Roger Goodell was the stooge the NFL needed
Everything there is to know about Roger Goodell’s tenure as NFL commissioner during the last decade can be summed up in two words: cold pizza.
It’s from an anecdote published in The Wall Street Journal, and it involves a late-night meeting at NFL headquarters in September 2014, right around the time Goodell was getting drop-kicked from every angle for his botched handling of the Ray Rice situation.
The Rice case was maybe five dozen NFL scandals ago, but let’s quickly unpack it for the purposes of making a point: Rice was caught on video dragging the body of his then-girlfriend and current wife, Janay, from the elevator of a casino. Goodell - whose reign by then had been marked by his willingness, perhaps eagerness, to levy heavy-handed discipline against NFL players - suspended Rice for two games. TMZ then published a second video that showed Rice in fact punched her in the elevator. Goodell was thus caught flat-footed: Why didn’t he know about the existence of the second video? Or, worse yet, had he known and issued such a lenient penalty anyway?
Goodell and the league were in full damage-control mode. As the Journal reported, he had assembled his staff at HQ on that late night to figure out what to do. Pizza was ordered. But it sat there. "No slice was taken until Mr. Goodell ate," per the Journal. "He never did, and the slices turned cold in the box."
Goodness, that’s perfect. That cold pizza represents Goodell’s desire to show the world he’s in control, on behalf of all that is good and righteous and noble - even if the result is another ham-fisted public relations fiasco, of which the NFL has endured too many to count this decade. And yet: fan interest in the league remains sky high, with annual revenues up to an estimated $16 billion - nearly double what they were toward the start of the decade. That cold pizza, it turns out, also represents how ephemeral many of the NFL’s numerous publicity crises have proved to be. Cold pizza can always be thrown away.
Outwardly, Goodell might look like he spent the decade stepping on rakes. But behind the scenes, he succeeded at the one thing that matters most to the people who pay him upwards of $40 million per year to serve as their human shield: he’s helping the owners make gobs and gobs of money.
The game itself is what sustains things. The NFL long ago surpassed baseball as America’s most popular sport, but the fervor of that fandom is a genuine phenomenon: "Game of Thrones" might have been the most-watched television series in 2018 in the 18-49 demographic, but Nos. 2, 3, and 4 on that list were NFL-related programming. The 50 most-watched sporting events of 2018 - an Olympic year - included 40 NFL telecasts. And of the top 100 most-watched shows of 2018, a whopping 64 belonged to the NFL.
That gargantuan cultural reach accounts for the league’s ability to print money, but it has also created a kind of hubris, as embodied by Goodell and his approach to many of the league’s off-field concerns. In his 2018 book, "Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times," which provides a Rome-before-the-fall look at the league’s inner workings, Mark Leibovich put it this way:
Goodell is always touting the league's virtues as a moral force. "The game has so many elements I think our country admires and respects," Goodell told (Leibovich). Football provides a belief system at a time when so many community, religious, and family institutions is weakening. "It unites people," Goodell continued. "It gives people a chance to sort of come together and enjoy people around this country today."
That's what's called being high on your own supply. It's also integral to Goodell's standard marketing pitch. "Football explains America," he once told ESPN's Sal Paolantonio, in a book Paolantonio titled - I kid you not - "How Football Explains America." Goodell expanded on the idea by telling Paolantonio that "the game is about teamwork and camaraderie, competition and passion, strategy and emotion. You can look at football and see the heart of America."
Never mind that every sentiment expressed there can easily be applied to just about any sport, if not any number of non-sports activities. Part of Goodell's job is to speak the language of bland corporatism. What sets his wholesome sales pitch apart is this framing of the game as some universal paragon of virtue.
Despite all of Goodell’s airy talk about unity, the NFL has for years worked aggressively to limit its financial exposure to brain-damaged former players with whom it reached a settlement, thus creating additional headaches for those former players and their families. That settlement resulted from litigation that sprang from the years the league spent manipulating the science of head trauma.
Goodell didn’t start this, obviously, but he did get dragged on the topic in an appearance before Congress in 2009. He also didn't help himself a few years ago when, in a clumsy attempt to dismiss brain-injury concerns by way of extolling football's grand virtues, he stood up at a Super Bowl week press conference and said, "There is risk in life. There is risk in sitting on the couch."
The NFL this decade instituted a number of rules changes aimed at reducing injuries. On its face, this emphasis on health and safety is a positive development. But the league also can't help but spike the football in its zeal to declare to the world that it prioritizes player safety.
Also, many of the rules changes have often sowed confusion, and their uneven application has frequently made it difficult not to feel like the league was trying to shift the injury responsibility back onto the players - a cynical attempt to deny the game's inherent dangers by implying that peril can be avoided by playing the right way. Score another one for family, for community, and for America.
Still, it's not hard to imagine that a man capable of discussing football as a powerful, unifying force might also believe in the league's (if not his own) infallibility. And it's that gallant vision of the league as a cultural lodestar that's influenced many of Goodell's most bone-headed missteps.
Goodell, 60, is an NFL lifer who famously began his career as an administrative intern at the league office in New York. He got the gig after lobbying for it by writing letters to NFL HQ and to every team. That was in 1982. Other than a year away as an intern with the New York Jets, he’s been with the league office ever since. Goodell worked his way up the ranks and succeeded Paul Tagliabue as commissioner in 2006. "It's the only place," he once said, "I've ever wanted to work."
That lifetime devotion to the brand - or to The Shield, as Goodell might say, a reference to the self-aggrandizing symbolism of the league’s unmistakable logo - has no doubt impressed upon him his unshakeable belief in the NFL's ability to shape the world beyond sports. What was required to accomplish this was the assertion of control.
Control has always been a guiding principle for the NFL. The game itself is physically and emotionally demanding, and its proper execution is dependent upon a top-down structure of obedience. This arrangement has too often granted football's adherents with the license to infuse football with the metaphors of war, which, again, may account for the game's (and Goodell's) outsized view of itself.
Labor relations are always about control, and football's structure of obedience is certainly in evidence there. The NFL was the last of the four major North American sports leagues to grant free agency to its workforce, and even then that outcome was achieved in the courts, after the owners had put literal replacements on the field during one of several players' strikes. The NFL also remains the only major sports league not to guarantee most of its players' contracts. And the current CBA might have locked in labor peace that led to bigger revenues, but it also includes numerous restrictions on player movement - and was only brokered after the owners locked out the players. Again, control.
This is where Goodell enters the picture. The NFL's various collective bargaining agreements with the NFLPA, dating to the first CBA in 1968, have long afforded the commissioner with total disciplinary authority. But Goodell was the first to truly weaponize this power as a means of control.
He brought the hammer down during his first offseason as commissioner, suspending cornerback Adam "Pacman" Jones for an entire season and wide receiver Chris Henry for eight games. He also instituted a stricter personal conduct policy that called for fines or even banishment for repeat offenders, regardless of how any cases might play out in the judicial system. Teams were even threatened with punishment for signing problematic players. To borrow a phrase Goodell is fond of repeating: The Shield must be protected.
That personal conduct policy also included owners, yet it would become hard not to notice they largely escaped punishment for any alleged crimes or off-field misbehavior in the years ahead. Goodell might have had the authority to discipline his 32 bosses, but that never meant he would. Absolute control was meant for the help.
And this absolute control, combined with Goodell's eagerness to wield it, was a recipe for repeated public relations disasters. As the years went on and he was (naturally) confronted with disciplinary cases of greater complexity, Goodell's decision-making began to look arbitrary, if not downright foolish.
In 2011, Terrelle Pryor was suspended by the NCAA for five games but withdrew from Ohio State that summer, before he’d have to sit out. His transgression? Pryor had sold some memorabilia, including his autograph - that is, he sought to cash in on the demand for his own likeness. After the Raiders selected Pryor that August in the supplemental draft, Goodell suspended him from the NFL for five games. It was one more missed game than Ben Roethlisberger served the year before after twice being accused of rape.
When Goodell was confronted with Spygate and Bountygate, he aimed his disciplinary powers toward coaches, teams, and even front-office personnel. But he still couldn't resist issuing lengthy suspensions to four Saints players associated with Bountygate - a decision that was overturned on appeal by none other than Tagliabue.
Two years later, there would be the embarrassment of the Rice case, which mushroomed in part because Goodell had fostered the expectation that he would Protect The Shield at all costs. In the wake of an Associated Press report that a league staffer received a copy of the second Rice video before it became public, the league even hired former FBI director Robert Mueller to conduct an investigation. Mueller, who would later investigate the damn president of the United States, found no evidence that anyone in the league office was aware of or had seen the footage. But rather than chasten Goodell, those months of bad headlines only seemed to embolden him to do even more.
He ramped up the NFL's own in-house investigative unit, transforming a professional sports league into a freestanding extrajudicial system in an effort to burnish the league's ability to do something about an intractable societal problem like violence against women. Predictably, here again more trouble would ensue, as the league's use of massive resources and random deployment of punishments became too easy to recognize. Which is what happens when discipline as a means of control is less a matter of justice than public relations. Just remember who got punished and who didn't.
Goodell again went after the Patriots, this time for allegedly taking a small amount of air out of footballs in a game they won by 38 points. It proved to be another case that would drag on for months. It would likewise involve a fancy investigative report, and it would wind up in a federal appeals court before the punishment was upheld - including a four-game suspension for Tom Brady, one of the sport's biggest stars. To assert control, Goodell seemed intent on using his hammer in the pursuit of nails. But only to a point.
A big part of Goodell's job is managing the interests and egos of the 32 billionaire owners to whom he answers. Therefore his disciplinary hammer is typically not for them. In 2013, Vikings owner Zygi Wilf was found liable for violating New Jersey state racketeering laws and ordered to pay $84.5 million in damages (later reduced to $32 million on appeal) for stealing money from former business partners. A year later, a company owned by Browns owner Jimmy Haslam was fined $92.5 million for defrauding customers. Yet neither Wilf nor Haslam was punished by the NFL.
At the same time, the league threw its vast investigative apparatus after a domestic assault allegation involving placekicker Josh Brown - and somehow failed to find documentation that was readily available until after the media did. The NFL's efforts also did more to re-victimize Brown's wife Molly than to accomplish anything worthwhile. Which, again, is what happens when PR concerns trump all other interests.
Goodell's disciplinary zeal finally got him in the crosshairs for real when he suspended Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott for six games in the summer of 2017. The Elliott case, which involved allegations of domestic abuse, again was grist for the press, in no small part because the NFLPA and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones formed an awkward alignment to push back against the punishment on process terms. More important to Goodell's standing, however, was the wrath he endured from Jones, who was left to suffer the on-field consequences because of the monster he and the other owners had created.
In November of that year, ESPN reporters Don Van Natta Jr., and Seth Wickersham published a lengthy backstory about all the palace intrigue, which included Jones' obsessive efforts to scuttle Goodell's next contract as retribution. In the end, it was Jones who went too far in asserting himself in the eyes of the other owners, and Goodell got his deal. It wasn't hard to see where the league's priorities truly lie.
Amid all this drama, the NFL's financial position continued to grow, as did the valuations of all 32 franchises. The current CBA that Goodell helped broker, with its 10-year length, is the engine that has powered the NFL's enormous revenue spike. It allowed the league to lock in lengthy, lucrative network television contracts; windfalls that began in 2013 have allowed the salary cap - which is pegged to revenues - to skyrocket to an anticipated $200 million or so in 2020, a 63% jump from the $123 million when they began.
On Goodell's watch, the NFL has become a year-round leviathan that has taken full advantage of the internet's and social media's appetite for constant content. The demand for offseason free agency and draft speculation can sometimes seem to overwhelm the in-season action on the field. If it's too cynical to suggest that the league's raft of bad publicity in recent years was part of some hidden, next-level strategy - "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about," as Oscar Wilde once wrote - it's at least obvious that all that negativity hasn't affected the league's bottom line.
As Van Natta and Wickersham reported, Goodell's oversight during a period of such gargantuan growth has granted him the leverage to take certain risks. He refused to back the owners' decision to mandate that players stand for the national anthem - a unilateral policy that backfired and died before it was implemented - and he reportedly worked to facilitate last month's doomed workout for Colin Kaepernick, the first player to call attention to racial injustice by protesting during the anthem.
Goodell did have an ulterior motive for this defiance, of course. He had spent the nearly three years since Kaepernick last played insisting that Kaepernick was not being blackballed, even as the league settled his collusion claim. Goodell also embraced - and even enlisted Jay-Z as a front-man - a social justice campaign started by a splinter group of players in the aftermath of Kaepernick’s protest. That effort, however, deftly avoids any mention of police brutality or protests. It also has the self-fulfilling mission of co-opting the actual cause, using it instead as just another marketing tool for the league.
Goodell has kept a low profile of late, rarely attending games or making public appearances beyond press availabilities at league meetings. Which, for the league, is likely for the best. He's typically booed at the draft each year, and there's only so much flak he ought to take, even if it's part of the job description.
What Goodell is doing is actively negotiating a new CBA with the players' union; the current deal expires in March 2021. All reports indicate those talks are far less acrimonious than the last time around, even if the two sides still aren't close to an agreement.
There's an incentive for Goodell to play nice: An extension of labor peace would give the league more leverage for the next round of television deals. Ad buys are getting pricier, but there's also internet streaming and gambling to add to the revenue pie. Goodell's own contract runs through 2024, but there's speculation about whether he'll stick around after the CBA is completed. By then, it'll be up to him. Whatever he decides, it may not matter. To the owners, his primary duties will have been finished. The cold pizza will have been thrown away.
Dom Cosentino is a senior features writer for theScore.