Jack Kent Cooke Has Ideas on Restructuring the NFL

Jack Kent Cooke, the owner of the Washington Redskins, has proposed a broad restructuring of the National Football League, his son, John Cooke, said Friday.

“This is the only worthwhile thing that’s going to come out of this. We’re going to redo the league,” John Cooke said Friday after Washington lawyer Paul Tagliabue was elected commissioner Thursday even though the Cookes favored Jim Finks, the general manager of the New Orleans Saints.

When the first search committee was formed last March after Pete Rozelle had announced he was retiring, each club was asked for a recommendation on how the league should be structured.

Cooke said his father wrote a letter to the committee recommending that no owner be allowed to be the chairman of more than one committee.

He also recommended that the members serve fixed terms on the committee and be rotated and that it be mandatory that each owner serve on committees.

“If a guy says I don’t want to do it, he shouldn’t have any choice,” John Cooke said.

Cooke said he and his father would make the same recommendations to the consulting company of Booz, Allen, Hamilton Inc. when they meet with members of the company next month.

The company has been commissioned to present a report on the restructuring of the league when the owners meet in Orlando, Fla., next March.

John Cooke said another result could be that the Management Council, which has overseen negotiations with the NFL Players Association for the last decade, will be disbanded.

“We may not have a Management Council. We may give back more power to the commissioner. I think we should be involved more in labor negotiations. Obviously, we’ve got to have some kind of committee (for negotiations), but it should go back to the commissioner’s office for him to oversee,” he said.

Cooke said his father’s recommendations were designed to meet the concerns of the new guard owners who blocked Finks’ election because they felt they didn’t have enough input in the league.

“They guys were alienated and they became frustrated,” he said.

John Cooke, though, felt Finks was the better candidate for an era of transition because Tagliabue has been advising Rozelle the last two decades.

When Cooke was asked if he voted for Finks on the last ballot even after Wellington Mara of the New York Giants and Art Modell of the Cleveland Browns had agreed to switch to Tagliabue, he answered by not answering.

“There’s no secret that I thought that of the two men, the most qualified at this time in history was Jim Finks,” John Cooke said.

Neither Cooke has ever felt part of the inner circle in the past, and John said it’s a good idea to get more owners involved in league operations.

“Sometimes we agreed with the clique and sometimes we didn’t,” he said, “but we’ll never be part of a bloc. We’re independent and I’m saying to you that we should all be independent.”

In the Rozelle era, the key was consensus. Cooke feels it’s more important to have each team voting its view.

“I don’t care about consensus,” he said. “All I care about is the vote.”

He said the owners can do a better job of voting if they’re more informed by being on committees. “It’s best for the league over the long haul.”

Cooke served on a committee for the first time when he was named to the second search committee in July.

Dan Rooney, the president of the Pittsburgh Steelers and a longtime member of the inner circle, said the strife over the election of a commissioner may turn out to be positive because it gave all the clubs a chance to express themselves.

“The old guard better realize that they have to talk to everyone,” Rozelle said.

Meanwhile, Tagliabue said in a conference call with writers around the country Friday that he had talked with Rozelle and that they decided Rozelle would resign next Saturday.

On Nov. 5, Tagliabue said he “will be functioning as commissioner.”

When Tagliabue was asked about changes in the structure, he said he wouldn’t make any major changes the rest of this season and would wait until he gets the consultant’s report before planning any steps.

Tagliabue said his phone had been ringing off the hook and that one of the calls came from former President Reagan in Tokyo.

The former president congratulated him and asked him to pass on his compliments to Rozelle for a job well done the last three decades.

Tagliabue also said that Reagan stressed he was a two-way football player and maybe they should bring back two-way players.

“That may have been his way of talking about situation substitution,” Tagliabue said, and then, “he said at some point to make sure to ‘Win One for the Gipper.’ ”