If you want to get truly enraged (and really, who doesn’t?), check out a movie called The Big Short. It tells the story of the 2008 financial crisis, focusing on a handful of people who saw the collapse coming and did everything but send up smoke signals to warn the industry. In fact, Wall Street guru Michael Burry even threw down more than $1 billion of his investors’ money into default credit swaps. After pouring over the numbers, he was so convinced a crash was coming that he bet against the housing market. A few others followed suit, and when bankers were being escorted from their desks in droves, they were cashing in, bigtime.
Here’s the worst part. According to the book on which the movie is based, which was written by Michael Lewis, Dr. Burry offered to share his findings with government and banking officials and explain how he forecasted the collapse. His calls went unreturned.
It validates the fact that when people ask, “why didn’t we see this coming?” there’s usually someone who did. The problem isn’t that no one saw it, but rather that those in charge didn’t want to hear about it.
I thought about Dr. Burry’s smoke signals while reading a preview of the NFL Draft, which starts tonight in Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. If there is any group of individuals who have failed to head warnings, it’s NFL team owners. Time and time again, they’ve focused too much on athletic ability and talent, and not enough on character and work ethic, and it has yielded catastrophic results.
The best (or worst) example? Cleveland Brown ownership, which ignored the many red flags encircling quarterback Johnny Manziel, and decided two years ago to build their team around him. A few weeks ago, he was cut by the team after a short career in which he racked up more endorsement deals than touchdowns. Over the course of his tumultuous run, the attention-craving QB failed to learn the playbook, skipped several team meetings, alienated the entire coaching staff and, at one point, failed to show up on game day (it was later revealed he was partying in Las Vegas rather than standing by his teammates). He fired his mentor and has been dropped by two agents. And now, he faces possible assault charges after an ugly incident with his (now former) girlfriend.
All of this drama around a player that the Browns’ coaching staff didn’t even want, according to a Monday Morning QB report, which claims it was owner Jimmy Haslam who pushed for Manziel. And Haslam was hardly the only cheerleader for the QB, who became something of a media darling while at Texas A&M and garnered quite a bit of support going into the 2014 draft. Skip Bayless, a columnist who cohosts a show on ESPN, famously tweeted this:
The Houston Texans will forever regret it if they do not take Johnny Manziel with the No. 1 overall pick. He will haunt them.
The Texans are not, indeed, haunted by the decision. Although the player they did draft first — linebacker Jadeveon Clowney — has been injury-plagued, he’s coming off a promising rebound season with a team that has playoff expectations. The Browns, meanwhile, are looking for a quarterback. Again.
If only they had listened to scouts like Nolan Nawrocki, who warned teams of Manziel’s “sense of entitlement” and “prima-donna arrogance.” Based on his thorough research, he felt that the young man was “not a leader by example or known to inspire by his words,” and needed to adjust his “hard-partying lifestyle.”
Check, check, and check.
The good news? Some teams have learned from Cleveland’s mistake and are revamping the way they rank prospects. For example, the Arizona Cardinals added a football character grade and an overall character grade to help differentiate those players who have exercised poor judgement but still have potential, from those who have slipped up repeatedly and aren’t prepared to handle the NFL lifestyle.
“Off the field, a lot of these college kids make mistakes. It’s a great balance to understand, ‘OK, he’s made some mistakes, but his football character is tremendous,” said Cardinals Head Coach Bruce Arians. He’s been a hard worker, he’s got great intangibles, he’s a great teammate.’”
There’s a reason Arians’ team is coming off three straight winning seasons. Rather than bury their heads in the sand and ignore the signs of a collapse, they’ve chosen to listen — and make the changes in the right direction.
It’s too bad the big banks couldn’t do the same thing. I wonder if that haunts them?
Share Your Thoughts
You must be logged in to post a comment.