Domo's Still On Fire

Whoever's slipping the grumpy into Domo's coffee each morning, please keep it up.  The guy's on fire.

Today's target:  that longer schedule Goodell wants to squeeze even more money out of the broadcast partners:

NFL COMMISSIONER Roger Goodell made a rather stunning admission last week at the league owners meetings. In case you missed it, he acknowledged that preseason games are crap.

Actually, "crap" is my word, not his. What Goodell said was NFL exhibition tilts "aren't up to our standards" and are "low quality."

Goodell's trashing of the preseason was a major part of his explanation as to why the league's owners are seriously considering a 17- or 18-game regular-season schedule.

It's not that Jeff Lurie and Co. are greedy SOBs who are trying to squeeze every last dollar of revenue they can out of their product in these trying economic times. No, that's not it at all.

They're just thinking of you, Joe Fan. Why make you suffer through four meaningless preseason games when they can reduce the preseason, expand the regular season and give you more games to watch that matter?

Nut graf:

And that really is the only thing the NFL is about right now - making money. As much of it as possible. If it has to eliminate hundreds of jobs to do it, it will. If it has to start accepting liquor ads and selling lottery tickets on game day, it will. If it has to lock the players out in 2011 so it can reclaim a larger share of the league's revenues, it will. And if it has to extend the season to 18 games, it will.

I'll never forget these words from Patriots' owner Robert Kraft when the longer season proposal was first floated last year:

"We have to grow the pie; the biggest way of quickly growing the pie is in the media area," Kraft said. "The feeling is that we would get greater revenue for media if we had more regular-season games.

"We have to grow the pie."  That's how these guys see things.  Not, "we have to preserve the things that make our game great."  Or "sometimes doing the right thing for the game will mean taking slightly less revenue than possible."

Nope.  Let there be no illusion.  The NFL is a business, just like any other business, and the only thing they care about is the bottom line.

This isn't to say everything the NFL does these days is bad.  Some of the new rules seem like attempts to legislate away bad luck -- is it really going to make a difference that the other team gets a 15-yard penalty after some defensive linemen lying on the ground lunges and blows out Donovan's knee? *** (Although, truthfully, the way the refs seem so intent on screwing the Eagles, they probably wouldn't even call it.)  But player safety does seem to be the one area the league is willing to sacrifice some entetainment value in favor of the greater good.

Everything else, not so much.  And now that Dr. Z is off the beat, it's hard to find a national writer willing to tell it like it is about the league as often and as loudly as they should.  Maybe Whitlock will get bored at some point this offseason.

For the time being, at least we've got Domo locally.

*** UPDATE:  I saw this (via PFT ******) a couple minutes after I wrote this item.  Predictably, Sheldon Brown has thoughts:

"You're just going to see a lot more fines because of this [rule]," said Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Sheldon Brown. "Nobody is going to take the time to get up off the ground to hit a quarterback. So you'll have guys make the play, pay the fines, write it off on their taxes and move on. Whoever made that rule is crazy..."

"If you take that rule seriously, they will find somebody else to play your position."

Yep, pretty much.

****** SECOND UPDATE: When I said "PFT" of course I actually meant "Gabe's del.icio.us links over on the right there."