Lions Owner William Clay Ford AP Photo/Paul Sancya
When dealing with the issue of sports business it is often hard to separate my feelings as a fan, from what makes good business sense. First and foremost I am a sports fan, especially when we are dealing with my hometown Detroit teams. However though my years of Business schooling and real world business work experience I can separate why certain things are done that don’t make any sense to the fans, but when we look at the books seem too.
Now I want to use that filter to analyze one of the most controversial topics in Detroit. No I am not talking about the Detroit City Council, or ex Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, but the rein of terrorDetroit Lions fans have come to call the Matt Millen regime.
Millen ran the club for eight years starting in 2000 when the team still played their home games at the Pontiac Silverdome. Forbes listed their net worth that year at 328 million dollars.
When Millen was fired during the 2008 season the Lions net worth had grown to 917 million dollars. For the fans that was eight years filled with 97 loses, and yet the club was worth more then double then when Millen was first hired.
If we look at this in this light one can understand why Lions’ owner William Clay Ford seemed oblivious to the state of his product on the field. An NFL franchise is essentially a license to print money and there seems to be little correlation between how a teams win and loss record equates to how healthy the bottom line is.
Over the first five years of the Millen regime the Lions compiled a record of 25-55, and yet Forbes is reporting that the team was profitable during those five years. I have often made the argument that Mr. Ford’s mistake was not hiring Millen a move that never seemed to work out, but the mistake came in giving this man a contract extension.
However if we look at he business side of it, the team was making money why should Ford rock the boat when the man he put in charge is turning a profit?
Granted there are many other factors that we should be looking at here. After two of these seasons the Lions moved from the aging Pontiac Silverdome, a place where Detroit fans never truly liked, into a state of the art facility located in the heart of downtown Detroit.
We must now assume that the profitability the Lions enjoyed during this time was more attributable to them being in a new home, rather then the product they put out on the field. This is where we get back into the fandom side of the argument. The Lions were not doing well and in the first two seasons in Ford Field they only one eight games, which is barely good enough for one season much less two.
This is where we find a fundamental flaw in the NFL system. Since it equally distributes its TV earnings among all 32 teams, and those monies cover the cost of operating a franchise, there is little incentive to build up a powerhouse team. Lazy owners, like Mr. Ford, can simply get by doing little more then the minimum.
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