Believe it or not, National Football League is a nonprofit
By: Larry Fitzgerald
Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
Originally posted 05/21/2009
This is not a joke — this is real. When you think of well-known nonprofit organizations, maybe you think of the United Way, the American Cancer Society, the Vikings Children's Fund or the Carol Fitzgerald Memorial Fund. How about the National Football League?
The founding fathers of the NFL many years ago set the league up as a nonprofit; yes, the NFL is a 501c6. Imagine that! Theses are the same teams that historically, year in and year out, never spend up to the full salary cap maximum and are never penalized for it.
Last year, the NFL and the 32 teams that belong to this wonderful nonprofit made $8 billion. The number-one most popular sport based on revenue and ratings of all the major sports leagues including the MLB, NBA and NHL is the NFL.
Recession? Not in the NFL. That's why it's crazy when you hear the rhetoric being distributed about the NFL owners locking out the NFL players in 2010 to establish new ground rules for the next collective bargaining agreement.
“It's never personal for me. It's just business.” These are the words of DeMaurice Smith, the newly elected executive director of the National Football League Players Association, the man who follows in the huge footsteps vacated by the late Gene Upshaw.
“Gene built an incredibly strong organization with people who are and were very passionate about their support of the players,” says Smith. “The challenges are almost the same ones he faced with some changes. The NFL owners opted out several months before Gene passed, and so the same challenge that he was facing when he left us is the same challenge that we walk into. That challenge never changed.
“The owners decided that the deal was not good enough. It was not us that walked away from the deal; it was them. That's our primary challenge, and stepping into that challenge with the team that Gene built, we're ready to confront that challenge.
“We don't know what the financial condition is of the teams because the owners don't turn over that information. The NFL teams over the last 10 years have grown in net worth by over 400 percent,” said Smith. It's with that bit of news that we understand the NFL playing field of negotiations, the one presented by the owners and the one presented by the players.
Tim Brewster on the hot seat?
After going 1-11 in 2007 and bouncing back to a 7-7 in 2008, Gophers football expectations with a new on-campus football stadium in 2009 could force a change! One of the worst penalties a state university can have is losing scholarships. Usually they are lost from NCAA violations like cheating and breaking rules. In this case, the school football program's Academic Progress Rate dropped from 927 to 887 in 2008 and lost three scholarships.
In that nightmarish first year of Brewster's 2007, the school had 13 players leave the program, including poor student-athletes like Harold Howell and Damien White. Five of the players who exited were part of Brewster's first recruiting class that included his own son Clint.
If Northwestern University, for example, who last year beat the Gophers in football and who does so annually academically, lost three scholarships because of a falling APR, they would drop the football program. It's that important.
The Gophers need to prioritize on both fronts now, academically and athletically. In fact, it should be a mandate for change.
Fitz Notes & Quotes
Former Gopher Al Nuness, Jostens' vice president of sports marketing, has done it again. The Minnesota-based Jostens, along with designing millions of rings annually for high school and college graduates, churches and corporations across the United States, is designing the World Championship ring of the Super Bowl XLIII Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, the first six-time Super Bowl Champion.
The ring is awesome in design. Jostens-Nuness is also designing the Super Bowl rings of the Arizona Cardinals, who lost 27-23 in one of the most exciting Super Bowls ever. It's the first-ever Super Bowl ring for the Cardinals, the league's well-traveled franchise (Chicago-St. Louis-Arizona) that's been in the NFL since 1922.
Larry Fitzgerald can be heard weekday mornings on KMOJ Radio 89.9 FM at 8:20 am, and on WDGY-AM 740 Monday & Saturday mornings at 7:50 am and Fridays at 3:50 pm; he also commentates on sports 7-8 pm on Almanac (TPT channel 2). Larry welcomes reader responses to lfitzgerald@spokesman-re corder.com, or visit www.Larry-Fitzgerald.com .
