There are a number of good reasons why you might want to ask for Bill Polian’s opinion on football-related matters, and one overarching bad one. The good ones are compelling, pointing back towards Polian’s long and distinguished career as a NFL executive. He built five Super Bowl teams for three organizations, won the the league’s Executive of the Year Award six times, and was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2015. If you have a question about the sport, you might as well ask Bill Polian to answer it. Which leads us to the bad reason, the one that supersedes all those good ones: if you ask Bill Polian that question, he’s probably going to answer it.
Say, for instance, you are a weekly radio show focusing on discussion about the Pro Football Hall of Fame; you are called The Talk Of Fame Network, and you are a real thing that exists. The purpose of your show, which runs every week in various markets in 34 states, is to talk about the Pro Football Hall of Fame; you do this every week, the “you” in this case being three veteran football writers and well-known NFL types like Polian. One thing you should not do, as a host of this show, is wonder whether there are 52 weeks worth of conversations per year about the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which is a thing that even ardent football fans care about for maybe 90 minutes each year. You start asking those questions of yourself, and you will have to answer those questions. Better to ask Charles Haley, for instance, if he thinks Tom Brady’s Super Bowl wins are tainted by allegations of cheating. (He does.) Focus on the work. Focus on the questions.
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So you ask Bill Polian, your guest, if he would choose Terrell Owens and Randy Moss for induction. There’s no reason he’d have to pick just one, as both will be on the ballot next year, and voters—all three of the Talk of Fame Network’s hosts are Hall of Fame voters—could pick both if they wanted. But ask the question. Polian could pick one, or both, or neither.
“I take neither,” Polian said. “First of all, here’s my position: (I want players who) contribute both individually and to the team. T.O.’s situation, T.O.’s temperament, his ability to contribute to the team was well known up front. He was going to be a problem. We did not want to deal with problem children. Others may. We didn’t. That’s number one. Number two, every year in Indianapolis we said the following: ‘The price of admission is 100 percent effort all the time in everything we do.’ Well, how can we take Randy Moss when we make that statement? It’s that simple.”
Ask Polian a follow-up question. Will these two receivers, who are both most measures the two best pass-catchers of their era, get into the Hall of Fame eventually?
“I think they will,” Polian says. “Unfortunately, in my view … Because whether you like it or not. these ‘electoral campaigns’ have a way of swinging people. In my view, and I said this publicly last year, I think the Hall of Fames are for people who make their teams better, not who detract from them. Now, T.O. was a bigger detractor over his career than Moss, but you certainly wouldn’t call (Moss’ attitude) any harbinger or example of what you want in a football player other than when he decided to play. ‘I play when I play.’ I don’t buy it.”
There is time remaining. Ask Polian more questions. Would he vote for Isaac Bruce, a very good player who is also on the Hall of Fame ballot and was by every meaningful measure an inferior receiver to both Owens and Moss, over both Owens and Moss?
“Yes,” Polian says. “Of course … What did Owens do that made his teams better? He put up a lot of numbers. Bill (Parcells) said that he was a disruptive force. Jerry (Jones), who’s probably one of the most easy-going people when it comes to disruptive guys, got rid of him. I’ve gotten texts from people in Philadelphia responding to the campaign saying, ‘This guy was a cancer and destroyed our football team.’ How does that square with the Hall of Fame?”
You could ask Bill Polian, too, how he squares all this strident stuff—the character concerns and loose harbingers, the implications and the text messages from Philadelphians—with his own life in football, which was as imperfect as any other. As the GM of the Carolina Panthers, Polian used a first-round draft pick on Rae Carruth, who went to prison for hiring a hit man to murder a woman who was eight months pregnant with his child; the best receiver on the great Indianapolis Colts teams Polian built was Marvin Harrison, who is awfully close to another murder.
You could ask him about this, or you could ask him about the weird “problem children” formulation, the strange and shifting standards, the moralizing and the gratuitousness. Ask him about the uselessness of carving the world up into tiers and binaries, about the fatuity of all these false choices, about how corrosive all this phony outrage is for all involved, how weary it is and how wearying it is. Ask him. You have to ask him. There are hours remaining in the show, and next week’s is already looming, dark and grumbling and vague, out there over the horizon.
