Thread: Bears kicker suffers from foot-in-mouth disea

Originally Posted by soulman

Ric, to that I agree on both counts but I still believe the article to be a hatchet job. Gould is doing a politician's job as player rep and is no less guilty of useless rhetoric than Goodell or Pash but since they didn't verbally attack Saint Ginny nothing is said. He admitted that he was calling out the owners but said it wasn't a direct swipe at the McCaskey's alone. Just owners in general and used his owners as an example along with a few others. Players reps have a shitty job to do and I'd never want that role if I were a player.

I'm thinking George Clooney's job in Up in the Air, in which his job is to go around firing people.

Originally Posted by dabears54

Soul, if virginia or any mccaksey said "talk about being greedy! gould makes $14 mill for kicking a ball 3-4 times once a week for 16 weeks thats $390,000 we pay per kick! that's 10X what the avg is per chicago household for each kick- the players are overpaid and greedy"

i'd feel the same way they went over the line and were wrong and if their response was , ""I didn't downgrade anything robbie has done. I just said robbie, along with the rest of the players, are greedy and that's why we're in this lockout"... i'd call them jerks for that also

And I could say that the McCaskey's inherited a multi-million dollar sports franchise from Papa Bear having done little or nothing to have earned except by virtue of genetics and it wouldn't make any of it a sensible way to go about things. As a players rep Gould did his job quoting the party line. It's the same politics that Goodell and his group use trying to sway the public to their side of the fence and it's all just useless banter in the long run.

Ric is right. All of them need to get over their bad selves and hammer out an agreement that they can both live with. It's just one f'd up mess right now. Lockout off, lockout back on, this court says no so appeal to that court and in the end they come right back to where they left in weeks ago. Gould expression of his and the players frustration with what they perceive to be the owners greed is no different than Goodell's incredulous comments about players walking away from the bargaining table. No different than the letter Goodell sent to individual players expressing his frustration with their reps and going behind their backs to do it.

That doesn't change the fact that the article was a hatchet job intended to show Robbie Gould in a poor light and I'm surprised you even took the effort to post it. Most of the time you rail against this kind of bullshit so why do you want to support Haugh on this one?

Look, we can both go right on posting articles that show the other side to be bad guys or we can just drop out of it altogether. I thought I did weeks ago. You may have decided differently but it's draft weekend and this whole article is non sequitur to what's in the headline news right now so why even bother?

Originally Posted by dabears54

ask trace armstrong.john mackey and kevin mawae if the owners hold grudges about players if they speak out against them...: )

Free agent center Kevin Mawae thinks he’ll probably play for the Tennessee Titans in 2010, but he’s currently not under contract. And Mawae can’t help but wonder whether his status as the president of the NFLPA is keeping owners from offering him a deal.

”Part of me wants to say no, that that’s not the case, that management can look past the business side of football and try and build a good football team,” Mawae told Titans Radio WGFX-FM. ”But history shows that they’ve done this to players in the past. John Mackey back in the day was the President of the Players Association. He was an All-Pro and didn’t even get a job until midway through the next season.”

My point exactly. The Bears let Trace Armstrong go and lost a consistent double digit sack DE all because he was a players rep and disliked by the ownership. Not by the coaches but by the owners for crap sake.

It's time they grew up and learned that they're business people and sometimes business people get criticized by their employees. They are not fvckin' royalty damnit. This is America isn't it and last I checked we didn't have a king or queen or any dukes or barons either although sometimes I think NFL owners believe they have that status.

They own business franchises just like the people that own McDonalds franchises and I've yet to see any of them wearing a crown or asking or anti-trust exemptions. Maybe if they acted like it for a change they'd get more respect.

I'm going to ride the fence on this one, fellas. I am going to say, "Well, Robbie Gould should not be speaking from the pulpit against the hand that feeds him without there being any recourse against his status as a player of the Chicago Bears." Does that mean that they release him? Probably not, but you never know. But I would imagine that he might be fined for vitriolic comments by George McCaskey as well as he will continue to be harangued in the media by the likes of David Haugh and other columnists for The Chicago Tribune.

Secondly, I am going to say that I am officially announcing that I am siding with the players' union in this fight over the CBA and in the courts, although I do so with a heavy heart and with the knowledge that I may be cutting my nose off to spite my face. If you go back into the history of the NFL, the owners have dominated the landscape of the league, particularly when the ones like George Halas and Curly Lambeau also were the general managers and head coaches. This mentality continued if I'm not mistaken until 1993, with that court case titled "White vs. NFL," which basically brought the NFL into the then-20th Century by allowing for free agency to take place. DB, you yourself posted one time the figures for the 1985 Chicago Bears' salaries; Walter Payton was the league's highest, most marketable player, and his salary was only about $350,000 per year. To be the face of what at the time was the preeminent sports franchise in Chicago, the NFL, and quite possible the nation and not make more than that is a sham. It wasn't until the 1990s that players began earning millions of dollars to make them more competitive with the likes of Major League Baseball and the NBA.

In essence, the league has shit in its cereal and the players are fighting them tooth and nail over it. I say all of this, yet I agree with you DB that both sides are so greedy in what they have "accomplished" in the past by old strikes and fights over the CBA that they have become blinded by the truth, and that truth is that they are forgetting who their real bread and butter is - the fans, who are the source of all the revenue, from ticket sales, to TV revenues, to merchandise sales, to memorabilia auctions, etc. Yet, if there is one side who is more damnable than the other, I have to say, and I firmly believe it to be so, its is the NFL owners, who fail to properly compensate the players for revenue and profit they bring into the league. The NFLPA is guilty of its share of the crimes committed by not being willing to give a little to gain a lot because, as we all know, pro football is a hot commodity in this country right now and people, especially children, look up to these players as idols of sorts when they have, in reality, have done very little to earn that title. However, as I said, the bulk of the fault in this whole travesty of planned economics which I liken to near-Soviet socialist principles in the fashion in which the economic structure is planned lies mostly at the feet of the owners. I would say 60% of it does, anyway.

This incident where Robbie Gould used the bully pulpit outlet of the mass media to issue his stern views in order to achieve the plight of the NFLPA is truly unfortunate, and is no doubt an act of shrewd political intrigue. I do not believe that this act should go unpunished. I do not think that he will be released, but I also would not be surprised if he is not fined and censured over this rather stupid "slip of the tongue." Gould is as political as Barack Obama, and nearly as aggressive with his language overtones. He could have taken a softer approach to all of this and, instead, generalized his comments more (Yes, soulman, he did single out Virginia McCaskey, whether anyone wants to admit it or not), but he did not, and now he is going to have to pay for his indiscretion in one form or another, as well as he should.