Tagliabue talks football

NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue spoke at the President's House for a Saybrook Master's Tea on Wed., Feb. 21 as part of the Gordon Grand Fellowship, which brings business and government leaders to Yale. Tagliabue talked to the Yale Herald about the XFL, the lack of minority head coaches in the NFL, and the possibility for a new Jets stadium.

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH NFL Comissioner Paul Tagliabue spoke at the Saybrook Master's Tea on Wed., Feb 21 as part of the Gordon Grand Fellowship.

Yale Herald: The Super Bowl had some of its worst ratings ever [the third lowest in the last 30 years]. Do you think this phenomenon is specific to this year or is it something to be concerned with?

Paul Tagliabue: The Super Bowl rating was the fifth largest audience ever to watch a television program in U.S. history, so I don't think that's a bad rating when you consider what's happening with television and the fragmentation of the audience.

The key thing for us is that our ratings this past year were up to the point where they were about 25 percent above the average prime-time show, which is the strongest they've ever been relative to the competition. That's really what you need to measure, because you have to look at the explosion of channels and the fragmentation of the audience generally across all of these platforms. So you always like to do better, but we're not concerned at all about where our ratings are.

YH: What do you think of the XFL? Do you think it will succeed? Is it a threat at all to the NFL?

PT: I haven't watched it except for about 10 minutes, and whether it will succeed or not I don't really know. I think it will have more of an impact on the other sports that are being played at this time of year, like NBA basketball, NHL hockey, and the [NCAA] college basketball tournament. So it's really not much of a factor for us.

YH: Are you intrigued at all by any of the rule changes or the different styles of production?

PT: The rule changes are mostly things that we looked at and rejected years ago. In terms of production, like I said, I haven't seen much of it , but most of the people in television that I've spoken with feel that it's less than meets the eye.

This EyeVision that CBS came up with and introduced for the Super Bowl, I think probably that has the potential to be a 360-degree picture of a play, whether it's a football game or a basketball game, or a boxing match, for that matter. I think that element probably has pretty widespread application in the field. But three weeks is hardly a long enough period to make much of a judgement. And I'm sure much of what they're doing is experimental. And when you do an experiment, some of it's going to be good, and some of it's going to be not so good.

YH: Neither [Baltimore Ravens defensive coordinator] Marvin Lewis nor [New York Giants defensive coordinator] John Fox got a head coaching position. What do you think of changing the rule that bars teams from talking to assistant coaches of teams that reach the Super Bowl until after the Super Bowl?

PT: We're going to look at it. In fact, I'm meeting tomorrow with the competition committee in Indianapolis. We changed the rule several years ago to allow the team that's looking for a coach to talk to that coach's existing team in the postseason to ascertain whether he is interested in the possibility of working for their team. I think that if we do go to a system where negotiations are permitted, it will have to be very limited, because the coach's principal responsibility is to his existing team and the players and fans of that team.

YH: Some people see in the Marvin Lewis case a larger problem, namely that there are so few black head coaches in the NFL [white coaches have filled 44 of the last 47 head coaching vacancies]. Do you see that as a problem, and if so, what do you think is the solution?

PT: We've seen that as an issue for probably a half-dozen years. We've been working very intensively on that, trying to change the structure that underlies the interview process in the NFL for head coaches. We tried to build in elements to make it more of a university-type model or a corporate-type model, where there's much more direction from the top and there's more of an open process rather than individual coaches relying on the network of people that they've worked with over the years.

We had an executive search firm, Russell Reynolds, do an analysis of the interview process as it existed in the league about five years ago. They felt that structural changes needed to be introduced. We've done large numbers of video interviews with coaches—both minorities and non-minorities—and then we've made them available to teams as soon as they've had an inkling that they're going to be interested in replacing their head coach. So I think that those structural changes are beginning to show us some results in terms of the people being considered and hired, and I think we'll continue to make progress in that area.

YH: What do you think of the idea of having a stadium for the Jets in Manhattan, and what would the NFL do to help make it happen?

PT: We've already told the Jets that the likelihood is that we would be able to invest up to $150 million in this stadium, depending upon how the cost of the stadium is split between public funding and Jets funding. That's a policy that we adopted several years ago that enables the league to invest in stadiums through the teams. We've done it in New England; we're doing it in Philadelphia, Detroit, Denver, Chicago, and a number of other cities. The Jets understand that, and at this point it really depends on what kind of a consensus there is in New York about adding to the capacity of the Jacob Javitz Center and making a retractable-dome stadium an element of that expanded convention center. The process is underway, a lot of discussions are being held, and it's complicated because it's such a major undertaking. But I think overall it would be good if it could be accomplished.

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