OT: Worst Commissioners in American Sports History
In response to the, um, heavy handed penalties issued to Tom Brady and the Patriots, I began to create a list of the worst commissioners in American sports history. My short list:
1. Roger Goodell -- He just seems to make shit up as he goes along. Words like arbitrary and capricious come to mind. The examples are too endless to mention.
2. Gary Bettman -- Several lockouts, the disastrous expansion of hockey to impossible-to-succeed markets, presided over a huge decline in popularity of the sport, general incompetence.
3. Fay Vincent -- So bad that the owners booted him from his position.
What is your list of the worst sports commissioners of all-time?
Is turning out to be the worst ever. Bettman is bad, but Goodell is taking it to a whole new level. When it is all said and done he will be the worst ever.
Goodell isn't the worst in history. As others have mentioned, the NFL is doing really, really well and is making record money. There is also parity in the league.
I also think that Goodell is paid to look like the bad guy and shoulder blame away from the owners. Look at what happened to the Raven's owner or the Minnesota owner over their stars getting in trouble. Look at the "outrage" over Kraft, who along with Belichick isn't even being discussed (even though they both had to know).
I guess my point to you (and to sadeto above) is that the financial aspect isn't necessarily all that relevant when comparing commissioners. If you put Gary Bettman in charge of the NFL right now the league wouldn't go into a death spiral within ten years. It would still dominate in revenue and sales and all of that. Football has been king and will be king for at least a while, regardless of commissioner.
I also think Bettman's job has been more difficult than Goodell's for a number of reasons, although he has been terrible like I mentioned in the OP. Goodell has made a mockery of the NFL too many times to count and truly seems to make shit up on a whim, with no apparent rhyme or reason to anything he does. Has that cost him many fans? No, but it might in the future.
Then again, all of these worst (or most disliked) commissioner arguments are so subjective. If healthy finances and parity are the most important things, then he is certainly not the worst commissioner in sports. I weigh those aspects less than most.
Good point about the bigger issues - brain injuries and off field conduct. Baseball seemed to have survived despite over 100 years of wondering if the ball is scuffed or has a foreign substance on it.
As for far worst head sports honchos we should look more internationally where these guys can be crooked and just don't care if anybody knows it.
FIFA - Sepp Blatter - somehow under his reign, awarded the World Cup to Qatar for 2022 despite an average daytime temp duing the World Cup months of June and July of 50 degrees C - that's 120 degrees Fahrenheit!
IOC - ex leader Juan Samaranch
And yes amazingly these guys are not the worst - that honor goes to FIDE - the world chess federation - where there has been two chess despots:
Florencino Campomanes
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov
Selig was involved in ownership collusion to drive down the price of free agents, didn't care about PEDs until he was forced to by public opinion and the government, has recklessly expanded the postseason and interleague play and pretty much made up his own rules regarding ARod and the other players caught in the Miami PED ring.
I completely agree with you and I think you said it better than i did below.
Was the worst. He couldn't stop criminals in ridiculous costumes from wrecking Gotham City, and he was too stupid to figure out that Bruce Wayne and Batman were the same person.
Not since the blatant corruption of the Mayor McCheese political machine have I seen such incompetence in office
How did we get this far without nominating Isiah Thomas, who drove a fifty-year-old basketball league into bankruptcy and oblivion within two years of purchasing it?
Continental Basketball Association was for years a de facto D-League for the NBA. Stitched together from a patchwork of minor leagues, it stayed in existence for decades yet was destroyed under the leadership of Isiah Thomas - great player, bad manager and coach. AND yet he is back in the NY basketball scene as part of the WNBA team, the Libertys.
but he's without a doubt the most overpaid one. He gets a shit ton of money for making lame decisions or simply doing the minimum to see if a problem will just go away. I don't why the owners tolerate him.
First off he is responsible for the worst and most ridiculous rule change in sports, i.e., having an All Star game determine home field advantage for the World Series. That advantage should be earned by the teams throughout the year, just as they do in every sport that doesn't have a neutral field.
I understand that you want a competitive All Star game, and I am all for that. That just happens to be the worse way to do it. Better option is having two charities and the winning side's charity gets the bigger donation. Or you could just want to win it for simple pride and bragging rights.
Second worst move is "expanding" the wildcards to two teams and create a play-in game, all so you can manufacture the excitement of a pennant race coming down to the last day of the season. The reason it was exciting that faithful day a few years back is cause it came naturally after a long season and was filled with unexpected turns and unbelievable moments. Built-in play-in games put the wildcard teams at a disadvantage for obvious reasons.
And his most inept moment was his whole handling of the steroid era. There was two ways of handling that issue, the smart way which is. 1) Come out before the season and say "we have been remiss in not having an official steroid policy prior to this point. We have now instituted a policy effective as of .... which carry the following penalties ... or 2) the Bug Selig way, which is go a witch hunt, particular against guys he might not necessarily like, to try and discredit, retroactively punish and overall taint the image of baseball as much as you can. All while hypocritically ignoring the fact that Selig and baseball as a whole road the steroid era to salvation.
The home-field advantage prize for winning the ASG is dumb, but it has roots in an even dumber overreaction. Because a game ended in a tie, everyone acted like that was some colossal travesty, and MLB decided to "fix" it. The game is nothing but the single most glorified exhibition in sports, who the fuck cares if it ended in a tie? Why people thought that was bad, I have no idea. Who gives a shit? The only thing that matters about ASGs is if they're memorable, and that one certainly qualified.
Second, the play-in game is supposed to put the wild cards at a disadvantage. That's the whole point. And doing so is a good idea.
I can't agree with you there. After battling through a 162 game season your reward should be something more than a one-game sudden death "play-off game". They play series in baseball because a single game is not the most effective way in determing the better, more deserving team. It becomes too much of a crap shoot.
And if the motivation behind it is to put a wildcard team at, what i consider is a pretty sizable disadvantage, I have a better idea just go back to the Divisional winners only format. There is not bigger disadvantage to your playoff hopes then not makign the playoffs.
A 162 season grind should earn a playoff team something more than a glorified pull of the slot machine.
Division winners only would be great, but with three division winners it's nigh-impossible to do. Maybe if they expanded to another team in each league and had four divisions each like the NFL does.
At any rate, to me the complaints made sense, that the division winners didn't get enough of an advantage. Too many wild cards in the WS was a valid complaint, I think. I just think of it as, the wild cards aren't actually in the playoffs yet until they win their way in one more time, and then the wild card gets the disadvantage of starting their rotation with their #2 pitcher. The only team really "hosed" by it is the first wild card. The second wild card would never even have gotten to pull the lever. Anyway, it remains to be seen in practice if it's that much of a disadvantage. Last year we had another all-WC Series.