Former Chiefs defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham, who now works in the same capacity with the Lions, recently made clear his interest in players whom the Chiefs plan to dump.
Though Cunningham didn’t name names, the message was clear -- he basically was reciting the text from the plaque on the Statue of Liberty to those players who might be jettisoned from Kansas City.
Is it tampering with players currently under contract? Hell yeah.
Is the league going to do anything about it? Apparently, hell no.
According to Tom Kowalski of MLive.com, an NFL spokesman said that Cunningham’s comments “haven’t even registered at a league level.”
They’d register if the Chiefs were to file tampering charges. And the Chiefs should. In fact, we’d bet that some within the organization would like to.
The problem is that such squabbles expose an underbelly of cheating, especially when the team making the claim of tampering possibly has been tampering from time to time on its own. Moreover, given that the NFL currently has managed to maintain a united front in the face of the labor dispute with the union, any fights among franchises would be better avoided until after a new CBA is negotiated.