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NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue: The State of The NFL - Page Six
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At 11:30 AM EST, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue gave his annual "State of The NFL" speech from the NFL press conference ballroom at Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, Fla. This is page six of the complete speech and press conference.
(con't)...COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: I've
spoken to the Mayor probably a month or so ago
when they were announcing the terms of the
agreement that was going to the legislature. I
really haven't been able to keep close to it in the
time since then. We've talked about what it would
take to get a Super Bowl there, and I think the
Mayor has been very emphatic that the stadium is
going to be a tremendous thing for Indianapolis
and for multiple events, including NCAA events,
and he draws a comparison between that new
facility and Reliant Stadium in Houston.
I think what they're doing is probably going
to maximize their chances to get the project done
and at some point hopefully it will include a Super
Bowl.
Q. How would you characterize your
discussions and negotiations right now with
the ESPN and ABC with TV contracts?
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: Not the
way you characterized them the other day.
(Laughter.)
We've had a lot of discussions with ESPN, ABC,
Disney, and we're going to continue. And they
have tremendous interest in staying with the NFL,
both on cable television and on broadcast
television. We have an interest in having them
stay with us. We have a disagreement about what
the rights fees should be, based not on wishful
thinking, but based on what we think the rights
fees would be in the marketplace as it is, with
tremendous interest in NFL football.
So we're going to continue talking to ABC.
The discussions will probably be complicated,
because we're looking at it from a strategic
perspective. We are giving very serious
consideration to being part of the launch of another
major sports network on cable and satellite
television. That's a complicated thing, but we're
looking at that very seriously. That's a strategic
thing, which anticipates the future of television
technology and the future interests of where
people are going to be in terms of digital television
technology.
We're also talking to other television
networks and companies about the packages that
we still have to sell, including the Thursday
night/Saturday package we're creating. And
there's strong interest in other companies, some of
whom already have contracts with us and some of
whom don't. So it's a strategic set of questions
and initiatives. We will continue to talk with ABC
and ESPN, and hopefully we'll get something done
with them, and hopefully we can do something
that's really bold and major and not just business
as usual in terms of how we grow our television
services. NFL Network is a step in that direction,
and we hope to take more steps in that direction.
Q. As you discussed earlier, the NFL's
economic system is a gold standard in
professional sports leagues. What do you
think it would be like to be the commissioner of
a league trying to implement such a system in
this day and age as some of your other
professional sports leagues are trying to do?
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: I think
that the other leagues actually are doing pretty
good in terms of dealing with the revenue disparity
issue that they've had, particularly in baseball and
the cost disparity issue. I've seen some of the
economics of the baseball tax, or whatever they
call it, and the redistribution escrow system in the
NBA.
They are transferring significant amounts
of money from higher-revenue teams to
lower-revenue teams. They are in various ways
sharing equally or planning to share equally in the
future potential of the business, such as on the
Internet. So I think the other sports are doing a
fine job. It's heavy lifting and it's heavy lifting in our
league to continue to address the scale of the
business and the tradition of support and the
integration of all the teams so that everyone can
be competitive in a fair way.
So they have their challenges. We have
ours, too. I still work an eight-hour day.
Q. I just want to get back to something
you said earlier. Were you saying that you
don't think right now there are enough qualified
minority candidates for front office positions
for the Rooney Rule to be affected by that rule,
and if there aren't, how do candidates get the
experience necessary to become qualified for
those positions?
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: No.
What I'm saying is that I think that the first priority
is to continue to do things that build the pool of
qualified talent. We've been doing that. We've
been running executive education seminars at the
Stanford Business School. We've been
aggressively reaching out through the search
process to bring minority talent into the league.
We've been encouraging owners who
have talented African Americans in the front office
to be open with other teams and give those
executives the opportunity to move up with other
organizations. We're reaching out to other areas
of industry where people have skills that are usable
in the NFL, whether it's marketing, whether it's
retailing, apparel retailing, other areas, accounting.
We've got people that have worked in our
Management Council staff that came to us from the
aerospace industry because they have accounting
skills that are applicable to the salary cap. The first
priority is to create talented people. And we're
encouraging teams to have minority candidates in
all their positions, not just the head coach position.
But for us to sit in New York and point our finger to
32 teams and say we'll fine you if you don't do X or
Y, it would not be a constructive step at this point.
There is much greater diversity of
positions. The head coach is a definable position.
To take that, the dozens of other positions, and us
to try to micromanage it from New York with fines
is not likely to be a positive thing right now.
Q. You talked earlier about the
hospitality of the people in Jacksonville. Is it
practical to have the Super Bowl in a city that
has only 14,000 hotel rooms and about 300
cabs when you have tens of hundreds of
thousands of people coming from all over the
world?
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: I will
know more about that by next week. But I think
that what you're seeing is what you see when you
have a Winter Olympics in a smaller community or
you have even a Summer Olympics in a smaller...more..
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