FloridaMan88
01-26-2015, 11:26 AM
A long but very interesting read.
The highlights: Goodell is more of a puppet for Robert Kraft than previously was revealed, Goodell has had a major falling out with Paul Tagliabue who criticizes Goodell in this article and Goodell is losing support among owners now as well.
Link to article: http://www.gq.com/sports/201502/roger-goodell-season-from-hell?currentPage=1
The Season from Hell: Inside Roger Goodell's Ruthless Football Machine
On almost any other morning, Roger Goodell would have welcomed an impromptu chat with Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots. But this was the morning of September 9, and just about the worst time for the commissioner of the National Football League to be interrupted. For the past twenty-four hours, a vast swath of the public had been calling for his head for his handling of perhaps the most explosive crisis the league had ever faced—a crisis largely of the commissioner's own making. The day before, Goodell and the NFL had been badly exposed and embarrassed when TMZ posted security-camera video that showed Baltimore Ravens star Ray Rice coldcocking his fiancée, Janay Palmer, and dragging her unconscious body out of an Atlantic City casino elevator, leaving her on the floor like a tray of picked-over room service. The horrific footage instantly made a mockery of Goodell's initial decision in July to suspend Rice for a mere two games. The commissioner had quickly extended Rice's suspension to "indefinite," but that had done little to quell the outrage over the video—or the widespread disbelief at Goodell's claim that he had never seen it.
Kraft had a request, as he often did. According to a person with knowledge of their conversation, he wanted Goodell to get on-camera with CBS News anchor Norah O'Donnell and deal with the controversy before it spun even further out of control. Earlier that day, Kraft had appeared on CBS This Morning and was questioned by Charlie Rose about Goodell's handling of the Rice situation. It didn't go well. "He had no knowledge of this video," Kraft told Rose stiffly. "Anyone who's second-guessing that doesn't know him." After the interview, the source says, Kraft conferred with his friend Leslie Moonves, the CEO of CBS. The two men spoke often, but this call was urgent: In roughly forty-eight hours, CBS was set to air the first of eight Thursday Night Football games (for which the network reportedly paid about $250 million), and the game featured the Ravens. Kraft and Moonves agreed that Goodell needed to appear on CBS News and answer questions. The questioner, Moonves added, should be a woman.
Goodell rarely went out front to face tough interviews. But Kraft was one of Goodell's closest confidants among the NFL's thirty-two owners, and his fiercest advocate and defender. As a member of the league's compensation committee, Kraft has vigorously defended Goodell's eye-popping $44 million pay package, and in the wake of the TMZ leak, he personally called owners and lobbied them to issue statements backing the commissioner, according to a senior league source. So large is Kraft's sway with Goodell that one veteran NFL executive likes to call him "the assistant commissioner."
And so, several hours after talking with Kraft, Goodell sat down with O'Donnell in a conference room at NFL headquarters in New York.
"Do you wish you had seen this videotape before it was released by TMZ?" O'Donnell asked.
"Absolutely," Goodell said. "When we met with Ray Rice and his representatives, it was ambiguous about what actually happened."
Within days, a lengthy ESPN investigation all but called him a liar. According to the report, not only did Rice tell Goodell exactly what happened inside that elevator, the NFL was also in possession of the Atlantic County indictment, which noted Rice's attempt "to cause significant bodily injury" and "indifference to the value of human life." Most damningly of all, the NFL could have easily acquired a copy of the surveillance video—Rice's legal team had one—but inexplicably, the league made almost no effort to obtain it. If Goodell truly didn't know the full extent of what happened in the elevator, it seemed, it was because he didn't want to know. (On January 8, former FBI director Robert Mueller released his long-anticipated, league-commissioned investigation of the Rice incident; its findings reinforced the perception that Goodell and the NFL simply didn't try very hard to get the video.)
In any other season, Goodell's fumble would have faded from the headlines. The commissioner, after all, had weathered a string of grisly off-field episodes before, from Michael Vick's dogfighting conviction to Jovan Belcher's murder-suicide. But this season from hell was unlike any other. It was a season not just marred by scandal but defined by it. There was the ongoing and seemingly intractable problem of concussions and player safety. There was the Adrian Peterson child-abuse case. There was Ray Rice, of course, plus a flurry of other alleged incidents of domestic violence that led, for the first time, to serious questions about Goodell's job security. (Ten days after his shaky CBS News interview, Goodell held a disastrous press conference in which he parried a barrage of questions such as "Have you considered resigning at any point throughout this?" and "Why do you feel like you should be able to continue in this role?") And just last week, of course, Deflategate completely overshadowed what should have been an uncomplicated celebration of one of the most compelling Super Bowl matchups in recent memory. Taken together, the nonstop drumbeat of bad news added up to a growing sense that Goodell and his owner bosses are tone-deaf to the issues that plague the NFL—and on the wrong side of history to a rising generation that increasingly sees football as too violent, too regressive, and too money-driven to enjoy without feeling more than a little bit turned off by the whole decadent spectacle.
Over the course of this long and brutal season, I spoke to nearly a hundred people, including current and former NFL executives, front-office types, agents, and players. (Goodell's office denied multiple interview requests.) The commissioner emerged as a gifted, ambitious man who possessed precisely the right combination of skills and connections to propel him to the pinnacle of America's most powerful sports league—indeed, one of its most powerful institutions, period.
Far less clear was the answer to this question: Is he the right man to lead the NFL into a future that has never looked scarier?
By one measure—money—Goodell has been the most successful commissioner in the history of the league. Since landing the gig eight years ago, he has made the NFL more powerful than ever. Total league revenues have grown about 65 percent; the value of franchises is at an all-time high. (Goodell has told the owners that he wants to increase revenues to $25 billion over the next dozen years.) Last year, he persuaded the owners to settle the concussion lawsuit with more than 5,000 former players for $675 million. "God knows what the owners thought they were liable for," a veteran league executive told me, suggesting that they were prepared for the possibility that they might have to pay more. "They look at it as a cost per team: So we're capped at what, $25 million each? That deal alone should solidify Goodell's legend." (The deal was so good, in fact, that the judge in the case later ruled that the cap was unfair to players and threw it out.)
"He's had a lot of challenges," says Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, "but I think he's done a good job with a very difficult situation."
Adversaries take a less charitable view. Eric Winston, an offensive tackle for the Bengals and president of the NFL Players Association, says the NFL is simply too popular to screw up, and that its recent success has come in spite of Goodell's leadership, not because of it: "You could be the worst bartender at spring break, but you'd still be killing it."
In Goodell's defense, his job is an infinitely complex one. The commissioner of a pro sports league must be CEO of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, fan ambassador, and player disciplinarian, all while serving at the pleasure of owners who elected him to maximize their profits. "Commissioners work for owners, and that shouldn't come as a shock to fans because it doesn't come as a shock to the players," DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, told me. "We are asked to be partners when it is convenient and—more frequently—told what to do when it is not. Owners ignored players when our union was founded, and our history has been one of forcing them to recognize players' rights. That paradigm will never stop."
And yet even some owners have been frustrated by aspects of Goodell's tenure. Bob McNair, who owns the Houston Texans and is a Goodell supporter, told me that when Saints owner Tom Benson resigned from three league committees in 2013, Goodell's pay package and his handling of the Saints' Bountygate scandal were two reasons. "Tom's a green-eyeshade accountant of many years," McNair said. "He's just not happy about what happened." (Through a spokesman, Benson denies this.) It's also an open secret in league circles that some owners, especially Woody Johnson of the Jets, resent the preferential treatment Goodell is perceived to extend to his inner circle. (As the football world waits for the commissioner's decision on whether to punish the Patriots for Deflategate, many are wondering how his relationship with Kraft will affect Goodell's ruling.)
And then there is Goodell's most fundamental challenge of all: the long-term prospects for the NFL in an increasingly anti-football world. From 2010 to 2013, the league's under-50 audience declined 10 percent; this season, The Walking Dead repeatedly trounced the NFL on Sunday night. In a recent Bloomberg Politics poll, fully half of Americans said they wouldn't let their sons play football (in similar polls, the numbers skewed even higher in left-leaning demographics), and only 17 percent said they believed the game will grow in popularity over the next twenty years. Could football, an institution as American as Thanksgiving, wind up just another wedge issue in the country's red-blue divide? The new NASCAR? Fred Nance, an adviser to the Cleveland Browns and a former candidate for NFL commissioner, puts it like this: "A cultural IED is exploding in the middle of the business of the NFL."
Inside NFL headquarters on Park Avenue, a sense of siege fills the air. League officials feel victimized by a phalanx of enemies, from the media to the players' union to plaintiffs' lawyers. "The players' union wants to bring Roger down anytime they can," Bob McNair told me. A media executive added: "All of the owners are in unison on this. A lot of people feel it's a liberal agenda." Says another source, a friend of Goodell's: "You have Al Sharpton saying Goodell should be fired. What the **** does Al Sharpton know?"
For Goodell, it wasn't supposed to be this way. Sports and politics were the lodestars of his youth, and in a very real sense he has been training for this job his whole life.
When he was just 6, he got his first official pigskin, a ball used in an NFL game, and it became a kind of security blanket. "Just that smell, the whole thing, I will never forget it," he once told a reporter. Three months after Roger was born in February 1959, his father, Charles, a mild-mannered Republican lawyer and Korean War veteran, was elected to Congress representing the Forty-third District, a rural patch of western New York. And when Roger was 11, he witnessed firsthand the price one might pay for staking out a moral position that posed a threat to powerful interests.
In September 1968, three months after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, New York's Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller tapped Charlie to fill Kennedy's Senate seat. As a congressman, Charlie had voted reliably alongside his Republican colleagues. But after he entered the Senate, he broke with his party on the era's defining issue: Vietnam. In September 1969, Charlie stepped onto the Senate floor to introduce his Vietnam Disengagement Act, a copy of which hangs prominently on the wall of Roger's office today.
Not surprisingly, the Nixon White House treated Charlie's conversion as "almost treason," as Henry Kissinger told Rockefeller, and plotted to destroy his campaign for another term. Roger stumped for his dad, handing out buttons on Manhattan street corners, but to no avail. On election night, Roger cried as he watched his father lose—a defeat that ended Charlie's political career. "He did what was right," Roger told Time. "You can't buy a lesson like that." There's little doubt the experience stuck with him. What exact lesson he took from it is another question.
After the election, the family moved to Bronxville, New York, a Waspy suburb where Roger fit right in. He proudly donned his Redskins jacket in school, went steady with a cheerleader, and captained the football, basketball, and baseball teams. On the gridiron, Goodell was known more for his grit and leadership qualities than raw talent. "He was not the fastest guy on the planet," his teammate Bill Mullally told me.
And the Next Commissioner of the NFL Will Be...
Many have called for Roger Goodell's head to roll in the aftermath of the Ray Rice scandal. Others think he's not fit for the future of the game. Who could fill his shoes? Our favorite candidates—some serious, some not at all—to lead the NFL when Goodell is gone. —Mick Rouse
When it came time for college, Roger ended up at Washington & Jefferson College, a small liberal-arts school outside Pittsburgh. A knee injury kept him from playing ball, so he finally hit the books, majoring in economics. To earn extra money during his junior and senior years, he tended bar at the Landmark, a popular spot in the shadow of the football stadium. Tim Foil, the Landmark's former owner, remembered Goodell as a hard worker and a bit of a prankster. "He'd do crazy things behind the bar," Foil recalled. "One wall of my bar was a glass walk-in cooler, and he'd like to go in there and flash people. He'd give 'em the old butt."
For a long time, Goodell never told Foil about his famous father. Then, one day, Foil asked Goodell what he planned to do with his life. "I'm going to be commissioner of the NFL," Goodell declared. "That's when he mentioned his father, who knew [then commissioner] Pete Rozelle," Foil remembered. "I said, 'You're really set on this?' He said, 'I'm gonna do it, Tim. I'm gonna do it.' "
When Goodell graduated in May 1981, he sent letters to every NFL team and even Rozelle, begging for a job—any job. When NFL executive Don Weiss wrote back, saying Goodell could come by league headquarters if he was in New York, Goodell called Weiss and said he was already there. In fact, Goodell was living in Pittsburgh at the time. He jumped in the car and drove through the night to make it for his morning interview.
About a year later, Goodell landed an internship with the league's public-relations staff. Before starting the job, he sent a letter to his father. "If there is one thing I want to accomplish in my life besides becoming commissioner of the NFL," he wrote, "it is to make you proud of me."
Charlie replied with a letter that Goodell described as the best advice he ever received from him: "Feel only your own pressure. Your own is sufficient."
In December, I arrived at the Dallas Four Seasons for the midseason team owners' meeting. In normal seasons, the gathering is a sleepy affair largely ignored by the press. This year, not surprisingly, was different. Reporters were gossiping about the possible outcome of Mueller's pending investigation of the Ray Rice episode. And on my way in, I noticed Joe Lockhart, the former Bill Clinton press secretary, standing off to the side. The NFL had hired his PR firm to help manage its image.
A gauntlet of sportswriters and cameramen greeted owners as they paraded toward the meeting room. The bosses' mood appeared as gray as the overcast December sky, and even Goodell's biggest booster seemed tired of defending him. Shortly before the morning session, I ran into Robert Kraft walking down the hall, and I asked how he felt about Goodell's performance this season.
"What do you mean? How do I feel about what?" he said, clearly annoyed.
"All the issues that—"
"Yeah, it's out of context. All the issues? We're going to cover those here today."
Kraft stopped and faced me in his dark navy suit and Nike sneakers, collecting himself. "He works very hard, and his intention is very good," he said. "And he's looking out for the long-term interest of the NFL. He has my full support."
Goodell's ability to connect with the men who run the NFL goes all the way back to his earliest days in the league. At the 1986 Super Bowl in New Orleans, Rozelle tapped Goodell, then 26, to serve as his personal driver. "I practically lived with him," Goodell told Time. "And he could see how I managed people, managed situations. I wouldn't give that back for a moment."
In 1989, Paul Tagliabue succeeded Rozelle. A cerebral Washington lawyer, Tagliabue was cut from a very different mold than the brash Rozelle. Goodell had no trouble winning the new commissioner over. NFL staffers noted how Goodell began going to dinner with Tagliabue, whose wife remained in Washington. "Paul was lonely, and Roger was his wingman," a former executive said. Tagliabue entrusted Goodell, who by the mid-'90s had risen to senior vice president in charge of football development, with the league's highest-profile assignments, including international development, league expansion, and stadium construction. And Goodell justified that trust, proving he could put out even the hottest fires. In 1996, he brokered a solution to keep a Browns franchise in Cleveland after owner Art Modell stunned the league (and enraged Cleveland fans) by announcing he was moving the team to Baltimore.
Among the NFL owners, Goodell was becoming known as the person you called to get what you needed from the league office. "Roger was the problem solver," a former executive said. "Roger never said no." Goodell understood the insular boys'-club culture of the league. When the NFL hired MTV president Sara Levinson to run NFL Properties, the league's multi-million-dollar licensing and sponsorship arm, Tagliabue's communications chief, Joe Browne, told a colleague, half in jest: "The good news is, we've hired someone. The bad news? It's a woman." (Browne denies saying this.) As Goodell rose, he gained invaluable intelligence on the shifting balance of power in the ownership ranks, as the old guard ceded influence to a new generation that included the Cowboys' Jerry Jones, the Panthers' Jerry Richardson, and above all, the Patriots' Robert Kraft.
But Goodell still needed to prove to the bosses that he had the business experience to run the league, which is why he maneuvered to wrest control of NFL Properties after Levinson left in 2000. It put him one step closer to the throne. And he used this new perch to hone the smashmouth negotiating chops he knew he needed to round out his portfolio.
In 2002, Goodell pushed NFL executives to renegotiate (and squeeze more revenue out of) a ten-year, $250 million licensing deal with Reebok—even though the deal had been inked just two years earlier. "He said, 'You find a way to renegotiate it. We're the NFL. We're the only pony in town,' " a person involved in the talks told me. "He's the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. No one knows leverage like him. He just sits there, like ice."
By 2005, Goodell was agitating for Tagliabue to step down. At one point, Goodell even considered a job offer from ESPN, but Tagliabue persuaded him to stay at the league. "He was getting impatient," Tagliabue told me. Finally, in 2006, Tagliabue, who turned 66 that year, announced he was retiring. Goodell was one of the five candidates, but everyone knew it was his game to lose. In the end, it came down to a two-horse race—Goodell and Gregg Levy, the league's outside attorney—and on the fifth round of balloting, Goodell received the necessary two-thirds majority.
The owners had their man. And for the players, as well as Goodell's subordinates in the league office, there would be consequences. At NFL headquarters there was suddenly a new mood, a brasher, more money-minded approach. The new commissioner demanded loyalty from staffers and even questioned their value. "He thought everyone was overpaid," a former senior executive told me. "He always told me I was overpaid." Another told me: "He gave me a hard time about my contract. I was like, The **** you doing? This is peanuts."
Shortly after 11 A.M. on November 5, 2014, Goodell dodged a pack of reporters clustered outside a Midtown Manhattan law firm. He was there to testify in front of former federal judge Barbara Jones at an arbitration hearing in the Ray Rice case. But in many ways, it was Goodell's commissionership that was on trial: For weeks, Goodell had been defending Rice's indefinite suspension by claiming the leak of the second TMZ video fundamentally changed his understanding of what had happened inside the elevator. In Goodell's telling, Rice had downplayed the brutality of the attack when he spoke to league officials about it on June 16. But during two hours of withering cross-examination by the Players Association's lawyer, Jeff Kessler, Goodell's story unraveled.
Over and over, Goodell revealed himself to be an out-of-touch CEO who seemed uninterested in the facts of the case. He said he made only a few random handwritten notes during the June hearing. "I didn't write a lot of things down," he said, according to transcripts obtained by GQ. A briefing book prepared for Goodell by the league contained graphic descriptions of Rice's assault—one memo stated that "during the course of the argument, Rice struck Palmer rendering her unconscious"—but Goodell appeared not to have studied it. He even seemed uninformed about his own claim to owners that the league requested the full elevator video from four law-enforcement agencies, arguably the most pivotal fact in the whole case. It was an uninspired performance, and the judge agreed. On Black Friday, she reinstated Rice and ruled that Goodell's punishment was "arbitrary."
The episode reinforced a pattern that comes up again and again when you look at Goodell's commissionership: When he's reacting to PR crises and disciplining players, his judgment is poor. But when he's negotiating on behalf of his owner bosses, Goodell almost never loses.
A prime example came in 2011, when he pushed the NFL Players Association into a 136-day lockout, the longest work stoppage in NFL history. By the time it was over, Goodell had secured a ten-year labor deal that was widely considered a windfall for owners. (For its part, the union argues it won concessions for players, too.) The deal locked rookies into contracts of five or fewer years, kept salary caps largely flat, and reduced the players' share of the league's revenue from 50 to 47 percent. "It should be a national day of mourning for players," sports agent Bill Parise, who represents more than two dozen NFL players, told me.
"Roger understood the business aspects really better than Tagliabue," said Bob McNair, the Texans' owner.
"Why does he get paid what he does?" Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, a member of the compensation committee, told me. "Because you try herding thirty-two cats. He does a great job of it."
But for Goodell, the union deal and mogul-level salary came with a steep price. It turned out that the more he tried to impose his will on the league, the less in control he seemed. By pushing the union to the brink, Goodell helped turn the players against him. And as the safety and other social issues of the game moved to the fore, he became the public face of the denial that gripped the league office in the face of mounting evidence that football was destroying the brains of its retired players.
Goodell pushed his PR hands to fight the issue in the press. Alan Schwarz, the crusading New York Times journalist whose concussion reports were driving the debate, became a Goodell bogeyman. "Roger felt this guy is out to get us," a former league adviser told me. At times Goodell stepped in personally. After viewing a May 2007 segment on HBO's Real Sports that embarrassed Dr. Ira Casson, a co-chair of the NFL's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, Goodell called then-HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg and complained about the way HBO had edited the interview. Casson had spoken with HBO for two hours, and yet they ran a clip of him blithely denying links between football and head trauma. (The appearance earned him the nickname Dr. No.) "[Roger] was shocked by it," Casson told me. "A few weeks later, he told me the president of HBO Sports had written a personal letter apologizing for the way they treated me." As late as 2009, Goodell testified before Congress that he could not say whether there was a link between pro football and head trauma.
A month later, however, he suddenly reversed course. The NFL adopted a slate of reforms to improve player safety—fining dangerous hits, moving up kickoffs, keeping concussed players off the field—and even critics conceded that Goodell was making progress. But new conflicts kept flaring. For one thing, the five-figure fines for illegal tackles struck players as capricious and hypocritical, given that the league promoted videos of big, dramatic hits on its website. The players also wonder how committed Goodell could be to player safety when he bargained with the union to add two games to the regular-season schedule or enforced the 2012 referee lockout.
But it was the Bountygate scandal (when New Orleans Saints coaches and defenders were caught offering cash bounties to knock opposing players out of games) that truly cemented Goodell's image as an impulsive and rudderless commissioner prone to lurch from one issue to the next, overreaching in some cases (Bountygate), underreacting in others (Spygate). In the spring of 2012, Goodell levied Draconian penalties on New Orleans Saints players and front-office executives for their role in the team's alleged bounty program. But questions were soon raised about the NFL's investigation. Attorney Peter Ginsberg, who represented Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma in the appeal, told me about a tense meeting at NFL headquarters where he exposed some troubling flaws in Goodell's inquiry. "Roger was stone silent," Ginsberg said. "He almost acted insulted that someone would be questioning him."
Under pressure, Goodell appointed his mentor and predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, to conduct an independent appeals hearing. In December 2012, Tagliabue published a twenty-two-page decision that vacated Goodell's punishments. "I talked to him after I issued the bounty decision," Tagliabue told me. "I explained I was doing it and why. He didn't think I would vacate all the discipline. He said, 'I was surprised where you came out.' "
By the summer of 2013, Goodell was determined to put Bountygate and the broader concussion issue behind him. He held a series of meetings with team owners in New York and persuaded them to settle the class-action lawsuit brought by more than 5,000 players who were seeking financial payouts for concussion-related conditions such as Alzheimer's, dementia, and depression. Goodell argued that while the league could fight in court and likely prevail, the litigation would be a festering wound on the league's image.
"It was about protecting the brand," recalled Bob McNair, who attended the sessions. "Do we want the brand attacked on this for the next ten years? Or do we want to go ahead and take the high road? In effect, we don't think most of these concussions referenced even occurred in the NFL, but we're not going to complain about it."
The concussions didn't even occur in the NFL? The denialism is hard to fathom—and it suggests so much about the mind-set of the owners and their commissioner as they steer the league into the future. The concussion settlement was a patch-up job, and now that the judge has deemed the payout cap to be unfair, the owners have no idea what their ultimate liability will be going forward. The class-action suit was the largest concussion case against the league, but not the only one. Relatives of Junior Seau, who committed suicide in 2012, are pressing ahead with a wrongful-death suit that has nothing to do with the broad settlement.
Could the season from hell have been avoided? Or at least a lot less bungled? Goodell's predecessor thinks so. Tagliabue sees Goodell's laser focus on profit and his combative stance toward players as key parts of the problem. "If they see you making decisions only in economic terms, they start to understand that and question what you're all about," he said. "There's a huge intangible value in peace. There's a huge intangible value in having allies." As for his relationship with his protégé, Tagliabue says, "We haven't talked much since I left. It's been his decision. Bountygate didn't help." In our conversation, Tagliabue seemed disappointed, and a bit sad, about the sorry state of the game he ran for seventeen years.
Others feel it, too, and wonder if the commissioner even recognizes the fullness of the league's crisis. "The existential issues are, I would argue, issues that Roger just doesn't find interesting," says DeMaurice Smith of the players' union. With the NFL's shrinking youth audience, narrowing fan base, and player-safety issues that just aren't going away, Goodell's goal of growing the league to $25 billion by 2027 is starting to feel like a naive dream. Whether the commissioner finds these challenges to be "interesting" or not, it's entirely possible that the past few seasons will go down as the moment when the National Football League—the biggest, fastest, richest game in America—peaked and began to decline. The world changes, people's values change, and institutions get left behind, no matter how big and powerful and unstoppable they once seemed. It happened to boxing in the 1980s. Big Tobacco in the 1990s. Is football next?
Late on the afternoon of December 10, the commissioner stood in front of journalists at the closing press conference of the owners' meeting. He was there to defend the league's new personal-conduct policy, which removed him from the investigation phase of player-discipline cases but preserved his final say over appeals. He looked careworn and a bit defeated as he answered question after question about "third-party arbitrators" and other employment-law jargon.
I raised my hand and asked Goodell a question: What's the biggest lesson you've learned this season? "Anytime you go through this, it's a chance to reflect and to learn an awful lot," he said. "I've obviously learned a great deal about domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse."
As he spoke, I thought back to a story that his friend Tim Foil, the former owner of the bar where Goodell worked during college, told me. One evening, a bull of a man barreled through the front door looking for his wife. "She'd come down to the bar to get away from him. She was a regular," Foil said. "He was probably six two, 240 pounds—a typical mean guy when he was drinking." Goodell was working behind the bar, watching the grim scene unfold. The man walked over and started hitting his wife. Goodell didn't hesitate. "Roger got between 'em, broke 'em up, and told him to calm down," Foil remembered. As Goodell escorted the man outside, he said, "You're in my establishment right now, and I'm in charge."
If only that Roger Goodell were in charge now.
The highlights: Goodell is more of a puppet for Robert Kraft than previously was revealed, Goodell has had a major falling out with Paul Tagliabue who criticizes Goodell in this article and Goodell is losing support among owners now as well.
Link to article: http://www.gq.com/sports/201502/roger-goodell-season-from-hell?currentPage=1
The Season from Hell: Inside Roger Goodell's Ruthless Football Machine
On almost any other morning, Roger Goodell would have welcomed an impromptu chat with Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots. But this was the morning of September 9, and just about the worst time for the commissioner of the National Football League to be interrupted. For the past twenty-four hours, a vast swath of the public had been calling for his head for his handling of perhaps the most explosive crisis the league had ever faced—a crisis largely of the commissioner's own making. The day before, Goodell and the NFL had been badly exposed and embarrassed when TMZ posted security-camera video that showed Baltimore Ravens star Ray Rice coldcocking his fiancée, Janay Palmer, and dragging her unconscious body out of an Atlantic City casino elevator, leaving her on the floor like a tray of picked-over room service. The horrific footage instantly made a mockery of Goodell's initial decision in July to suspend Rice for a mere two games. The commissioner had quickly extended Rice's suspension to "indefinite," but that had done little to quell the outrage over the video—or the widespread disbelief at Goodell's claim that he had never seen it.
Kraft had a request, as he often did. According to a person with knowledge of their conversation, he wanted Goodell to get on-camera with CBS News anchor Norah O'Donnell and deal with the controversy before it spun even further out of control. Earlier that day, Kraft had appeared on CBS This Morning and was questioned by Charlie Rose about Goodell's handling of the Rice situation. It didn't go well. "He had no knowledge of this video," Kraft told Rose stiffly. "Anyone who's second-guessing that doesn't know him." After the interview, the source says, Kraft conferred with his friend Leslie Moonves, the CEO of CBS. The two men spoke often, but this call was urgent: In roughly forty-eight hours, CBS was set to air the first of eight Thursday Night Football games (for which the network reportedly paid about $250 million), and the game featured the Ravens. Kraft and Moonves agreed that Goodell needed to appear on CBS News and answer questions. The questioner, Moonves added, should be a woman.
Goodell rarely went out front to face tough interviews. But Kraft was one of Goodell's closest confidants among the NFL's thirty-two owners, and his fiercest advocate and defender. As a member of the league's compensation committee, Kraft has vigorously defended Goodell's eye-popping $44 million pay package, and in the wake of the TMZ leak, he personally called owners and lobbied them to issue statements backing the commissioner, according to a senior league source. So large is Kraft's sway with Goodell that one veteran NFL executive likes to call him "the assistant commissioner."
And so, several hours after talking with Kraft, Goodell sat down with O'Donnell in a conference room at NFL headquarters in New York.
"Do you wish you had seen this videotape before it was released by TMZ?" O'Donnell asked.
"Absolutely," Goodell said. "When we met with Ray Rice and his representatives, it was ambiguous about what actually happened."
Within days, a lengthy ESPN investigation all but called him a liar. According to the report, not only did Rice tell Goodell exactly what happened inside that elevator, the NFL was also in possession of the Atlantic County indictment, which noted Rice's attempt "to cause significant bodily injury" and "indifference to the value of human life." Most damningly of all, the NFL could have easily acquired a copy of the surveillance video—Rice's legal team had one—but inexplicably, the league made almost no effort to obtain it. If Goodell truly didn't know the full extent of what happened in the elevator, it seemed, it was because he didn't want to know. (On January 8, former FBI director Robert Mueller released his long-anticipated, league-commissioned investigation of the Rice incident; its findings reinforced the perception that Goodell and the NFL simply didn't try very hard to get the video.)
In any other season, Goodell's fumble would have faded from the headlines. The commissioner, after all, had weathered a string of grisly off-field episodes before, from Michael Vick's dogfighting conviction to Jovan Belcher's murder-suicide. But this season from hell was unlike any other. It was a season not just marred by scandal but defined by it. There was the ongoing and seemingly intractable problem of concussions and player safety. There was the Adrian Peterson child-abuse case. There was Ray Rice, of course, plus a flurry of other alleged incidents of domestic violence that led, for the first time, to serious questions about Goodell's job security. (Ten days after his shaky CBS News interview, Goodell held a disastrous press conference in which he parried a barrage of questions such as "Have you considered resigning at any point throughout this?" and "Why do you feel like you should be able to continue in this role?") And just last week, of course, Deflategate completely overshadowed what should have been an uncomplicated celebration of one of the most compelling Super Bowl matchups in recent memory. Taken together, the nonstop drumbeat of bad news added up to a growing sense that Goodell and his owner bosses are tone-deaf to the issues that plague the NFL—and on the wrong side of history to a rising generation that increasingly sees football as too violent, too regressive, and too money-driven to enjoy without feeling more than a little bit turned off by the whole decadent spectacle.
Over the course of this long and brutal season, I spoke to nearly a hundred people, including current and former NFL executives, front-office types, agents, and players. (Goodell's office denied multiple interview requests.) The commissioner emerged as a gifted, ambitious man who possessed precisely the right combination of skills and connections to propel him to the pinnacle of America's most powerful sports league—indeed, one of its most powerful institutions, period.
Far less clear was the answer to this question: Is he the right man to lead the NFL into a future that has never looked scarier?
By one measure—money—Goodell has been the most successful commissioner in the history of the league. Since landing the gig eight years ago, he has made the NFL more powerful than ever. Total league revenues have grown about 65 percent; the value of franchises is at an all-time high. (Goodell has told the owners that he wants to increase revenues to $25 billion over the next dozen years.) Last year, he persuaded the owners to settle the concussion lawsuit with more than 5,000 former players for $675 million. "God knows what the owners thought they were liable for," a veteran league executive told me, suggesting that they were prepared for the possibility that they might have to pay more. "They look at it as a cost per team: So we're capped at what, $25 million each? That deal alone should solidify Goodell's legend." (The deal was so good, in fact, that the judge in the case later ruled that the cap was unfair to players and threw it out.)
"He's had a lot of challenges," says Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, "but I think he's done a good job with a very difficult situation."
Adversaries take a less charitable view. Eric Winston, an offensive tackle for the Bengals and president of the NFL Players Association, says the NFL is simply too popular to screw up, and that its recent success has come in spite of Goodell's leadership, not because of it: "You could be the worst bartender at spring break, but you'd still be killing it."
In Goodell's defense, his job is an infinitely complex one. The commissioner of a pro sports league must be CEO of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, fan ambassador, and player disciplinarian, all while serving at the pleasure of owners who elected him to maximize their profits. "Commissioners work for owners, and that shouldn't come as a shock to fans because it doesn't come as a shock to the players," DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the NFL Players Association, told me. "We are asked to be partners when it is convenient and—more frequently—told what to do when it is not. Owners ignored players when our union was founded, and our history has been one of forcing them to recognize players' rights. That paradigm will never stop."
And yet even some owners have been frustrated by aspects of Goodell's tenure. Bob McNair, who owns the Houston Texans and is a Goodell supporter, told me that when Saints owner Tom Benson resigned from three league committees in 2013, Goodell's pay package and his handling of the Saints' Bountygate scandal were two reasons. "Tom's a green-eyeshade accountant of many years," McNair said. "He's just not happy about what happened." (Through a spokesman, Benson denies this.) It's also an open secret in league circles that some owners, especially Woody Johnson of the Jets, resent the preferential treatment Goodell is perceived to extend to his inner circle. (As the football world waits for the commissioner's decision on whether to punish the Patriots for Deflategate, many are wondering how his relationship with Kraft will affect Goodell's ruling.)
And then there is Goodell's most fundamental challenge of all: the long-term prospects for the NFL in an increasingly anti-football world. From 2010 to 2013, the league's under-50 audience declined 10 percent; this season, The Walking Dead repeatedly trounced the NFL on Sunday night. In a recent Bloomberg Politics poll, fully half of Americans said they wouldn't let their sons play football (in similar polls, the numbers skewed even higher in left-leaning demographics), and only 17 percent said they believed the game will grow in popularity over the next twenty years. Could football, an institution as American as Thanksgiving, wind up just another wedge issue in the country's red-blue divide? The new NASCAR? Fred Nance, an adviser to the Cleveland Browns and a former candidate for NFL commissioner, puts it like this: "A cultural IED is exploding in the middle of the business of the NFL."
Inside NFL headquarters on Park Avenue, a sense of siege fills the air. League officials feel victimized by a phalanx of enemies, from the media to the players' union to plaintiffs' lawyers. "The players' union wants to bring Roger down anytime they can," Bob McNair told me. A media executive added: "All of the owners are in unison on this. A lot of people feel it's a liberal agenda." Says another source, a friend of Goodell's: "You have Al Sharpton saying Goodell should be fired. What the **** does Al Sharpton know?"
For Goodell, it wasn't supposed to be this way. Sports and politics were the lodestars of his youth, and in a very real sense he has been training for this job his whole life.
When he was just 6, he got his first official pigskin, a ball used in an NFL game, and it became a kind of security blanket. "Just that smell, the whole thing, I will never forget it," he once told a reporter. Three months after Roger was born in February 1959, his father, Charles, a mild-mannered Republican lawyer and Korean War veteran, was elected to Congress representing the Forty-third District, a rural patch of western New York. And when Roger was 11, he witnessed firsthand the price one might pay for staking out a moral position that posed a threat to powerful interests.
In September 1968, three months after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, New York's Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller tapped Charlie to fill Kennedy's Senate seat. As a congressman, Charlie had voted reliably alongside his Republican colleagues. But after he entered the Senate, he broke with his party on the era's defining issue: Vietnam. In September 1969, Charlie stepped onto the Senate floor to introduce his Vietnam Disengagement Act, a copy of which hangs prominently on the wall of Roger's office today.
Not surprisingly, the Nixon White House treated Charlie's conversion as "almost treason," as Henry Kissinger told Rockefeller, and plotted to destroy his campaign for another term. Roger stumped for his dad, handing out buttons on Manhattan street corners, but to no avail. On election night, Roger cried as he watched his father lose—a defeat that ended Charlie's political career. "He did what was right," Roger told Time. "You can't buy a lesson like that." There's little doubt the experience stuck with him. What exact lesson he took from it is another question.
After the election, the family moved to Bronxville, New York, a Waspy suburb where Roger fit right in. He proudly donned his Redskins jacket in school, went steady with a cheerleader, and captained the football, basketball, and baseball teams. On the gridiron, Goodell was known more for his grit and leadership qualities than raw talent. "He was not the fastest guy on the planet," his teammate Bill Mullally told me.
And the Next Commissioner of the NFL Will Be...
Many have called for Roger Goodell's head to roll in the aftermath of the Ray Rice scandal. Others think he's not fit for the future of the game. Who could fill his shoes? Our favorite candidates—some serious, some not at all—to lead the NFL when Goodell is gone. —Mick Rouse
When it came time for college, Roger ended up at Washington & Jefferson College, a small liberal-arts school outside Pittsburgh. A knee injury kept him from playing ball, so he finally hit the books, majoring in economics. To earn extra money during his junior and senior years, he tended bar at the Landmark, a popular spot in the shadow of the football stadium. Tim Foil, the Landmark's former owner, remembered Goodell as a hard worker and a bit of a prankster. "He'd do crazy things behind the bar," Foil recalled. "One wall of my bar was a glass walk-in cooler, and he'd like to go in there and flash people. He'd give 'em the old butt."
For a long time, Goodell never told Foil about his famous father. Then, one day, Foil asked Goodell what he planned to do with his life. "I'm going to be commissioner of the NFL," Goodell declared. "That's when he mentioned his father, who knew [then commissioner] Pete Rozelle," Foil remembered. "I said, 'You're really set on this?' He said, 'I'm gonna do it, Tim. I'm gonna do it.' "
When Goodell graduated in May 1981, he sent letters to every NFL team and even Rozelle, begging for a job—any job. When NFL executive Don Weiss wrote back, saying Goodell could come by league headquarters if he was in New York, Goodell called Weiss and said he was already there. In fact, Goodell was living in Pittsburgh at the time. He jumped in the car and drove through the night to make it for his morning interview.
About a year later, Goodell landed an internship with the league's public-relations staff. Before starting the job, he sent a letter to his father. "If there is one thing I want to accomplish in my life besides becoming commissioner of the NFL," he wrote, "it is to make you proud of me."
Charlie replied with a letter that Goodell described as the best advice he ever received from him: "Feel only your own pressure. Your own is sufficient."
In December, I arrived at the Dallas Four Seasons for the midseason team owners' meeting. In normal seasons, the gathering is a sleepy affair largely ignored by the press. This year, not surprisingly, was different. Reporters were gossiping about the possible outcome of Mueller's pending investigation of the Ray Rice episode. And on my way in, I noticed Joe Lockhart, the former Bill Clinton press secretary, standing off to the side. The NFL had hired his PR firm to help manage its image.
A gauntlet of sportswriters and cameramen greeted owners as they paraded toward the meeting room. The bosses' mood appeared as gray as the overcast December sky, and even Goodell's biggest booster seemed tired of defending him. Shortly before the morning session, I ran into Robert Kraft walking down the hall, and I asked how he felt about Goodell's performance this season.
"What do you mean? How do I feel about what?" he said, clearly annoyed.
"All the issues that—"
"Yeah, it's out of context. All the issues? We're going to cover those here today."
Kraft stopped and faced me in his dark navy suit and Nike sneakers, collecting himself. "He works very hard, and his intention is very good," he said. "And he's looking out for the long-term interest of the NFL. He has my full support."
Goodell's ability to connect with the men who run the NFL goes all the way back to his earliest days in the league. At the 1986 Super Bowl in New Orleans, Rozelle tapped Goodell, then 26, to serve as his personal driver. "I practically lived with him," Goodell told Time. "And he could see how I managed people, managed situations. I wouldn't give that back for a moment."
In 1989, Paul Tagliabue succeeded Rozelle. A cerebral Washington lawyer, Tagliabue was cut from a very different mold than the brash Rozelle. Goodell had no trouble winning the new commissioner over. NFL staffers noted how Goodell began going to dinner with Tagliabue, whose wife remained in Washington. "Paul was lonely, and Roger was his wingman," a former executive said. Tagliabue entrusted Goodell, who by the mid-'90s had risen to senior vice president in charge of football development, with the league's highest-profile assignments, including international development, league expansion, and stadium construction. And Goodell justified that trust, proving he could put out even the hottest fires. In 1996, he brokered a solution to keep a Browns franchise in Cleveland after owner Art Modell stunned the league (and enraged Cleveland fans) by announcing he was moving the team to Baltimore.
Among the NFL owners, Goodell was becoming known as the person you called to get what you needed from the league office. "Roger was the problem solver," a former executive said. "Roger never said no." Goodell understood the insular boys'-club culture of the league. When the NFL hired MTV president Sara Levinson to run NFL Properties, the league's multi-million-dollar licensing and sponsorship arm, Tagliabue's communications chief, Joe Browne, told a colleague, half in jest: "The good news is, we've hired someone. The bad news? It's a woman." (Browne denies saying this.) As Goodell rose, he gained invaluable intelligence on the shifting balance of power in the ownership ranks, as the old guard ceded influence to a new generation that included the Cowboys' Jerry Jones, the Panthers' Jerry Richardson, and above all, the Patriots' Robert Kraft.
But Goodell still needed to prove to the bosses that he had the business experience to run the league, which is why he maneuvered to wrest control of NFL Properties after Levinson left in 2000. It put him one step closer to the throne. And he used this new perch to hone the smashmouth negotiating chops he knew he needed to round out his portfolio.
In 2002, Goodell pushed NFL executives to renegotiate (and squeeze more revenue out of) a ten-year, $250 million licensing deal with Reebok—even though the deal had been inked just two years earlier. "He said, 'You find a way to renegotiate it. We're the NFL. We're the only pony in town,' " a person involved in the talks told me. "He's the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. No one knows leverage like him. He just sits there, like ice."
By 2005, Goodell was agitating for Tagliabue to step down. At one point, Goodell even considered a job offer from ESPN, but Tagliabue persuaded him to stay at the league. "He was getting impatient," Tagliabue told me. Finally, in 2006, Tagliabue, who turned 66 that year, announced he was retiring. Goodell was one of the five candidates, but everyone knew it was his game to lose. In the end, it came down to a two-horse race—Goodell and Gregg Levy, the league's outside attorney—and on the fifth round of balloting, Goodell received the necessary two-thirds majority.
The owners had their man. And for the players, as well as Goodell's subordinates in the league office, there would be consequences. At NFL headquarters there was suddenly a new mood, a brasher, more money-minded approach. The new commissioner demanded loyalty from staffers and even questioned their value. "He thought everyone was overpaid," a former senior executive told me. "He always told me I was overpaid." Another told me: "He gave me a hard time about my contract. I was like, The **** you doing? This is peanuts."
Shortly after 11 A.M. on November 5, 2014, Goodell dodged a pack of reporters clustered outside a Midtown Manhattan law firm. He was there to testify in front of former federal judge Barbara Jones at an arbitration hearing in the Ray Rice case. But in many ways, it was Goodell's commissionership that was on trial: For weeks, Goodell had been defending Rice's indefinite suspension by claiming the leak of the second TMZ video fundamentally changed his understanding of what had happened inside the elevator. In Goodell's telling, Rice had downplayed the brutality of the attack when he spoke to league officials about it on June 16. But during two hours of withering cross-examination by the Players Association's lawyer, Jeff Kessler, Goodell's story unraveled.
Over and over, Goodell revealed himself to be an out-of-touch CEO who seemed uninterested in the facts of the case. He said he made only a few random handwritten notes during the June hearing. "I didn't write a lot of things down," he said, according to transcripts obtained by GQ. A briefing book prepared for Goodell by the league contained graphic descriptions of Rice's assault—one memo stated that "during the course of the argument, Rice struck Palmer rendering her unconscious"—but Goodell appeared not to have studied it. He even seemed uninformed about his own claim to owners that the league requested the full elevator video from four law-enforcement agencies, arguably the most pivotal fact in the whole case. It was an uninspired performance, and the judge agreed. On Black Friday, she reinstated Rice and ruled that Goodell's punishment was "arbitrary."
The episode reinforced a pattern that comes up again and again when you look at Goodell's commissionership: When he's reacting to PR crises and disciplining players, his judgment is poor. But when he's negotiating on behalf of his owner bosses, Goodell almost never loses.
A prime example came in 2011, when he pushed the NFL Players Association into a 136-day lockout, the longest work stoppage in NFL history. By the time it was over, Goodell had secured a ten-year labor deal that was widely considered a windfall for owners. (For its part, the union argues it won concessions for players, too.) The deal locked rookies into contracts of five or fewer years, kept salary caps largely flat, and reduced the players' share of the league's revenue from 50 to 47 percent. "It should be a national day of mourning for players," sports agent Bill Parise, who represents more than two dozen NFL players, told me.
"Roger understood the business aspects really better than Tagliabue," said Bob McNair, the Texans' owner.
"Why does he get paid what he does?" Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, a member of the compensation committee, told me. "Because you try herding thirty-two cats. He does a great job of it."
But for Goodell, the union deal and mogul-level salary came with a steep price. It turned out that the more he tried to impose his will on the league, the less in control he seemed. By pushing the union to the brink, Goodell helped turn the players against him. And as the safety and other social issues of the game moved to the fore, he became the public face of the denial that gripped the league office in the face of mounting evidence that football was destroying the brains of its retired players.
Goodell pushed his PR hands to fight the issue in the press. Alan Schwarz, the crusading New York Times journalist whose concussion reports were driving the debate, became a Goodell bogeyman. "Roger felt this guy is out to get us," a former league adviser told me. At times Goodell stepped in personally. After viewing a May 2007 segment on HBO's Real Sports that embarrassed Dr. Ira Casson, a co-chair of the NFL's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, Goodell called then-HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg and complained about the way HBO had edited the interview. Casson had spoken with HBO for two hours, and yet they ran a clip of him blithely denying links between football and head trauma. (The appearance earned him the nickname Dr. No.) "[Roger] was shocked by it," Casson told me. "A few weeks later, he told me the president of HBO Sports had written a personal letter apologizing for the way they treated me." As late as 2009, Goodell testified before Congress that he could not say whether there was a link between pro football and head trauma.
A month later, however, he suddenly reversed course. The NFL adopted a slate of reforms to improve player safety—fining dangerous hits, moving up kickoffs, keeping concussed players off the field—and even critics conceded that Goodell was making progress. But new conflicts kept flaring. For one thing, the five-figure fines for illegal tackles struck players as capricious and hypocritical, given that the league promoted videos of big, dramatic hits on its website. The players also wonder how committed Goodell could be to player safety when he bargained with the union to add two games to the regular-season schedule or enforced the 2012 referee lockout.
But it was the Bountygate scandal (when New Orleans Saints coaches and defenders were caught offering cash bounties to knock opposing players out of games) that truly cemented Goodell's image as an impulsive and rudderless commissioner prone to lurch from one issue to the next, overreaching in some cases (Bountygate), underreacting in others (Spygate). In the spring of 2012, Goodell levied Draconian penalties on New Orleans Saints players and front-office executives for their role in the team's alleged bounty program. But questions were soon raised about the NFL's investigation. Attorney Peter Ginsberg, who represented Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma in the appeal, told me about a tense meeting at NFL headquarters where he exposed some troubling flaws in Goodell's inquiry. "Roger was stone silent," Ginsberg said. "He almost acted insulted that someone would be questioning him."
Under pressure, Goodell appointed his mentor and predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, to conduct an independent appeals hearing. In December 2012, Tagliabue published a twenty-two-page decision that vacated Goodell's punishments. "I talked to him after I issued the bounty decision," Tagliabue told me. "I explained I was doing it and why. He didn't think I would vacate all the discipline. He said, 'I was surprised where you came out.' "
By the summer of 2013, Goodell was determined to put Bountygate and the broader concussion issue behind him. He held a series of meetings with team owners in New York and persuaded them to settle the class-action lawsuit brought by more than 5,000 players who were seeking financial payouts for concussion-related conditions such as Alzheimer's, dementia, and depression. Goodell argued that while the league could fight in court and likely prevail, the litigation would be a festering wound on the league's image.
"It was about protecting the brand," recalled Bob McNair, who attended the sessions. "Do we want the brand attacked on this for the next ten years? Or do we want to go ahead and take the high road? In effect, we don't think most of these concussions referenced even occurred in the NFL, but we're not going to complain about it."
The concussions didn't even occur in the NFL? The denialism is hard to fathom—and it suggests so much about the mind-set of the owners and their commissioner as they steer the league into the future. The concussion settlement was a patch-up job, and now that the judge has deemed the payout cap to be unfair, the owners have no idea what their ultimate liability will be going forward. The class-action suit was the largest concussion case against the league, but not the only one. Relatives of Junior Seau, who committed suicide in 2012, are pressing ahead with a wrongful-death suit that has nothing to do with the broad settlement.
Could the season from hell have been avoided? Or at least a lot less bungled? Goodell's predecessor thinks so. Tagliabue sees Goodell's laser focus on profit and his combative stance toward players as key parts of the problem. "If they see you making decisions only in economic terms, they start to understand that and question what you're all about," he said. "There's a huge intangible value in peace. There's a huge intangible value in having allies." As for his relationship with his protégé, Tagliabue says, "We haven't talked much since I left. It's been his decision. Bountygate didn't help." In our conversation, Tagliabue seemed disappointed, and a bit sad, about the sorry state of the game he ran for seventeen years.
Others feel it, too, and wonder if the commissioner even recognizes the fullness of the league's crisis. "The existential issues are, I would argue, issues that Roger just doesn't find interesting," says DeMaurice Smith of the players' union. With the NFL's shrinking youth audience, narrowing fan base, and player-safety issues that just aren't going away, Goodell's goal of growing the league to $25 billion by 2027 is starting to feel like a naive dream. Whether the commissioner finds these challenges to be "interesting" or not, it's entirely possible that the past few seasons will go down as the moment when the National Football League—the biggest, fastest, richest game in America—peaked and began to decline. The world changes, people's values change, and institutions get left behind, no matter how big and powerful and unstoppable they once seemed. It happened to boxing in the 1980s. Big Tobacco in the 1990s. Is football next?
Late on the afternoon of December 10, the commissioner stood in front of journalists at the closing press conference of the owners' meeting. He was there to defend the league's new personal-conduct policy, which removed him from the investigation phase of player-discipline cases but preserved his final say over appeals. He looked careworn and a bit defeated as he answered question after question about "third-party arbitrators" and other employment-law jargon.
I raised my hand and asked Goodell a question: What's the biggest lesson you've learned this season? "Anytime you go through this, it's a chance to reflect and to learn an awful lot," he said. "I've obviously learned a great deal about domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse."
As he spoke, I thought back to a story that his friend Tim Foil, the former owner of the bar where Goodell worked during college, told me. One evening, a bull of a man barreled through the front door looking for his wife. "She'd come down to the bar to get away from him. She was a regular," Foil said. "He was probably six two, 240 pounds—a typical mean guy when he was drinking." Goodell was working behind the bar, watching the grim scene unfold. The man walked over and started hitting his wife. Goodell didn't hesitate. "Roger got between 'em, broke 'em up, and told him to calm down," Foil remembered. As Goodell escorted the man outside, he said, "You're in my establishment right now, and I'm in charge."
If only that Roger Goodell were in charge now.