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Bear Digest

NFL Lives Down to Reputation by Hiding in a Loophole to Cheat Bears

Analyzing what the NFL did to the Bears, and all the just criticism the league lets itself in for now by ignoring its own Rooney Rule with a typical Friday news dump.
Gene Chamberlain|
Commissioner Roger Goodell at the owners meetings.
Commissioner Roger Goodell at the owners meetings. | Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

It was fitting when the word came down on a Friday, a holy day no less.

They call this a Friday news dump, and it is done to help reduce the amount of furor over something bad. In this case, it was the NFL shooting down an appeal by the Bears. The Bears will not get their third-round compensatory draft picks for losing assistant GM Ian Cunningham to Atlanta as its chief football executive, even though the Rooney Rule calls for this.

This is final, according to the report from Ian Rapoport of NFL.com/media. In other words, from the league itself. And in this case, the NFL has not only made the dumbest decision possible but has officially doubled down on its stupidity.

Cunningham is not the chief executive, the league says, even though the Falcons, Bears, Cunningham, Falcons owner Arthur Blank, and everyone with functioning brain matter says the opposite. The league considers newly hired team president Matt Ryan the top football executive even though Ryan himself also says the opposite.

Cunningham makes the trades, signs the free agents, handles the salary cap and drafts the players. Ryan gets to wear the colors. He's a team mascot minus the silly outfit and is not the boss.

The league chose to live within the confines of a loophole in a law that it created rather than standing with the law's intent. They unnecessarily did this even though it invites accusations of racism.

You've really got to believe in your own stupidity to do that.

They tell you they care about equitable hiring and point to all of their public relations programs and stances suggesting high moral standards. Then they run away from all of it.

After all of the hoping by the Bears, after a trip to New York by ownership to appeal the initial decision, and now this rejection, the team still gets something far more valuable than a couple of late Day 2 draft picks. It's difficult for fans to see it, but it is true.

Standing above it all

Bears owner George McCaskey bent over backwards and tried to see the NFL's side during the owners meetings.

Long ago, McCaskey's grandfather, George Halas, invented the league and carried it on his shoulders well beyond infancy. Now it seems his grandson went out of his way to protect what little shred of integrity the NFL has remaining by softening their fall in this fiasco. It's nice of him but the league doesn't deserve it.

"The league has to think big picture," McCaskey told reporters at the owners meetings, obviously biting his tongue. "What are the consequences of us ruling in a particular way, in this particular case, and how would that be applied to the other 30 teams in the future?

"So it's a big question. It's not a narrow inquiry. They have to broaden the score of their inquiry."

The league really didn't explain why the Bears fail to qualify for the picks other than to gaslight and repeat the same earlier incorrect statement that Ryan is chief football decisionmaker.

Cunningham is a minority member, and when you invent a rule to reward teams for the development and hiring of minority members as personnel chiefs but then don't adhere to your own rule, there will be name-calling. It will get unnecessarily ugly, and the NFL deserves unnecessarily ugly in this case.

NFL takes the wrong stance again

The Rooney Rule is designed to promote hiring minority members for important team roles, in order to make up for past exclusion and promote future inclusion. It applies to personnel chiefs and also head coaches.

You can argue ad infinitum about DEI hirings and practices. Maybe it's necessary. Maybe it's against the Constitution. What can't be argued is the virtue of the intent.

That's not the real problem. The point is the league has designed this as its practice to put itself on what IT believes is moral high ground, and then is not even sticking to its own belief system. In fact, the league opted to willfully avoid its own rule to promote diversity and fairness and championed exclusivity when given an opportunity to do otherwise by the Bears' appeal.

In that case, why should anyone take anything the league says it believes as serious?

They'd be more proper simply by having no such rule and keeping silent on the whole topic because they wouldn't appear so deceitful. Concluding the entire topic with a Friday news dump through their own "reporter" with NFL Network made it all even sleazier.

The bottom line

The Falcons come out of this as winners because they get as their GM an executive brought up through the ranks in good organizations, in Baltimore and Philadelphia, before being given the chance to prove himself in Chicago at a higher level. He succeeded and blossomed there.

As for the Bears, their victory is even more noteworthy. They rise well above the two draft picks they would have received. The Bears did something they believe in even without a reward and stand by it.

"We identified diverse talent, we recruited him, we created a position for him," McCaskey had said at the owners meetings about Cunningham. "We allowed him access to the general manager role to work hand in hand with (GM) Ryan Poles. We allowed him to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes. We gave him supervisory duties.

"We gave him training. We made him ready to be a GM in the NFL, and he's getting his opportunity and we're thrilled for him."

It is, as McCaskey pointed out, what the Bears normally practice regardless of the doggy biscuits the NFL gives out under the Rooney Rule to everyone except the Bears.

Something Cunningham said at the owners meetings indicates his time with the Bears really did rub off on him in the right way.

“Just from my position, especially being a Black man, there’s still work to be done,” Cunningham told The Associated Press at the league meetings. “Now that I’m in this position and have this platform, I’m going to be intentional about what we do from a grassroots effort to a director level.

“I do think it’s important to give people of all races and sexes a chance to be in a position to further their career.”

He sure sounded like the top football executive even if the league says he isn't.

Meanwhile, the Bears now can take their draft picks at Nos. 25, 57, 60, 89, 129, 238, and 240, hold their heads high after seeing what Cunningham has become, and know they helped him get to this place. This was noble and proper.

They stand far above where the NFL is hiding, down there with its fake belief system and news dumps inside of a skanky little loophole.

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Gene Chamberlain
GENE CHAMBERLAIN

Gene Chamberlain has covered the Chicago Bears full time as a beat writer since 1994 and prior to this on a part-time basis for 10 years. He covered the Bears as a beat writer for Suburban Chicago Newspapers, the Daily Southtown, Copley News Service and has been a contributor for the Daily Herald, the Associated Press, Bear Report, CBS Sports.com and The Sporting News. He also has worked a prep sports writer for Tribune Newspapers and Sun-Times newspapers.

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