The National Football League crest is under fire. The logo is being attacked and the whole sanctity and fairness of this thing is having a couple grenades lobbed at it.
Check that.
Not just grenades, but an all-out arsenal unleashed on it.
The disproportionate nature of the skin color of coaches is one thing; when the outcomes of actual games on the field are being tinkered with by owners, Commissioner Roger Goodell has a gigantic problem of even bigger proportion.
And, folks, today Roger Goodell has a gigantic problem --- even if the claims of tanking are just that for the time being. Claims.
So, here we go with the background: Former Dolphins coach Brian Flores has a bone to pick with the NFL and he's unleashing some fury. One of the claims he's making is Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offered him as much as $100,000 back in 2019 to lose games and, with it, advance draft positioning.
But wait, there's more!
Not long after Flores made his claim, former Browns coach Hue Jackson hopped aboard the tanking train and used social media to tell the world Cleveland owner Jimmy Haslem was "happy while we kept losing."
That might seem innocuous. That was until Jackson broached the topic of money potentially paid for losses and responded, again on social media, "Trust me it was a good number!"
Oh boy. Here we go.
So now we have two former NFL coaches not afraid to put their names to it and tell the world they were offered money to guide their teams to something less than their best outcomes.
There is only one solution if these claims can be proven and corroborated: The teams must be sold.
There is no way Ross and/or Haslem can move forward in good faith as owners knowing that they attempted to hit a coach off monetarily for tanking games. That's the deepest and most cutting sin one can commit in their roles; skewing and distorting the outcomes of the games in an artificial manner.
I don't know where this all goes from here. I don't know exactly how the investigative arm of the National Football League would go about proving such claims. Certainly, it will be a long and arduous process.
But if the arrival point is one at which Ross and/or Haslem actually did this, there is no second chance.
No suspension will do. No nice, stern talking to.
It is straight to the figurative gallows.
They must sell.
They must be banished.
They have to get kicked out. And for good.
