Mike Tanier Spews Out Snappy Answers to Sincere Questions

This edition of Mailbag covers many of your more controversial and ethically-charged questions. I apologize for any excess sodium content in the responses .

As a preface to many of your questions, I invite readers to think of the NFL as an industry and collection of employers which is quantitatively different from your own industry and employers, but not really all that qualitatively different. NFL people make more money and achieve more fame than we do, but their ambitions and motivations aren't really different from yours or mine. Owners are greedy, but that doesn't make them all Sauron. Bosses are sometimes brilliant but more often short-sighted and uninspiring. Every locker room, like every workplace, is full of nice people and assholes. Most folks are happy to work together and look out for each other, until it's time to look out for themselves.

The NFL is not a government, religion, public trust or charity. Its players, for the most part are not saints, sinners, paladins or blackguards, just strapping dudes in their 20s with strapping-dude-in-20s values and desires. We should never expect the NFL, a team or a player to behave differently than we do. Or, if we consider ourselves wise and virtuous, we should never expect them to behave differently than the grasping office scoundrel down the hall behaves.

(Someone on Bluesky asked me recently why NFL players like Nolan Smith feel compelled to drive 130 miles per hour. When I was roughly Smith's age, I would do 80 down the Atlantic City Expressway in a 1976 Volare station wagon with bald tires and worn-down brake pads, not wearing a seatbelt. From a safety standpoint, that had to be the equivalent of breaking the sound barrier in a brand-new 21st century Lambo.)

With that harrowing preamble under the way, let's get nuts.

From the NFL emanates a miasma of billionaire buffoonery, consumerism, military propaganda, severe health risks for players, nepotism, corruption and so on. Yet we watch football and engage with the game, perhaps like the Romans watched lions devour the condemned in the Colosseum. Why do you think? – GS

Because humans are chimpanzees who wear boxer briefs. Violent contact sports stimulate our primate brains.

Every industry – sports, entertainment, the faith I was raised in, etc. – is run by a certain percentage of people who make Caligula look like Mister Rogers. It has been that way since the dawn of history. Folks who claim to have achieved some ideological purity in their consumerism are either kidding themselves or surviving by licking lichen off the walls of remote mountain caves and entertaining themselves by playing the pan flute for fruit bats.

We all pick and choose what we find too morally abhorrent to enjoy/support: football, the meat industry, artificial intelligence, organized religion, Substack, etc. I have friends who have sworn off football, and more power to them. I do my darnedest to respect the choices of others while not getting too precious about my own.

Is it possible to be an NFL owner and a decent human being at the same time? Alternately, how would you rank owners from best to worst, and what criteria would you use? – Jake Murray

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God. – Bill Walsh, Finding the Winning Edge

Many NFL owners are probably relatively decent human beings, at least by zillionaire standards. Jeffrey Lurie seems OK. Robert Kraft’s greatest crime against humanity appears to have been visiting a sex worker as an elderly widower, tsk-tsk. Most NFL owners disagree with me politically, but I am not ready to consign everyone who disagrees with me politically to the eighth ring of hell just yet. 

With wealth comes moral and ethical compromise. As Walsh also wrote, “let ye who are without sin cast the first stone.” When writing gags, I try to castigate owners for their specific crimes – Jimmy Haslam bilking truckers, Dan Snyder’s typical Tuesday – or for generally being silly and spoiled, not for broad moral turpitude. 

The best owners write checks, hire smart people and stay out of the way, but not so far out of the way that they don’t know or care what is going on. And they are not out-and-out criminal scuzzbuckets. I try to avoid ranking them, because I would just end up ranking the people that they hired.

Rank your Top 5 current worst professional sports franchise owners, using Marge Schott as the gold standard for a terrible owner. Does James Dolan make the list with his “Big Brother” surveillance at MSG and referring to his fans as “mole people”? Does Jimmy Haslam belong on the list for giving a sexual predator $230 million guaranteed? – Phil Johnson

I don’t know much about the owners of other sports! Dolan sounds awful. I know Schott was a gutter racist. Some of the criticism surrounding her may have been motivated by sexism, but still. 

Charlie Comiskey, the Black Sox Scandal owner, was pretty bad, right? What are the chances that he was just the typical greedy SOB but happened to run a team in mobbed-up Chicago at the start of the Roaring Twenties? There’s no chance that sportswriters of that era embellished tales of his maleficence to exonerate the players in that age of journalistic purity, is there?

George Preston Marshall (Washington’s owner for decades) was also a gutter racist. Lots of folks were pretty racist in the middle of the 20th century, but Marshall was disgusting by midcentury standards.

Dan Snyder belongs in some sort of alien space prison. Haslam’s gas-coupon swindle bothers me more than the Deshaun Watson contract, because it harmed ordinary working folk and small businesses. 

I am not sure what the standards are, really. There were baseball owners who ran cheap, last-place operations for decades. Legends like Curly Lambeau turned into total weirdos/possible arsonists late in their careers and lives. Are we talking about morality, success, how players are/were treated, the fan experience, or vibes? 

The team owner is always a rich person, and the home team never wins as often as local fans would like, so he or she is always easy to criticize and vilify. Being vilified is part of their job. Vilifying them is part of my job. I cannot really sympathize with them, because they sleep atop mountains of money.

Had an odd thought after reading about Patrick Mahomes’ latest contract extension, and began thinking of how people used to talk of Brady not pushing for top dollar due to his wife’s earnings. Is there anything stopping a player (most likely a QB) who has earned enough for several lifetimes with a team from simply saying, in the late stages of their career, that they’d play for the league minimum to stay in the same city and maximize their teammates so they can really play for championships/historical records etc.?

All these players say how grateful they are to be staying in the place they love etc. What if someone decided to pay back on that when it is time for a 3rd or 4th contract? – Tim Kirk

The “Brady takes less money because of Gisele” thing was a little bit of hagiography.

Brady didn’t sign contracts full of phony-baloney money, opting instead for a pay-as-you-go approach. The dollar value of Brady’s contracts, therefore, was never inflated. His reported salaries were never as high as those of whoever just signed a recent extension full of future bucks, but he was always earning about 100% of the reported money.

The degree of the hometown discount he gave the Patriots, both because of his wife’s earnings and his endorsement value, was overstated by local media in an effort to remain in the good graces of the perfect prince and his fans.

I don’t think there is any mechanism that prevents, say, Josh Allen from playing for the veteran minimum for the rest of his career while his wife brings home the bacon in vampire movies. He would probably lose his agent and publicists, but that would not matter much; some low-level agent would likely pick up someone as famous as Allen to handle endorsements and gate-keep the media. 

There would probably be some rumors, and perhaps some investigation, about back-channeled money for such a player. But let’s assume that we’re talking about an up-and-up situation. 

However, a little research reveals that most humans strive to earn as much money as their labor is worth! And the folks who chose not to do so tend to gravitate toward occupations like librarian, church organist or poet, not hyper-competitive careers for the ultra-ambitious like professional athlete.

So I don’t think we will see any NFL superstars playing for minimum wage and the love of the game anytime soon.

It's worth remembering that a large percentage of NFL players belong to mainstream Christian denominations that advocate tithing. Therefore, Jesus wants them to make as much money as possible, and they are disincentivized to argue.

Editor Jerry Wolper noted a more secular form of pressure. "The union has reason to want to see top players get big money, so that everyone else can fall into place. The cap mitigates this a bit, but the NFLPA still has an interest in making sure that when (say) Tyler Shough goes in to sign his next contract, management can't lowball him and say, 'That's more than Josh Allen is making.'"

Yep. And since the franchise tag is based on the five highest salaries at any given position ...

I’m a lifelong Patriots fan, and their dominance under Tom Brady brought many of my favorite sports moments of all time for me. Instead of taking the normal podcasting/write a book/defraud a university route that most great quarterbacks do in retirement, Brady seems to have emerged as a corporate advertising, risk adverse cyborg who wouldn’t even commit to picking his former team in the Super Bowl last year. Is this the new blueprint for successful quarterbacks upon retirement or just this who Brady has been all along? – KCTND

As I just mentioned, the New England and national media framed Brady as a paragon of virtue when he was with the Patriots. Brady had his own publicity team to help with the mythmaking. His representation and the Patriots PR department also aggressively "kept score." Brady shirttail-rider Alex Guerrero was running a TB-12 popup store out of the Patriots locker room, but no one dared mention it. Instead, we heard about how Brady loved winning more than money. (Guerrero now has an official, if ill-defined, job with the Raiders.)

If you believed the hokum surrounding Brady, then he appears to have made a heel turn in recent years. And lots of people believed the hokum, since everyone from ESPN to Pro Football Talk was selling it. But Brady was flitting around and doing whatever he wanted long before he retired. What he wanted most of all happened to be playing football.

A quarterback must be Brady-level successful to pull this sort of thing off; someone like Matt Ryan can become a GM, but not a GM/broadcaster/runway model. Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes are the only ones who currently meet the criteria. Rodgers is going to end up running for president as a libertarian or pirate. Mahomes will probably retire comfortably to watch his brother try to squander his money.

Do you know why QBs aren't willing to take less money in general? I can see Eric DeCosta saying, "Lamar, I can give you $50M/yr and keep Tyler Linderbaum, or I can give you $60M/yr and you are going to have to survive with whatever I can find in the back alley dumpster for center." Lamar: "I want $70M/yr knowing full well that we'll lose Zay Flowers next year."

Maybe as a mere mortal, $50M/yr sounds pretty sweet to me. But for QB's, that's just not going to pay for the steak dinners for the o-line like it used to? – Mike Schobazaford

We just spent three separate segments talking about NFL owners as if they were James Bond villains. Now we are wondering why quarterbacks don’t trust those same owners to take their reduced salary and reinvest that straight into the offensive line. 

Not to be too glib, but I don’t know how to properly answer “Why doesn’t someone else volunteer to work for less money?” without shouting BECAUSE IT’S MONEY. 

And no, I don’t think the salary cap changes the discussion much. Balancing the budget is management’s job. No one wants it balanced on their own back.

Has there ever been a case of a fanbase pushing a team toward moves that ended up counterproductive in the end? – Kevin

Eagles fans wanted Ricky Williams so badly in the 1999 draft that the local radio station bussed a bunch of brain donors to the draft at Radio City Music Hall to boo Donovan McNabb. Fortunately, the "Dirty 30" didn't get what it wanted.

Fans always want cotton candy: new quarterback, new coach, Heisman winner, flashy receiver/sack guy. That's fine: when I go to the movies, I want to see Wolverine fight Darth Vader, and I go to the bathroom at concerts when I don't recognize the song. I don't think modern teams care much about what the talk-radio or Reddit sect is pushing for. Though owners, eager to impress their peers, often think like fans.

I think I'm about as bleedin' heart as it gets, but I'm really struggling with this Brendon Sorsby thing.

If you were an NFL team, would you even consider drafting him? – Tony

The Brendon Sorsby situation has devolved since Tony asked this question. Sorsby sued (successfully) to avoid NCAA sanctions over his gambling habit so he could play for Texas Tech in 2026. But Sorsby, who reportedly underwent treatment for gambling addiction earlier in the spring, now plans to enter the mysterious and largely forgotten Supplemental Draft, so he could be on an NFL roster come September.

There are layers of idiocy and ick to the Sorsby case. I will limit my comments to one of them. 

Sorsby and his handlers are treating addiction recovery like a tonsillectomy: you go to the doctors in late April, they perform a procedure, you eat some sherbet, you come home cured forever. That’s a shallow and self-serving approach to what is actually a complex process that requires significant behavioral changes over an extended period of time.

Sorsby’s handlers may be callously using the language of recovery to stave off criticism from bleedin’ hearts like me and Tony. They want to make us treat the fact that Sorsby placed over 40 bets on Indiana football when he was Indiana’s quarterback like it’s some high ankle sprain from 2023 that is long in the past. We believe in the value of therapy and restorative justice, don't we?

(By the way, anyone minimizing Sorsby’s infractions because he was “betting on himself” has never encountered a point spread, an over-under, a prop bet or an addict.)

An addict making an honest effort at recovery should avoid environments and eliminate behaviors that could trigger a relapse. Sorsby is doing the opposite of that. 

Some NFL team will probably draft him and stash him on the practice squad to keep an eye on him for a year. There’s also a chance that the whole NFL decides, rather wisely, to keep the admitted compulsive gambler out of their locker room. Sorsby might then claim discrimination. And some otherwise smart people will fall for it.

Do the owners "buy off" Brian Flores with a wink-wink nudge-nudge HC job? If so, which team, and when? – Bill

I am not sure what a wink-wink nudge-nudge head coaching job looks like! Are Cowboys head coaches wink-wink nudge-nudge head coaches because they answer to Jerrah? Maybe David Culley and Lovie Smith for the Texans were nudge-winks a few years ago? That seemed like a rather specialized situation. A head coach is a head coach.

I hate being the voice of ideological impurity and realpolitik, but I can’t imagine why an NFL team should feel compelled to offer Brian Flores a head coaching job while he’s still suing the last team that gave him a head coaching job. I would think twice about hiring, say, a copy editor who just accused one of my peers of discrimination, especially if the crux of their argument (and their lawsuit) boils down to “the whole damn system is out of order.” 

Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of taking the NFL to task for institutionalized racism. I wish I could believe that forcing NFL teams into disclosure about their hiring practices would reveal the minutes of secret meetings of the Christmas Adventurers Club. But implicit bias is hard to prove in court, because of the implicit part. And no one can reasonably expect to climb the ladder with one hand while taking a blowtorch to it with another. 

These opinions are very unpopular in my sociopolitical sphere and my half of the Internet, where we often write “NFL bad, racism bad” think-pieces and congratulate ourselves for saving society. I’m rooting for Flores the activist and I like Flores the coach, but Flores the activist/coach is a confusing character who must surely realize that he is operating at cross-purposes to his self interest.

Mike, some of the recent reports showing the dramatic decline in the number of students projected to enter college over the next 15 years got me thinking. Is the NFL concerned at all about the talent level of incoming classes dropping? Could this lead to longer careers for current and future veterans? – Andrew Coyner

I don’t think declining college enrollment will be a problem for scholarship athletes receiving NIL money! If anything, changing attitudes toward college will probably make power-conference programs even more like a minor league system, as major schools use college football/basketball as both a revenue stream and a powerful recruitment tool for a shrinking applicant base. 

When I was a teacher, I saw too many kids with mild-to-moderate intellectual curiosity and drive and no specific career goals enroll in four-year colleges simply because it was expected of them, or for the “experience.” Many of those young people would have been better off financially, and probably happier, pursuing something more trade-oriented. If they wanted life experience, backpacking across Europe for six months is far cheaper than four years at Vague Liberal Arts University at Ninety Minutes From Home. 

I think destigmatizing trade programs and small community colleges among the upwardly-mobile suburbanite class is a good thing. But it’s not going to impact a 240-pound lad who starts meeting college recruiters when he’s 15.

Suggestion: Deep Dives into Dumpster Fires. A history of The worst teams and how did they get here. Mike is at his best hilariously trashing bad leadership and the bad decisions they make. Superbowl contenders have NFL films and plenty of writers and content creators immortalizing their rise. But not the shitshows! – GTcounterfootball

This sounds fun, but I worry about my overall saltiness level, especially after the last few responses. One of the goals of my offseason historical series is to introduce Too Deep Zone to new fanbases, and honey works better than vinegar.

Would you consider a Too Deep Zone watch party at the tavern of your choice? with your friends and fellow true believers? – Steve Matten

While it sounds like a blast, and Joekipedia says in the comments that he would fly in from California for such an event, I attended/hosted a bunch of book signings back in the day, both with Aaron Schatz for the Almanac and solo when promoting The Philly Fan's Code. There's an old Onion headline along the lines of Author Doesn't Mind if Book Signing Only Attended by One Person or a Huge Crowd of Seven, and that categorizes the size of such events.

I have also attended "Tweet Ups" by sports personalities a rung below Peter King, scheduled in cities hosting the Super Bowl, Senior Bowl or Combine. Attendance is usually sparse, even if some outlet like Bleacher Report puts muscle behind the promotion. It's hard for you, the subscriber, to carve out time and money for such an event. Whatever date I pick would be too close to your spouse's birthday or the busy time at your workplace.

Also, I have developed a bit of a social anxiety over the years since I left the classroom. If 50 readers did show up at a bar to hang out with me, I would probably sneak out the back door.

BUT ... there is usually a meet-and-greet at Sun King Brewery in Indianapolis each year on February 20-something during the Combine. I'm usually there, as are a dozen sportswriters you like and two or three that you hate. Kalyn Kahler of ESPN.com usually organizes it, and there's often a celebrity guest, or at least some Colts player. I will make a greater effort to promote the event in this space next year. It would be a great chance to meet, talk football and get rather drunk, and you would get a lot of NFL media personality bang for your buck.

Any interest in the test of time update to Civ 7? – mike abbott

I have been playing a bit more Civ now that my Almanac chapters are finished.

Every iteration of the Civilization video game series, since at least Civ IV, started out weak, then grew stronger through updates, expansion packs and DLC. The game is like a novel: it's not written, it's rewritten. Gamers also must grow into the game, and getting used to the bare-bones new version after spending hundreds of hours on the modded-to-the-hilt previous version takes a little open-mindedness on the gamer's part.

One thing I realized lately is that my relationship to Civ VI was deeply shaped by the pandemic. I play the new version the way I played versions III-through-V: a few hours here and there, often abandoning my empire around the Industrial Age even if I am winning. During quarantine, I played marathon Civ VI sessions, trying to win as every ruler, in an effort to feel busy. It kept me from going cuckoonanners, but my level of involvement with the game is probably healthier now.

Thanks again for all of your questions! See you again soon.