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NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue: The State of The NFL - Page Seven
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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 seven of the complete speech and press conference.
(con't)..community like Atlanta. You see more private
homes being leased out. And you see more
people having to drive a greater distance to get to
the game. But all of those things, those
inconveniences, in some cases they're not
inconveniences.
I spoke to one of our owners. He said he's
staying in a private home on the beach in Pont e
Vedra; it's a fabulous accommodation, even
though it's not a four-star hotel. Those things work
out, and it's different. Once we get through it all,
we'll have a definitive answer to your question as
to how well it worked and how great or how
inconsequential were the inconveniences. I think
the docked ship across from the Adam's Mark has
been quite dramatic. I know the COO of the
company is staying over there, so it can't be the
worst place to be.
Q. Some business leaders researched
the possibility of putting the Hall of Fame in a
downtown complex like Springfield at the
Basketball Hall of Fame. I don't know if the
NFL has taken a look at that. How healthy is
the Hall of Fame, and where do you want the
Hall of Fame?
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: The
option of putting a new one in Canton downtown,
rather than where it is?
Q. Yes.
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: I'm aware
of it, but not in any of the great details. And I know
that some people in the community think it's a
great idea; some others would be more wedded to
the existing hall and continuing to grow it. I'm on
the Board of the Hall of Fame, and I will be
up-to-date at some point. It's in the early
discussion phases.
Q. We want to know if the American
Bowl is going to come back to Mexico?
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: I don't
know, but we're looking at not only American Bowl
games outside the United States, but trying to
explore realistically whether we could do a regular
season game outside of the United States.
Obviously if that became possible in terms of
taking a game away from the fans of a team in its
home city, one of the places that would get serious
consideration for that would be Mexico City. Just
the time zones and travel would be compatible with
what you want to do with the teams. If we don't
want to do that, I'm sure we'll be back with the
American Bowl games.
Q. In the previous question about Los
Angeles you indicated that you hope to have
term sheets in hand by May, and I think
previously you set an objective of getting those
done by mid-March. Have those guidelines
changed? And also, regarding the negotiations
with the Coliseum, you're getting into the 10th
month, and it seems like both sides have been
putting a lot of effort into agreeing to terms.
I'm wondering why has it seemingly taken so
much effort than the other sites to get a deal
with them.
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: I know
there's been a lot of discussion about whether
we're going to open a stadium in 2008 or 2009.
Now we're having a discussion about whether
we're going to finish term sheets in March or May.
That doesn't matter to me. What matters is two
teams left L.A. a decade ago. We want to get back
there. Whether it's '08 or '09, it's going to be an
unacceptably long period of time out of L.A.
What matters to me is that we get this right
for a hundred years. If it's March or May, I don't
care. If it's '08 or '09, I have a little bit more
interest. But what I really want to do is get it done
within this decade, not have it go into another
decade. And when we do it, I want it to be
something that the fans in L.A., the business
community in L.A., the leadership of that
community, and the leadership of the NFL will be
very proud of because it will be a great thing, and
that it stays there and is very successful for 50 to
100 years. Those are the timelines that matter to
me, and that's the way we're working on this.
Q. We're all assembled here because
we love the game. The Super Bowl is a
wonderful event. The hoopla, the media.
Football is a grand sport. But it's a dangerous
sport. Jerome Bettis said because he played
so long in the NFL he didn't expect to live as
long as he might. Is that a perception or a
reality? It doesn't seem to be the case in other
professional sports. You wouldn't say that
about tennis or basketball or baseball. I
wonder if that's a concern for the NFL.
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: I think on
that particular issue of life expectancy, I think the
National Institutes of Health did a study some
years ago that showed there was no significant
difference in life expectancy between people who
played in the NFL and the male population at
large. That was an issue that we and the Players
Association many, many years ago focused on.
I think the NIH or somebody like that did a
pretty definitive study. On the other side of the
coin, if I look around the room, here, I don't see too
many people the size of Jon Runyan or Richard
Seymour. So we are very much focused on the
size of our athletes, what they do. It's very
stressful, as you know; you played the game.
We have in place a committee which we
set up quite some time ago, a medical committee
on cardiovascular health, which is looking into the
whole issue of size, obesity, stress with oversized
individuals, sleep apnea, all the other things that
go with size and obesity. but just size is the issue.
At the same time I think we have to be realistic.
We don't do gene implants. We don't create
quarterbacks that are 6-6, 275 pounds. They
come from their parents. The NBA didn't create
Yao Ming at 7-7, or whatever he is.
So people are getting bigger and bigger all
over the world. But, yes, we're very concerned
about making certain that we are leaders in
understanding the health risks with the kind of
people we have in our game. And we recognize
that we are unique, college football is unique, and
high school football is unique. And having
individuals do these kind of things, we're very
concerned about it. It's hard to get definitive
answers in the short term, because as you
suggest, it takes decades to know what the
consequences are to a person's health of having
played in the NFL for five or ten years.
So it's really going to be a decades-long
evaluation. Some things can be ascertained in the
short term, but some things are going to take a
long time to decide. And our sample is a relatively
small part of the total population.
Q. What's the latest on flexible TV
schedules for night games? You have the
Sunday Night Dallas-Giants with no playoff
implications. The last Monday Night game
where one team didn't play their starters, I
think the fans, most important, would want to
have meaningful games down the stretch.
COMMISSIONER TAGLIABUE: Yes. The
television contracts that we announced in early
November with CBS and Fox give us some options
for flexible scheduling in terms of switching some
games from Sunday afternoon into the primetime
broadcast window. So we have some approaches
for that in the future contractually that we haven't
had in the past and we'll be working with our teams
and the networks to figure out how to do that.
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