NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports
PHOENIX — When Roger Goodell became commissioner of the NFL in 2006, he immediately inherited the warmest honeymoon period anyone could ever hope for.
Media members, you see, couldn’t stand his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, who would talk down to them and was seen as condescending. Goodell, on the other hand, stepped in with a reputation as approachable, a good guy image honed as a solid deputy.
He was the baseball commissioner following Bowie Kuhn, the quarterback following Ryan Leaf, the coach following Rich Kotite.
The media fawned over Goodell and, when he began showing up at the writers’ annual meeting at the Super Bowl to take questions for 10 or 15 minutes — something Tagliabue never would have dreamed of doing — many in the media thought they had a new BFF.
Never mind that Goodell answered many of their questions by telling an aide at the back of the room to “make a note of that.”
Little more than eight years later, that honeymoon is only a faded memory, and recent incidents should make for some interesting exchanges Friday when Goodell holds his annual Super Bowl press conference.
He is under attack for his handling — or mishandling in many cases — of the NFL’s response on a variety of issues, ranging from the health of players (concussions), off-field domestic abuse (Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson), and, of course, the latest competitive brouhaha, “Deflategate.”
In some cases, most notably the Ray Rice incident, Goodell has been reactive, apparently failing to grasp the seriousness of the matter or not pursuing it strongly enough until a storm of protest forced his hand. In others, like the New Orleans Saints’ bounty case of a few years ago, Goodell came down with an iron fist that created other problems.
His predecessor, Tagliabue, was quoted in a recent magazine profile of Goodell as saying the two have hardly spoken in recent years. Tagliabue said “Bountygate didn’t help,” a reference to Tagliabue’s role as an arbitrator, striking down much of the punishment Goodell initially handed out to the Saints for offering bonuses to hurt opposing players in games.
Perhaps most notably, it is that lurching from crisis to crisis that creates the starkest difference between the two commissioners who have followed the late Pete Rozelle, arguably the greatest modern commissioner of any sport.
Tagliabue was criticized for his public relations skills, or lack thereof, and for his lawyerly demeanor in seeming to study to death every matter that came before him. But Tagliabue forged a strong relationship with the late Gene Upshaw, head of the NFL Players Association, and presided over 17 years of uninterrupted labor peace after an unsettled decade that included two player strikes at the end of Rozelle’s reign.
Tagliabue and Upshaw got along so well that some people took to calling them co-commissioners, but Tagliabue, for all of his nuanced legal jargon, understood that without the players, there was no game. And guess what? The owners still made gobs and gobs of money on his watch, some of it from the expansion fees paid by four new teams. But the money was a by-product, not the stated goal.
With Goodell, the emphasis seems to be backward, with the money coming first — including his oft-quoted comment to the owners that he wanted to make the NFL a $25 billion business in the next decade. To that end, he has put a full schedule of NFL games on Thursday night to increase television revenue and seems to be moving in the direction of putting a team in London, something which many football people believe is a bad idea. He also gained a lot of money for the owners, at the expense of players, in a 2011 lockout that wiped out virtually the entire offseason.
But, OK, commissioners are supposed to make money for their team owners. The question is whether that should be a first priority, which seems to have become the case.
In that same magazine article in which Tagliabue referenced his “Bountygate” role, he said of Goodell: “If (the players) see you making decisions only in economic terms, they start to understand that, and question what you’re all about. There’s a huge intangible value in peace. There’s a huge intangible value in having allies.”
Goodell still has plenty of allies, the ones who count — team owners — but there are signs of rifts, including the comment from Bob Kraft, the Patriots’ owner, that he’ll expect an apology if his coach and quarterback are found innocent in the Deflategate case.
That is also, to be sure, an incident which makes outsiders question the NFL’s priorities. While the league huffs and puffs over Marshawn Lynch’s refusal to deal with the media and the color of his shoes, while great attention is paid to issues that have nothing at all to do with winning or losing football games, it seems scant notice is paid to things that do impact games, like the footballs themselves.
And like the Ray Rice case, we now are forced to hear once more about an outside investigator brought in after the fact and a case that will hover over the Super Bowl and then drag on for weeks or months.
In fact, it’s far too early to predict where that one is heading, but even Kraft, who is one of Goodell’s strongest and most influential supporters, has been critical of Goodell’s handling of the matter, a position no doubt influenced by Kraft’s own self-interest.
Nonetheless, it’s not likely that Goodell’s $44 million-a-year job is in any jeopardy, not as long as his bosses are rolling in money. But you have to wonder how many more times NFL owners can stomach their game being the lead on the network news at night for stories they would rather not hear about.
— Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than three decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.
