Bailout Fever! Catch It at an Nationalized Football League Stadium Near You!

"Look what you've done."

Bailout Fever, it’s catching on everywhere! It’s in your banks, your local real estate agencies, and your investment firms…and now Bailout Fever has really hit home—welcome to the NFL, Amerikan style!

Imagine, if you will, the drastic sight of longtime Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis groveling at the feet of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. See the conflicted emotions of megalomania and great depression wrapped around his face like designer glasses, Davis pleading “Just do it, baby! Sign the deal! We gotta have it Rog-baby, else, this league is cooked!” as he tugs at the neat hem of Goodell’s pressed Armani slacks.

Davis needs Goodell to sign his historic reappropriations measure, allowing teams to now purchase each other. If Goodell fails to agree, the league that Davis helped to build is sure to collapse come Monday night.

For now, with the bottom dropping out all around him, Davis is multitasking. He is a miner at heart, and knows from experience that there is no time to wait for answers when the diamonds are being flushed along with the muck. Davis works Goodall for his decision while pulling up his sleeves, proceeding to mergitate. He holds in his trembling hands the newly programmed card keys to the front offices of the Seahawks, the hated Broncos, the Panthers, and the entire AFC West.

But this unlikely scene is ever weirder than that. Down the oaken table from where His Excellency is begging Goodell to sign, fellow owner Jerry Jones blows up four cell phones at once, juggling them between his ringed fingers like a Vegas barkeep on dollar Cosmo night. Normally a calm and collected man of savvy business instincts, something seems amiss on Jones serene-deficient face today.

Though his signature cracked smile remains plastered on his unnaturally boyish face, Jones seems clouded in the resigned air of a firing squad member who knows that his gun held the only real bullets.

On one of the phones that he shuffles between, Jones has Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder ready to capitulate his team and the stadium that it plays in. An overly leveraged Snyder blubbers into the phone, asking if he can just keep one player—exposing a strange affinity for tight end Chris Cooley. Jones soothes Snyder in a shushing tone, but tells him softly that Cooley too must go. It all must go. There is no other way. The jig is up.

Jones knows that he and Davis are the only ones who have the money to float the league, other than the League itself. Jones deftly flips the Snyder-phone into his left pinky and rotates to a mass conference call with millions of shocked shareholding fans of the Green Bay Packers. They too, he shushes quietly. It will all be OK, he tells them, all 115,000 disgusted Mid-Westerners. Lombardi would want it this way, he assures them. Now, let’s cut the cheese…

Davis and Jones work the virtual rooms of this rare mid-season emergency league meeting like Thresher sharks in bloody water. The rest of the suddenly broke NFL teams trail sweet red calling cards of capitol hemorrhage in the murky waters. Big fish are wounded and foundering, and are Jones and Davis’ for the taking, and on the cheap.

They beg to be saved from drowning as they drown in their own excess. When the last holdout—those pesky Mora’s of New York are pinned down and gobbled, the new super-team owners eye each other warily, waiting for one another to so much as flinch.

How they got here—two powerful owners, now locked into an unimaginable real estate grab, nobody really knows. There is speculation that the modern NFL trend towards obese rookie contracts has spurred on unsustainable salary levels. Even the kickers drive Maybachs and own small islands now. 

Some weary commentators point fingers at themselves. The $21 billion dollar TV contract seemed so sure and easy that the owners started getting reckless, spending millions on dove-armed QB’s and dial-up speed tailbacks. 

We, the fans were asked, as an aformention, to foot these outrageous expenses now leading to this unprecedented bailout. Now, during these incredible negotiations, all that we are told is that unless we allow the teams to swallow each other, and for the league to eat it’s own, that the great American sport of football will be exneyed come Sun-sney.

Not that we have much say in the matter. The numbers, they tell us, are too complex. There are at least 700 billion factors that would have to be explained in detail, and there is no time for that. The market will correct itself, and, if the plan works, when things loosen up, the old boys will sell back the rest of the teams to their downtrodden owners, minus a few key players who will, of course need to stay with their master teams when the crisis is over. What is fair is fair, you see.

Goodell knows that the “league” will be seen as a joke with only two teams, so he insists that some of the older teams—the Steelers, the Dolphins, Vikes, and Bears, for example, be propped up by the windfall of this massive bailout. Some of the players will be allowed to stay where they are, on their Nationalized Football League teams. But most of the veteran stars will transfer to the new super-Cowboys, or the mega-Raiders.

Jones pauses to hear Goodell when he approaches the head table. His face is grim. One of Jones’ phones rings. It’s Hank Steinbrenner, from New York, via Tampa. He sounds frantic, and needs advice on how to save baseball.

*Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a foreclosed beach house in an abandoned neighborhood near Carmel, California, where he has been seen muttering the phrase “WaMu, wammo, WaMu, wammo” to himself while creating small bonfires of useless checkbooks. For comments and/or subpeonas, contact him at [e-mail].