Mark Cuban is one of the savviest investors around, but even he has his share of misses. A decade ago, Cuban said that the NFL would implode. On Omaha Productions’ Peyton’s Places, the entrepreneur sat down with Peyton Manning to discuss the football business and why he was wrong about his prediction.
Cuban joined Manning at the University of Southern California while Manning pitched Cuban on football inventions that never took off, like the kicking rail, a wooden rail that keeps a kicker’s foot lined up perfectly on the football.
Like the snap-back football — which reminded me of the baseball training tool that you could secure to a pole in the backyard and hit with a bat continuously as long as the contact was perfect line drives that caused the ball attached to a rope to wind up and unwind for the next swing — the tear away jersey, and the helmet phone, the kicker rail was an idea that never gained traction then, and won’t now.
But the conversation was about something other than the inventions that never were as much as it was about Cuban’s new outlook on the game he once predicted would be doomed.
“I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion,” Cuban wrote in a 2014 Facebook post. “I’m just telling you, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And they’re getting hoggy. Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way.
“I’m just telling you, when you’ve got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That’s rule number one of business.”
Cuban’s original comments stemmed from the NFL’s aggressive plan to expand the game beyond Sundays. These days, the NFL makes money faster than the U.S. Mint can print it, and Cuban admitted that his prediction of the NFL’s fate was a bad take in hindsight.
Hey, you can’t win ’em all. Even if you’re one of the savviest business men in America. Manning’s conversation with Cuban on the latest episode of Peyton’s Places airs today on ESPN+.
