“He has been a captain of captains. Paul has led the NFL through a tremendous growth period. He has always recognized the importance of the fan as the key driver of the league’s success. His leadership produced a business model that allowed for players and teams to thrive.”

That thriving came at a cost. Tagliabue minimized, if not suppressed, concerns and research regarding the NFL’s concussion epidemic. He also ran the league during its alleged reckless and rampant prescriptions of opioids, which continue to be litigated.

On the other hand, Tagliabue’s negotiations with media companies turned a pool of money into an ocean. He wisely canceled NFL games the weekend after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. His steadfastness in keeping the Saints in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit the region just before the 2005 season might have been his finest hour.

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His finest initiative: In 2003, Tagliabue established the “Rooney Rule,” which has served as a pathway to inclusion and prominence for scores of minority coaches and, more recently, executives. Other leagues have adopted similar policies.

The Rooney Rule isn’t perfect. Neither are concussion protocols or the lukewarm pursuit of what the NFL terms “player safety,” which, in this most brutal of endeavors, always seems secondary to “player participation” (look up Tua Tagovailoa‘s concussion tape). But then, we always expect perfection from all our leaders, and we inevitably are disappointed.

Tagliabue wasn’t perfect, but he was significant. Given the NFL’s growth, both during his tenure and then following his template, Tagliabue is probably the most significant sports executive in my 35 years of sportswriting.

Lurie might agree.

On Sunday, Lurie issued this message:

“Paul was a … smart, strategic thinker whose visionary leadership led to tremendous growth and popularity for the NFL. Expanding the league’s international presence, stadium development, media rights explosion, community outreach, collaborative labor relations, and social responsibility were just some of his many accomplishments stewarding our great league.”

On the 40th day of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, President Donald Trump was gifted a platform by the Washington Commanders, who are owned by Sixers owner Josh Harris, who hosted Trump in his box. Harris wants a new stadium. Trump reportedly (and incredibly) wants Harris to name the new stadium after him, and has the capacity to use federal agencies to block its construction on the proposed site. Like every Trump gambit, this was a very public, strong-arm extortion move.

Only three sitting presidents have attended a regular-season NFL game, none since 1978, and none has ever used it as a forum for political gain.

It gets much worse.

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Trump then appeared on the Fox network broadcast of the game. This is unsurprising, since Fox’s news wing routinely promotes Trump’s platforms, no matter how diabolical.

The crowd wasn’t having it.

At halftime of the Commanders’ blowout loss to the visiting Lions, over the stadium’s loudspeakers, Trump read an oath of enlistment to troops in attendance. He was drowned out by boos.

Trump then joined Fox broadcasters Kenny Albert and Jonathan Vilma in the third quarter for eight minutes of pure cringe, which included false claims about the economy and inflation.

Not many folks like reading about politicians on the sports pages, and not many writers like writing about them in our limited space. But it’s hard to “stick to sports” when the president — any president — uses sports to promote an agenda, especially when what he is promoting is patently untrue, and doubly so when the nation is experiencing a time of distress and crisis.

At that point, the president enters my purview.

Two years after withdrawing his name from multiple head-coaching searches, former Lions offensive coordinator and Bears rookie coach Ben Johnson, guiding second-year QB Caleb Williams, is 6-3 after a 24-20 home win that cemented the fate of the last can’t-miss coordinator turned head coach, Brian Daboll, whose Giants fell to 2-8 in Daboll’s fourth season. … Earlier on Sunday in Berlin, resurrected Giants QB Daniel Jones and former Eagles offensive coordinator Shane Steichen, in his third year as Colts head coach, moved to 8-2 with a 31-25 overtime win over the Falcons. … Another Cinderella story continues to unfold in New England, where first-year coach Mike Vrabel and second-year QB Drake Maye further escaped the shadow of Bill Belichick with a 28-23 win in Tampa, Fla., to move to 8-2. … Josh Allen’s defense of his MVP award took another hit with two turnovers in a 30-13 loss at Miami.