Even with Mary Kay Cabot having replaced Tony Grossi on the Hall of Fame Selection Committee, Art Modell is still only getting in over a pile of dead bodies

by Cleveland Frowns on February 1, 2012

In the wake of last week’s removal of Tony Grossi from the Plain Dealer’s Browns beat, some folks tried to scare up the boogeyman of Art Modell’s induction into the NFL Hall of Fame. Grossi had been the leading advocate on the Hall’s selection committee for the righteous cause of keeping Modell out, so the line was that the Art Modell induction ceremony that had heretofore only been the subject of our worst nightmares would soon become a reality with Grossi off the beat.

This of course ignored the fact that the selection committee has to have a member from every NFL city, that Grossi would soon be replaced with someone else from Cleveland (as he was today with the PD’s Mary Kay Cabot) and that anyone from Cleveland who isn’t a complete raging sociopath would be just as successful as Grossi was in advocating for such a purely righteous cause.

Of course, anyone who isn’t a complete raging sociopath understands that Modell’s induction would be an(other!) unthinkably brutal blow to millions of Browns fans and everyone else who cares about the basic underpinnings of civilization; Much worse than the greatest hometown basketball free agent of all time deciding to exercise his free agency to leave his championship starved hometown play somewhere else, and also worse than Modell’s decision to leave with the Browns in the first place, because it wouldn’t just represent one man’s decision to exercise his rights at the absurdly grossly disproportionate expense of so many others, but also an affirmation of that decision by a committee of people from all over the nation who were expressly chosen by civilization to perform a fundamental gatekeeping function.

Again, we might be able to start to feel differently if Modell’s supporters could even start to explain why he had no choice but to move the Browns when he did, and relatedly why he couldn’t take the issue to the polls if the politicians were really giving him such a bad deal. But nobody’s ever even started to do that.*

And again, of course life is full of really complicated decisions, especially for folks as rich and powerful as Modell; Of course it’s fine for him to be otherwise recognized as a fine human being; and of course an otherwise fine human being might at certain points have every right to make a complicated decision to rip the heart and soul out of tens of millions of people and an entire region by blowing up a public trust for nothing but his own benefit. He just doesn’t get to be in the Hall of Fame if he does.

Finally, again, however difficult it could be for Modell and his family to be shut out of the Hall, they have some $500 million to help ease the pain, and also a Super Bowl ring.

As much as it all can’t be repeated enough, there’s just no way that Mary Kay Cabot isn’t all over it just as well as Grossi was.

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*Even Modell’s number one advocate, Len Shapiro of the Washington Post, can’t even start to make the case.

**Also don’t forget that Modell actually said at the time of the move that: “All the national furor over this, compared to other teams moving, is something of a reflection of how I marketed the team on a national basis;” And watch this video again, and this one, and especially this one.

Original story: http://www.clevelandfrowns.com/2012/02/even-with-mary-kay-cabot-having-replaced-tony-grossi-on-the-hall-of-fame-selection-committee-art-modell-is-still-only-getting-in-over-a-pile-of-dead-bodies/