There was a moment during NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s yearly press conference Monday where his words on gambling from 2012—TL;DR, it’s bad and it’s going to make people suspect something fishy is happening each and every time a bizarre occurrence takes place in the game—were read back to him. And inside the Raiders’ locker room, where the press conference was taking place, a strange kind of banging sound could be heard through the room like when the heat kicks on inside an old house.
If Goodell were to ever run from something, if there was ever going to be some kind of flashbang dropped through the ductwork and he could make his escape like the Dave Chappelle president, this was it. He, at one point, said it was bad and now we’re doing it. Maybe the noise echoing through the room was signaling the arrival of the getaway mobile.
Alas, what followed was a benign response about the Supreme Court legalizing sports gambling and the NFL assuming the position of adaptation. There was little in the way of fireworks, even when colleague Albert Breer asked about a report at Pro Football Talk, which mentioned Goodell being quoted as saying the league needed to launch “a ground war” to deflate reporting on concussions he deemed irresponsible.
It got me wondering about what this press conference had become and what it was intended to do. Goodell was prepared for everything. He didn’t stumble, even when one reporter asked him “how much money [he’s going to continue to take] from the little man” in regards to the league streaming a playoff game on Peacock (God bless that hero). I think it’s strange and far too inside football to say someone won or lost a press conference, but Goodell never tipped the canoe. He might consider himself a victor.
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Goodell has become so effective as a human shield that he has been leathered to almost any and all controversies. Think about the weight of what we have experienced through the lens of the NFL over the past decade. I have called for him to be more demonstrative, less cagey or openly hypocritical over the years. This year, it became clear that the stone facade is part of his staying power. The ability to bury a press conference into the league’s Super Bowl Opening Night is a skill. So is the ability to say nothing that would jeopardize the peaceful transition from serious questions about the game’s integrity, its commitment to diversity or player health and safety, and the Chiefs’ mascot doing backflips with the Blue Man Group.
So, we should be thinking bigger in terms of what we expect out of the actual league ownership when it comes to being accountable on league matters.
I’m never one for limiting access, so if preparing a question for the commissioner is the only way to deem someone in the NFL publicly accountable, then so be it. But it makes me long for a handful of press conferences back to back. Four owners on a podium, division by division, 45 minutes each. There, we’d see someone far less able to take a question and break it down into powdery nothingness. There, we would see some real human discomfort. There, we would see someone taking a verbal haymaker and believing that it was heard.
The reason this doesn’t happen, of course, is because Goodell is hired to do as much. He takes the body blows. He absorbs the discomfort. He practices for this. He has perfected the lane in which he can operate: with light contempt being on one side of the emotional spectrum, and limited, playful banter on the other.
And, great reporters everywhere will keep taking swings like the great stonecutter, Lord willing.
However, if all is so great, why wouldn’t the owners want to take the league’s biggest stage and do what they do best: suck up all the credit when something is going well? If this was truly the plan and the plan was amazing and the process is processing, why don’t they all want to tell us about it? If the transition to gambling is without faults or massive societal repercussions, if the league’s diverse employees truly feel seen, heard and represented, if the players feel like they are operating on the best playing surfaces, then having owners come and speak about it shouldn’t be an issue.
Only they can answer that, and they never will, because, to them, the perfect answer to any question is a nonanswer. Every year now, we receive a clinic in as much.
