Bills, Redskins, Cowboys, Raiders, Cardinals, & Bengals

[dave mcbride]

An interesting fact: six of the league's most dysfunctional franchises - Washington, Dallas, Buffalo, Cincy, Arizona, and Oakland - have owners who basically act as GMs and aren't really professionals. Dallas can sort of get away with it because they make so much money. The Redskins do too, but Jones himself was a decent player in college and at least gets the game. Davis used to get the game, but he appears to be insane -- consumed with anger and vendettas. But the common thread is that all of them refuse to professionalize. The Bills are not a professionally run-organization. Rather, like the others they are a family-run business: an organizational dinosaur in an increasingly sophisticated game and an increasingly complex organizational framework. Owners of successful teams -- Philly, NE, Chicago, Indy, the Giants, the Jets, Miami, Denver, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, to name some -- typically stand to the side and hire professionals to run the show. They don't win every year, but they usually have winning seasons. Teams like the Bills usually have losing seasons, although they occasionally strike gold (Carson Palmer, Gruden in Oakland, the Cardinals last year) for one-two years before reverting to their traditional losing form.