Mike Celizic

I really don’t care about the politics of a sports owner. If someone has the money to buy a franchise, who am I to say that person can’t do it? I can’t decide who can buy a television, why should I have a say in who buys a sports team?

So when Rush Limbaugh showed up as part of a group trying to buy the St. Louis Rams, my reaction was that I didn’t think he’d be a very good owner — pompous blowhards never are, which is why I wouldn’t buy one myself. But I couldn’t think of a good reason to keep him out of the NFL owners’ club. When you take a look at the eccentricities of other owners, it’s hard to pick on Limbaugh as being somehow too radical to own a team.

Fortunately for Rams fans — all six of them — the NFL rose up in high dudgeon and declared Limbaugh prospective owner non grata. He went out with his usual display of class, which is to say he whined about various people who were out to get him for no good reason that he could discern.

Whether he’s right or not doesn’t matter. The good news is he’s not going to be an owner, which means there’s a chance the Rams may be competitive again. Had he been around to pace the sideline and tell the professionals how to run things, Rams fans would have found themselves wishing they had a sane owner like Dan Snyder.

But in ensuring that Limbaugh would not infest their ownership cabal, the NFL underlined a problem in the process it uses to approve owners. The league is quick to ban people it disagrees with, but it’s utterly impotent when it comes to keeping out people who will be death to franchises.

It’s not just the NFL. Every sports league is infested with owners who will never win a bingo game let alone a league title. Some of them were easy to spot from a mile away, but they were allowed to buy in anyway because their politics or opinions didn’t offend anyone.

As fellow NBCSports.com contributor Shaun Powell points out, teams can fire bad managers and trade or cut bad players, but a bad owner is a gift that just keeps on giving. Unless you catch a break and he goes bankrupt, you’re stuck with the bum forever.

The problem with that is there's no person more vital to the success of a team than the owner or owners. The Red Sox never won anything as long as the Yawkeys owned them. Since John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino took over, there’s no more curse, there are fresh championship banners hanging from venerable Fenway, and Red Sox Nation has almost forgotten how miserable they were for 86 years.

The Yankees aren’t great because they have a lot of money. They’re great because the Steinbrenners, despite a flaw or two, will do whatever it takes to win, even if that means hiring competent managers and general managers. The Mets have scads of cash, too, but their owners don’t have a clue what to do with it.

No one knows who’s going to be a good owner and who’s going to be a bad one. It’s a crap shoot, much like the annual talent draft. When George Steinbrenner came in, it was a coin toss as to whether he was going to be a great owner or a dismal failure. All Major League Baseball knew was that he wasn’t CBS, which had ridden the team into the ground.

On the other end of the spectrum you have people like Snyder and Don Sterling, the owner from hell who presides over the abysmal Los Angeles Clippers. Or Al Davis, the former genius who has the Oakland Raiders in a death grip and won’t let go.

These guys couldn’t put together a 10-piece jigsaw puzzle. They need help to make a light bulb work. They go through coaches like Octomom goes through diapers. They can spend a ton of money on big names or no money at all on no-names and they’ll still come through with a losing record.

Nothing any coach or player or GM does is going to make any difference. These guys are just plain failures. You’d think all an owner has to do is hire a good GM, give him free rein with the checkbook and get out of the way. These guys can’t even get that right.

Every one of them will say they burn with passion to win. That may be true. The only trouble is they have less of an idea how to do it than a spider monkey has to do quadratic equations. And what drives a fan nuts is that despite endless and annual proofs of their own incompetence, these losers persist in their belief that they know what they’re doing. The only thing good you can say about any of them is that they’re not Donald Trump. Or Rush Limbaugh.

If you’re a fan of such a team — and there are many of them out there — I offer my bewildered admiration. It takes some outrageous loyalty to stand by a team that’s never going to win as long as its idiot owner refuses to get the heck out of the way. And if you’re a Clippers fan, all I can say is, “Why?” Are you also the sort of person who gets root canals on healthy teeth? Or do you think there is virtue in giving your money to someone who is never going to know what to do with it?

In a perfect world, owners would serve at the pleasure of their leagues. Keep losing for a decade or so, and the league would have the right to demand a lousy owner sell his or her share and let somebody else take a shot at it. There’s no reason why performance clauses couldn’t be written into the contracts signed with the league. Owners and leagues demand that cities and taxpayers pony up for new palaces for these guys to play in. Why can’t leagues demand that owners deliver a competent product?

There shouldn’t be anybody who can’t be fired, not in sports, the last true meritocracy we have. That should go for incompetent owners, too.

Also on NBCSports.com Rosenthal: Steelers’ struggles could sink their playoff hopes Circling the Bases: Halladay to Cubs? That’s unlikely College Football Talk: Weis to resign? That’s ‘not happening’ Opinion: So far, Nowitzki is NBA’s MVP  |  Fan Ranker Twitter: Follow us @nbc_sports

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