Roger Goodell's Season from Hell

[3Rivers]

From GQ(3 page article, I'll post quotes)
http://www.gq.com/sports/201502/roger-goodell-season-from-hell?currentPage=1

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."

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."

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.

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."

n 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.

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 fukk you doing? This is peanuts."

 

[3Rivers]

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."

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.

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.

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?

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.

 

[gho3st]

The Violence business as always, is booming right now. Money can't be printed fast enough.... As long as NFL/Football keep producing violence, they'll stay in business and make a gang of money. And Goodell's position is safe until it starts costing the owners money.

Fans dont care since they most likely have no relation to players thus they can compartmentalize what's happening on the field. And the TV networks need the NFL

 

[Trip]

Goodell as the article points out is way too laser focused on money....and now with the integrity of the on field product being questioned(the biggest issue by far imo) he needs to fix this fast. He cant be too cozy with certain ownership...that's how you alienate the fans.

 

[Joe Sixpack]

Goodell is such as an a$$hole

This guy is runnin around the office tellin everybody they are overpaid

I miss Tags

 

[Joe Sixpack]

Goodell is such as an a$$hole

This guy is runnin around the office tellin everybody they are overpaid

I miss Tags