It’s a pick ’em between Goodell and Jones
Life is about choices, and sometimes it’s hard to choose. Beer or wine? Steak or pork? The internet or a life spent experiencing the complexity and nuance of the world and the humans who, however imperfect and flawed, are capable of some of the most profound and beautiful things on Earth? Eat a bag of jelly beans or a second bag of jelly beans?
Anyway, in the NFL, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is the most powerful of the league’s 32 plutocrats because he has the most money, the most willpower, and the most money. He is cartoon Texas: extravagant as hell, tasteless as heck, folksy as a three-legged cat in a Mississippi sack race. When he bought a spankin’ new $8-million (U.S.) H145 Airbus helicopter last year, his review of it included the phrase, “You can shoot out of it. You can shoot pigs out of it. You can do a lot of things in this helicopter.”
It was imprecise language — you can eject pigs out of the helicopter, or shoot pigs with a gun from the helicopter? Probably either one, with the right attitude, but in this metaphor NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is now the pig. You would ordinarily say Jerry was trying to knife ol’ Rog in the back, but (1) he appears to be trying to knife him in the front, if anything, and (2) in Texas, they prefer guns to knives. It’s the culture.
This betrayal has been building for a while, but this week The New York Times reported Jerry threatened to sue the league and his fellow owners if they approved Goodell’s contract extension. He has apparently hired movie villain lawyer David Boies, who was recently in the news for being the guy who did a contract between a company called Black Cube and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein to dig up dirt on the women accusing Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault.
Note: It didn’t work. Boy, it’s a bad time to be a terrible man.
Anyway, Jerry threatened to sue the six owners who make up the compensation committee, of which Jerry was an ad hoc member until he threatened to sue them, at which point his status was understandably revoked. Whoops! ESPN’s duo of Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham reported four to five owners are on Jones’s side, and another half-dozen might be convinced, and that Goodell was furious that Jones and other owners were trying to turn his deal into an incentive-based contract.
He’s the commissioner of a league that gives out non-guaranteed con- tracts, by the way. Ha.
Anyway, it’s a tough call: Who do you root for? The owner who is gunning for the commissioner because he suspended the owner’s star running back after an allegation of domestic abuse? The commissioner who has mishandled similar cases so egregiously in the past? The owner who threatened to force his players to stand during the anthem, or the commissioner who is trying to make them stand for the anthem? The owner who screwed Chargers owner Dean Spanos on the L.A. relocation deal, or the commissioner who let him? The one who has been deeply insensitive when it comes to brain injuries for players, or the other one?
Roger Goodell has deserved to be fired quite a few times over the years, but probably not for this. Jerry deserves a comeuppance bigger than his team gratuitously brain-farting in its biggest moment with the predictable spectacle of a Yellowstone geyser. Goodell is probably going to do fine. But what was it Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said about the NFL in 2014? “Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way.”
He didn’t mention helicopters, but . . . hmm.
Last week this space went 7-5-1. The winless season will have to wait. As always, all lines could change.