joe dokes said:
Al Davis is not the example I thin Patriot fans want Kraft to follow Al Davis died a lonely and bitter man who had to move his team around California and who hadn't won much in the last real long time of his ownership, and who rotting stench stil permeates the franchise.
I think you have it exactly backwards. Bob Kraft does not want to end up like Al Davis.
Smiling Joe Hesketh said:
He's already there. By supporting this disgrace of a commish even when the Ginger Hammer fucks over his own team, he's displaying the same clueless idiocy that Davis did in his waning years. Bob Kraft rendered himself irrelevant today while his team got sabotaged for the foreseeable future, and he''s just...taking it?
Fuck that noise.
I can't agree, as long as we're talking about pre-2003 Al Davis. The fact that there is still today a New England Patriots organization is due to the efforts of Al Davis, more than any other single person, to win respect and attention for the AFL. He got the better of the NFL time and again (signing players under their noses, especially QBs in the late 60s as AFL Commissioner). He was a leader in a ton of things, like the first black head coach (Art Shell) and female team President (Amy Trask). That Al Davis goes to the mat for his players and franchise, and usually wins. He had a lifetime of canny, sometimes underhanded dealing in order to out-maneuver opponents.
Kraft is not as dissimilar as we might like to think. His first job out of HBS was working for his father-in-law's paper business; 4 years later, he engineered an LBO to take over the business, slim it down, and aggressively grew it from there. He bought Schaefer Stadium in order to give him leverage to buy the team from Sullivan. The whole Hartford debacle. Kraft might not quite be in Al Davis's league, but one underestimates his ability as a tactician and dealmaker at one's peril.
Few NFL ownerships survive amicably across generations. Look at the Bensons now in New Orleans, or the DeBartolos a decade ago; there are many more examples. Who cares if Kraft "ends up" with a similar dotage to Al Davis; what made Davis a laughingstock in his old age was football incompetence, not a lack of business acumen. Kraft has been smart enough to delegate anything football-related to a legendary talent in that regard, and stay the F out of it. In all business matters, though, I don't see why Kraft might have been worried about ending up as Al Davis.
And ending up like Donald Sterling or Frank McCourt was never a possibility, I don't think. I don't know the NFL constitution at all, but if you can show me a portion that suggests Kraft's ownership might be terminated were he to pursue legal action against the league, I'll change my opinion. Short of that, I don't think he had much to lose beyond the 1st- and 4th-round picks and $1M that was already on its way out.