The NBA owner who seemed prescient with his prediction that the NFL is getting too big and powerful for its own good isn’t above a little pandering in his home market.
Dallas Maverick owners Mark Cuban predicts the Dallas football team will win the Super Bowl.
“It is going to be the Cowboys versus the Broncos with the Cowboys coming on top 53-51 in the highest scoring Super Bowl ever,” Cuban said recently on Good Morning America, via the Dallas Morning News.
“I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion,” Cuban said in March. “I’m just telling you, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy. Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way.”
Cuban’s words echoed in September, when the NFL was dealing with a spate of scandals that still linger. But the game has since taken center stage, with little or no lasting damage to the national interest in the game.
So maybe this pig can get a lot fatter before it becomes a slaughtered hog. Regardless, the league would be wise to realize that, as some point, the game will be damaged by the unlimited exercise of unilateral power in ways that seem arbitrary, unreasonable, and inconsistent.
And while issues involving the things players do away from the field should never have any real impact on the game, the hog-slaughtering moment would come if the league ever found itself dealing clumsily with a point-shaving scandal or a Tim Donaghy-style mess -- especially in this age of rampant social media.
