GOODELL MAY NEED A HAIL MARY PASS.
NFL COMMISSIONER REPORTEDLY CLOSE TO NEW CONTRACT DESPITE GRUMBLINGS FROM KEY OWNERS
These are troubled, divisive t i mes, what with the missiles and the hoods and torches and the biblical storms.
So let us join together, then, in the Goodellenfreude.
Roger Goodell, as you have probably heard, is paid vast sums of money — more than US$ 40 million a year — as the NFL commissioner, even though he would have been outperformed in that role by a potted fern.
Think of all the ferns the league’s owners could get for $ 40 million. They would be able to select some truly choice house plants.
But Goodell, as you might not have heard, was trundling along toward a contract extension, with the ubiquitous NFL i nsiders reporting it was expected to be finalized soon, when it emerged that Jerry Jones was struck by the realization that perhaps the 32 league owners had not received a lot of value for money from Goodell.
But ESPN reported Wednesday night the NFL owners had resolved the issues and cited a source familiar with the negotiations as saying the deal is “getting papered right now.” ESPN said the source said the extension could be finalized in days or maybe weeks.
And yes, the source said, Jones raised his concerns.
The Dallas Cowboys owner makes for a much better cartoon villain than he does a hero, but we will take it. The enemy of my enemy, etc.
Jones, the owner of the biggest, wealthiest team in the NFL and thus one of its most powerful figures, was and still is apparently aggrieved by Goodell’s handling of the six- game suspension levied on Dallas running back Ezekiel Elliott for allegedly assaulting a thengirlfriend in the summer of 2016 before his rookie season. As with seemingly every high- profile discipline case the commissioner handles, it has blown up spectacularly in his face. A judge called the entire process “fundamentally unfair” to Elliott, granted the player an injunction and it now looks like it will take until next season before any punishment is served, if at all.
That the commissioner has botched the case is unsurprising, given his track record, but what is unusual is there was a brief period when it looked like he had handled this correctly. Acting in response to previous discipline embarrassments, this time the league conducted a lengthy investigation of its own — Elliott was never criminally charged — and determined he caused injuries to the young woman and so would receive an automatic six-game ban, per league policy. That sounded reasonable enough: either a league should only discipline players who have been found guilty of a crime or if it is going to conduct its own investigation, it has to do it thoroughly.
Somewhere in the middle, a half- assed cursory investigation and a light punishment (hello, Ray Rice) is the worst of options.
The l egal fighting has since revealed Goodell ignored t he advice of his own lead investigator and torqued the process against Elliott. To be clear, he may well deserve a long suspension, but it looks like the league decided it wanted to come down hard and then presented only the evidence in support of that outcome. When you are developing your own quasi- judicial system, best not model it after the Soviets.
This has been Goodell’s pattern, to hoard all the power to impose justice, to both issue the sentence and then to hear the appeal and then to watch as the case is torn to pieces. In recent years, he has run afoul of Robert Kraft in New England and now Jones and if you were drawing up a list of owners who could pull off a coup, those two would be near the top.
But with a contract extension on the way, Goodell will stay in place.
Goodell’s survival over the years is usually attributed to two things: the vast money hose of the NFL’s TV contracts, which keeps owners fat and happy, and the CBA with the players, which does the same thing.
The TV money would have come, though, regardless of who was in the commissioner’s office, as indeed it has exploded across all sports in recent years. And on the CBA, signed in 2011, it dramatically cut the amount spent on rookies, which meant teams could avoid the $ 50- million first- round bust. But that system has produced a league in which more teams use cheap first- and secondyear players for salary cap purposes, which goes some way to explaining why there is so much bad football every Sunday. ( And especially Thursdays, another Goodellera innovation that produces awful games, while also completely exposing as hollow anything the commissioner might say about the importance of player safety.)
Oh yes, and three teams have in recent months given the metaphorical finger to their fans and decided to move to new cities. Los Angeles now has two of those teams and doesn’t appear to want either of them. It is something to watch a huge city react with utter indifference to the Rams and Chargers, evidence the mighty NFL, which could long do whatever it wanted, has now discovered that it cannot just come to town and expect people to swoon.
That arrogance is the hallmark of the Goodell years. In so many ways, the NFL says and does things without fear of impunity, because it assumes it will always win in the end. A contract extension for Goodell seems to prove that point — again.