"You can't buy a championship"

Goes without saying but bears repeating

This morning on the Sirius NFL Radio morning show Opening Drive hosts Bob Pappa and Randy Cross were talking to regular caller Bennie from the Bronx, Bennie is very knowledgeable about football overall and is a 49ers fan, he was lamenting the notion that if Eddie DeBartolo was still the team owner Kurt Warner never would have left San Francisco without a contract.

In 1998 Eddie was implicated in the corruption case of former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, governor Edwards had demanded 400 thousand dollars from Eddie to grant Eddie a Louisiana riverboat gambling license. Eddie ultimately pled guilty to failure to report a felony, paid a one million dollar fine and as a result was fined by the NFL and barred by the league from running the 49ers for one year. The next year in 2000 Eddie sold his interest in the team to his sister Mary DeBartolo York and is out of the football business.

Randy Cross, a three time Pro Bowler and three time Super Bowl champion with the 49ers from 1976 to 1988 and former employee of Eddie's, disagreed with Bennie in a deliberately ironic fashion, noting that if Eddie were still in charge of the team there would already have been a franchise quarterback in place and the team would not have been scrambling to rent a gun for a year or two at fifteen million per.

Bob, Randy and Bennie then went on to discuss Eddie's free spending ways and then Bob and Randy compared the old way of spending in San Francisco (and in the league in general before a salary cap) to Redskins owner Dan Snyder's profligate ways, comparing Dan to a bank with bad habits and in need of a bailout, and of course they referenced Washington's tendency to make the biggest free agency splash every couple of years, have a look at 2000, 2003, 2004 and 2006.

After some good crosstalk Randy came to the point every football knows and every Redskins fan must live with:

You cannot buy a championship. You can buy players and you can buy talent. But championships are not for sale.



Redskins owner Dan Snyder: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP photo from here.