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What should the NFL do?
Laura Okmin: Let's talk about what's going on right now with the NFL and where we stand in regards to Sunday's games. Peter King: At this point the NFL is meeting at this hour and discussing all the alternatives about whether they should play this weekend. On the plus side is the fact that I think that the NFL has historically mirrored America and wants to try to return to normalcy as much as possible. On the minus side of playing, I think, is playing games in the shadow ... I mean one of their big games would be the Giants and the Packers and that would be literally in the shadow of where the World Trade Center used to be. So I think that right now they're trying to make those decisions. I think one of the key things will be: Will the Bush administration, as the Kennedy administration did through Pierre Salinger in 1963, tell the NFL to play the games? If the Bush administration tells Paul Tagliabue to play, even though it would be an unpopular decision, I believe that they would play the games. Okmin: Do you think that's something maybe he is hoping happens, that the NFL doesn't have to make the decision on its own? That if Bush or the government gets involved, of course, they will do what the government asks them to, most likely? King: I think that Paul Tagliabue has never been afraid to make a difficult decision. He's made a bunch of them. He's been at times a very unpopular commissioner, so I think that if he has to make a decision that will be deemed "very unpopular" in the public eye, he'll make it. The one other thing is this has to be a decision, that to me, if George Bush, no matter what people think of his politics or whatever, if George Bush and his administration tell the NFL that they want football games to be played Sunday, I think it should be a total non-partisan issue and I think everybody should basically say, "OK, we're playing the games." Okmin: What do you think the sentiment is? In particular, let's talk about the Giants game at home. Would it be the best medicine? King: I talked to one scout last night, not for a New York team but who said, "We would be insane to play the games this weekend. Nobody in our office is thinking about football right now." And I said, "Well there's going to be a lot of sentiment that way and then there's going to be a lot of sentiment the other way. If you don't play, then what you've done, basically, is you've said to the people who want to totally disrupt your society: You win." I'm not trying to be any kind of Ted Koppel here because I don't know anything about the relative political merits of this situation, but I do know this: The [key] part of terrorism is that people who do terrorist acts want to disrupt your society. And to me, a fall Sunday without football is a gigantic disruption to our society. Whatever you think of football, whether you think it's important or unimportant, there's probably about 60 or 70 million people in the United States who every Sunday in September through December, live for the NFL. Whether they're gamblers. Whether they're fans. Whether they're players. Whether they're connected with teams. So if these games are canceled, particularly this New York situation is going to be very interesting. It's a torturous decision. Do you play a game 12 miles as the crow flies from the site of where this happened? Or maybe do you think about moving the game to Green Bay? I don't have those answers. I just know that these are things that the NFL are discussing right now. Sports Illustrated senior writer Peter King covers the NFL and appears regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated and CNN's NFL Preview.
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