New season offers Roger Goodell fresh start,
Like coach on hot seat, commissioner must make most of 2015’s fresh start
There’s nothing like a clean slate. It’s a new season, with 32 undefeated teams in the NFL draped in optimism that is yet to be sullied by game results.
Roger Goodell can use this fresh start, too.
Sure, the string of courtroom losses to players in recent years remains on the books.
But after the most tumultuous season in NFL history was finally capped last week with the ruling that wiped out Tom Brady’s fourgame suspension from the Deflategate saga (pending appeal), the commissioner and his supporting cast need a do-over more than any NFL franchise.
It’s time for Goodell to restore credibility to the league office.
That was the huge takeaway from Deflategate, which threatened to leave the reigning Super Bowl MVP suspended from starting the season until Judge Richard M. Berman blew more holes into the NFL’s process for discipline.
Then again, that was a takeaway last year from the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson matters and from 2012 with the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal.
That’s not to say Goodell did not need to act forcefully in any of the cases. He took the brunt of the criticism for mishandling the discipline on Rice and then took it on the chin again for going overboard and for the lack of a defined process as the caseload expanded.
As for Deflategate, the league needed to address the Patriots — amid continued suspicion from other teams that, extending to Spygate, they cross the line to gain a competitive edge — and protect the integrity of the game.
That should have been the driving force. If the public loses faith that the games are contested fairly (yes, ask the Detroit Lions about the bogus non-calls at the end of the playoff game at the Dallas Cowboys), then that threatens the product at the core.
The NFL should never be compared to the WWE, which is why cases such as Deflategate must be pursued. To some degree. It just didn’t need to become a federal case that further tainted the league’s battered image. And in pursuing justice, it helps to seal the deal with hard evidence.
Goodell and the NFL have been taken to school with one lesson after another.
While the NFL took proper steps in enlisting outside experts as it addressed the crisis last season, even that effort made you wonder.
Take the effort to address do- mestic violence issues. In a league in which more than 70% of players are African American, the NFL established a four-woman review panel last year without including an African-American woman.
The league instituted a tougher player-conduct policy yet somehow, amid a cold war, could not get in step with the players union for crafting it. The same union that keeps taking it to court.
Will they ever get it right? And how?
The reaction from Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank last week after Brady’s ban was vacated provided another essential clue to the level of concern among owners who have stood behind Goodell through so much turbulence.
“Change may be appropriate,” Blank told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Blank wasn’t calling for Goodell’s job. Remember, Goodell has represented the interests of Blank and other owners with aplomb on other fronts, such as the 10-year collective bargaining agreement that many industry observers contend significantly tilted the economics of the $11 billion-a-year industry toward the owners while taking away gains by players from the previous labor deal.
Instead, Blank, who chairs the three-owner compensation committee that recommends the level of Goodell’s salary and annual bonuses, is seemingly fed up with a disciplinary process that repeatedly has led to the league defending itself — and taking its lumps — in court.
This is hardly the first time Blank has wondered whether an overhaul is needed.
During the height of crisis last fall, Blank told me it was ownership that ultimately would have to come to grips with the matter of whether Goodell’s role in the process needed to be changed.
The momentum for that has never seemed stronger.
Patriots President Jonathan Kraft, biased or not, recently told Boston radio station 98.5 The Hub that the endgame needs to ensure “that the spotlight and the attention doesn’t all have to fall on Park Avenue.”
The younger Kraft was much more diplomatic than his father in expressing the notion of taking Goodell out of the line of fire.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft provided one of the most riveting time-capsule sound bites from Deflategate when he declared at the start of training camp, “I was wrong to put my faith in the league.”
Yet the owners have done just that in empowering Goodell, who takes even more heat than he deserves because he represents the owners and deflects criticism that should extend to the ownership.
In any event, it’s ironic that the Patriots provide a face for the resistance. In 2011, Robert Kraft was hailed as a hero by both sides for his crucial role in settling the lockout and striking the labor deal that again ensured Goodell’s power for meting discipline.
Now, short of reopening the labor deal, perhaps Kraft can help build a new bridge between the NFL and the players union as they revamp the disciplinary process. He can try to fix what has been broken in his relationship with Goodell, too.
It’s too bad that respect for the commissioner’s office has deteriorated to the point where the procedural overhaul can’t wait until the next round of labor talks.
Goodell, though, needs to look in the mirror — and at whichever advisers nudged him along — to ascertain how it has come to this.
Commissioners, not only in the NFL but also in pro sports in general, have historically held broad power that includes the fundamental charge of protecting the integrity of the game.
It’s clear now, as outlined in the Deflategate ruling, that Goodell’s fundamental flaw has been in abusing that power. That won’t cut it anymore. As much as anyone, Goodell should embrace the idea of starting a new season with a clean slate.