GOODELL SOMEHOW SURVIVES
Despite NFL commissioner’s bungling of Elliott case, he’s not about to lose his job
These are troubled, divisive times, 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 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 could 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 insiders reporting it was expected to be finalized soon, when it emerged Jerry Jones was struck by the realization that perhaps the 32 league owners had not received a lot of value for their money from Goodell.
Yet ESPN reported Wednesday night the NFL owners 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, Jerry Jones raised his concerns.
Jones, 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 then-girlfriend in the summer of 2016, before his rookie season.
As with seemingly every highprofile discipline case the commissioner handles, it has blown up spectacularly in his face. A judge called the 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. What is unusual is there was a brief period where it looked like he 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 would receive an automatic sixgame 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 legal fighting has since revealed Goodell ignored the advice of his lead investigator and torqued the process against Elliott. To be clear, Elliott may 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’re 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 hear the appeal — great sentence, judge! — and to then 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. (I would add Goodell has also taken a lot of bullets on the concussion file.)
The TV money would have come, though, regardless of who was in the commissioner’s office. 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 second-year players for salary-cap purposes, which goes some way to explaining why there is so much bad football every Sunday. (And especially on Thursdays, another Goodell-era 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 discovered 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. A contract extension for Goodell seems to prove that point — again.