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Scroll down after the PFT article to read the whole article from the NY Times. A long read but well worth it if you're interested in the business of the NFL.
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http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...y-regarding-al-davis-still-influences-owners/
Animosity regarding Al Davis still influences owners
Posted by Mike Florio on February 3, 2016
In most businesses where decisions are influenced by factors that for any number of reasons shouldn’t influence decisions (in other words, in all businesses), discretion is exercised. When it comes to the NFL and decisions made involving the Raiders, discretion flies out the window, apparently.
An excellent, thorough, and at times biting portrait of the modern NFL and its Commissioner from Mark Leibovich of the New York Times Magazine includes new details about the January 12 ownership meeting that resulted in the Rams getting the first L.A. golden ticket.
“Everybody wins in this deal,’’ Dolphins owner Stephen M. Ross said to reporters while leaving the meeting.
‘‘What about the fans of St. Louis?’’ he was asked.
‘‘Well, somebody has to lose,’’ Ross said.
The Raiders also lose, and for reasons not entirely related to business merit. The Raiders lose because their partners hold a grudge.
‘‘Oakland gets nothing,’’ Texans owner Robert McNair. ‘‘Al used to sue us all the time.’’
McNair didn’t even join the league until 2002, and yet his feelings about the litigiousness of a man who had been dead for more than four years are blunt and raw. How do the owners who actually lived through the worst of the legal battles feel?
The comments from McNair underscore a sense that has been percolating around the league for years. The Raiders won’t move to L.A. as long as Mark Davis owns the team.
For his part, Davis seems to think his status comes from a perception that he’s not nearly as rich as his billionaire colleagues.
‘‘Everyone thinks I have no money,” Davis told Leibovich. ‘‘But I’ve got $500 million and a team.’’
As long as Davis still has that team, that team likely won’t have a spot in L.A., even if the Chargers decide to stay in San Diego. And the league, based on the attitude expressed by McNair, won’t be likely to do Davis any favors as a result of the perceived sins of his father, who if anything was decades ahead of the curve in pushing back against a business model that, as it always has been constructed, potentially violates multiple federal antitrust laws on a regular basis.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/m...l-machine.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
Roger Goodell on the sidelines before the N.F.C. championship game. Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
Why Haven’t Concussions Hurt the N.F.L.?
For all the revelations about the dangers pro football poses to its players, the sport is more popular than ever. How the commissioner Roger Goodell and a group of billionaire owners manage the league
in a time of crisis — and record profits.
By MARK LEIBOVICH/FEB. 3, 2016
Everywhere you go at the National Football League’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan, a Park Avenue enclave that feels both futuristic and retro at the same time, you encounter ‘‘the Shield.’’ The star-studded, upside-down nipple with a football floating on top adorns the front doors; it is painted on walls, carved into trophies, printed on napkins and mouse pads, inlaid in silver on a conference table, etched into cuff links and iced onto cookies.
All employees receive a Lucite Shield at the beginning of the season. Security guards in the lobby wear tiny Shield pins. The Shield is sacrosanct. It is a symbol of almost mystical power, and its display seems to be governed by some Constitution-like power. It stands for big notions, like ‘‘Respect,’’ ‘‘Resilience,’’ ‘‘Integrity’’ and ‘‘Responsibility to Team.’’ These words greet you in big letters on the glass entrance door.
‘‘The game has so many elements I think our country admires and respects,’’ Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, told me on Sunday, Jan. 24, about an hour before the Arizona Cardinals and the Carolina Panthers would kick off at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C. ‘‘It unites people. It gives people a chance to sort of come together and enjoy people around this country today.’’
On days like that, with back-to-back conference championship games, or this Sunday, with the 50th Super Bowl, the Shield might as well be the American flag. The sport provides a belief system at a time when faith in so many community institutions — government, religion, actual families — is weakening.
Though the Shield is itself a symbol of defense, it still requires safeguarding. Goodell, the league’s tightly coiled and sometimes embattled commissioner, is always going on about how his first job is to ‘‘protect the Shield.’’ It’s as if he is paid another huge bonus if he mentions the Shield enough. The Shield evokes gallant warriors and immovable forces, but it is also a reminder that the enterprise is under siege. When Goodell sits at his desk, he gazes upon a large rendering of the Shield on a back wall of his office. ‘‘It is a reminder to look out,’’ he says.
These are days of both great confidence and unease in professional football. As with any empire, there is a sense that for all its riches and popularity, the league is never far from some catastrophic demise. You hear talk of the N.F.L.’s ‘‘existential’’ challenges over player health and safety; the nation’s growing concern over concussions and degenerative brain disease; the drop in youth-football participation; lawsuits, regulatory roadblocks and disruptions to the broadcast model that the league’s modern business has been built on.
And yet, everyone wants a piece of the Shield. Put it on TV, and people will watch; put it on a jersey, they will wear it. The N.F.L.’s total revenue in 2015 ($12.4 billion) is nearly double that of a decade earlier ($6.6 billion). The price of television ads during the Super Bowl has increased by more than 75 percent over the last decade.
This year’s conference championship games set yet another viewership record for the league: 53.3 million people watched the A.F.C. game on CBS; 45.7 million watched the N.F.C. game on Fox. Goodell talks constantly about ‘‘growing the pie,’’ finding new revenue streams and ways to make the N.F.L. a ‘‘year-round’’ experience rather than just during fall and winter.
He has said he wants the N.F.L. to achieve $25 billion in gross revenue by 2027. No league is as relentless when it comes to growth and making cash for its billionaire cartel. It’s reminiscent of a shark that will die if it doesn’t keep moving and ripping little fish to shreds.
For as familiar as the Shield is, the group that owns it is a closed and mysterious club. These are the proprietors of the league’s teams — 31 of which are owned by individuals, families or partnerships, while the other (the Green Bay Packers) is owned by shareholder fans. As a collective, the N.F.L. owners are known within the league as the Membership.
The sport might represent the great spectacle of 21st-century America, played by extraordinary, bulked-up specimens before millions of viewers. But it’s these needy billionaires who own it. They are the heads of the football city-states that stir our civic passions and twist our moods from September to February. They are cutthroat businessmen and competitors, but they also envision themselves as noble stewards of the community.
‘‘We offer a respite,’’ Jerry Jones, the rascally owner of the Dallas Cowboys, told me. ‘‘We are a respite that moves you away from your trials and missteps, or my trials and missteps.’’ Jones describes a weekly display in which representatives from my town and your town meet up. ‘‘And we’ll just have a big old time, being relevant to one another.’’
‘‘Relevant’’ is a curiously timid concept in light of the N.F.L.’s dominance. But it, too, is heard with regularity in N.F.L. circles. Of course the league is relevant to contemporary America — as the Beatles are relevant to rock ’n’ roll. I thought of the news conference Bill Clinton gave in 1995 at a particularly low moment of his presidency. ‘‘I am relevant,’’ the most powerful man in the free world felt the need to say. ‘‘The Constitution gives me relevance.’’
For its current state of unmatched relevance, the Membership praises Roger Goodell, even if a good part of the football-watching and football-playing public does not. Since Goodell became the league commissioner in 2006, most of the Membership has seen the value of its franchises double (20 are now among the 50 most valuable sports franchises on the planet, according to Forbes).
Goodell understands leverage. ‘‘Whenever you have immense power like that, you’ve got the whip hand,’’ said Senator John McCain, who this season criticized the N.F.L. for charging the Department of Defense for promotional events for the military at league games. Goodell thinks little of success, more of the alternative. ‘‘I’m driven,’’ Goodell said. ‘‘I don’t like failure. Everything can change so fast in our society, for me or anyone else.’’
Another mantra I heard repeated around the N.F.L. headquarters is ‘‘Only the paranoid survive.’’ The phrase — popularized by Andrew Grove of Intel — is a Goodell favorite. During my three visits to the N.F.L.’s Park Avenue offices, I was always struck by the thick propaganda of the place. The N.F.L. Network plays at all times on big screens.
Every corporate office celebrates itself, to some degree, but the N.F.L.’s is particularly overwhelming, as if it were the sanctum of a highly successful megachurch marrying ESPN and Scientology. I had the strange feeling, as I waited in the lobby, that I was being watched, if not filmed.
On my first visit, Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.’s longtime communications director, took me to the cafeteria, known as the Huddle. We passed photo murals celebrating the various Members in their moments of triumph. He brought me an iced tea, sat me down and told me good stuff about the commissioner, good things about the league, big and heady numbers. He handed me positive fact sheets and articles and then, unprompted, summed things up: ‘‘Roger wins.’’
On another visit to the Huddle, I met Tod Leiweke, the league’s chief operating officer, who was hired last summer. Leiweke, a former Seattle Seahawks president, has brushed-back white hair, a sunny and almost New Agey manner and a beakish nose that makes him somewhat resemble an actual sea hawk. He wore a beige sweater with the Shield embroidered across his chest. Leiweke got to know Goodell on a climb up Mount Rainier with other executives.
Over lunch, he hurled mountain metaphors at me. ‘‘There are challenges to running the most successful league in the world,’’ he told me. ‘‘It’s like clouds on Rainier. Not everything’s perfect, but you fight through it.’’ He continued: ‘‘The league is trying to climb new mountains of its own.’’
He described Goodell as ‘‘convicted,’’ meaning, it seemed, having strong convictions. ‘‘Roger is hard-working, dedicated, convicted, tenacious,’’ he said. ‘‘He is an amazing, convicted guy.’’ He closed on message. ‘‘And he’s a winner.’’
My impression of Goodell, before I met him, was not favorable. I am a fan of the New England Patriots and like pretty much all Pats fans have an unshakeable belief that Goodell was farcically unfair to Tom Brady with his heavy-handed treatment of the quarterback’s possibly being ‘‘generally aware’’ that a minuscule amount of air pressure might have been removed from the footballs he used in last year’s A.F.C. championship game — the so-called Deflategate scandal.
Pats fans have company in their distaste for the commissioner. Goodell has come under blistering public criticism, periodic calls for his resignation and a procession of rebukes in court over a host of incidents and scandals — each knowable in shorthand (Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, the various ‘‘-gates’’). He is booed every year at the N.F.L. draft. There are sports bars with dartboards featuring his likeness. Goodell’s high profile is itself a testament to football’s runaway prosperity and popularity.
‘‘It’s like the old saying,’’ the Houston Texans’ owner, Robert C. McNair, told me. ‘‘The higher up the palm tree the monkey climbs, the more of his ass is exposed.’’ McNair laughed. He supports Goodell, although he thinks his astronomical salary makes him a target of easy resentment ($44 million in 2012 and $35 million in 2013 in salary and bonuses, the last years those numbers were available).
Every chief-executive job involves political duties, but watching Goodell, who is 56, evokes a most familiar mastery. I live in Washington and usually write about politics; Goodell — whose father, Charles Goodell, was a senator from New York — seems very much of that world. On camera, Goodell can come off as tight, smug and sanctimonious — a politician, and not a particularly compelling one.
Since the Ray Rice domestic-violence scandal of 2014, he rarely speaks to the news media in unsafe settings. He repeats himself often and recites talking points. ‘‘We’d like to see him more relaxed and smiling and answering the questions,’’ McNair said. ‘‘You know, he’s got all these legal advisers telling him you can’t say this or you can’t say that.’’
But as he worked the stadium from midfield before the N.F.C. championship game, Goodell’s schmoozing genes were elite. He moved among his constituents in a former jock’s ballet of bro-hugs and two-handed handgrips, punctuated with backslaps. He received guests, laughing easily if not for real. Goodell made sure to seek out Panthers executives, the Cardinals’ owner, referees and each head coach.
‘‘Come on, let’s walk,’’ Goodell told me. ‘‘If we don’t get away from the crowd, we’ll never get this done.’’ Goodell said he spends many N.F.L. Sundays watching games at home in Bronxville, north of New York City. He boasted about his man cave equipped with three TVs, which he watches simultaneously while checking multiple laptops.
He watches as a fan, as the commissioner and as a micromanager, firing off emails, making calls to his staff about everything from a referee’s call to something an announcer said to a promotion he caught that should not have aired. Goodell told me he spends most weekends watching game after game of football — pro, college and even high school. I asked him if he had seen ‘‘Concussion,’’ the Will Smith film about the devastating toll of head injuries in N.F.L. players and the league’s complicity in either ignoring or covering up the problem.
Goodell said he would get around to it. ‘‘I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been to a movie,’’ he told me, although in the next breath he said he had seen ‘‘The Intern,’’ starring Robert DeNiro, with his twin teenage daughters during the snowstorm the night before. Goodell then shoveled out his driveway so he and his wife could go to Soul Cycle on Sunday morning before he flew down to Charlotte via N.F.L. corporate jet. He likes people to know that he’s a workout fiend.
He gets up at 5:30, does his weights and cardio and gets ‘‘jazzed up’’ to start his day. He has no visible belly but always seems to be flexing his torso under tight blue suits. Goodell also likes it known that he used to play football in high school, and he appears to be especially energetic around N.F.L. players in their workplace.
More and more, the commissioner’s job is to serve as a protective buffer for the Membership. He talks about head injuries so that the owner of, say, the Buffalo Bills does not have to. No one called for the resignation of the Ravens’ owner, Steve Bisciotti, after the video of Ray Rice knocking out his girlfriend in an Atlantic City elevator went public.
Goodell testified before Congress on concussions in 2009 and listened to Representative Linda T. Sánchez of California compare the N.F.L. to the tobacco industry for its indifference to the physical harm being done to its players. ‘‘He is smooth, very smooth,” Jerry Jones said of Goodell. ‘‘I’d say he’s very classy. You see that kind of discipline and refinement.’’
Goodell was the middle of five boys born in seven years to Jean and Charles Goodell. His father was a moderate Republican congressman who was appointed to succeed Senator Robert F. Kennedy after Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. Charles Goodell was a favorite of President Richard M. Nixon until he turned against the Vietnam War and introduced a bill to end it.
The White House then turned against Goodell and worked to defeat him in the 1970 election. Roger, only a boy, followed his father everywhere on the campaign trail. From this, the commissioner learned the value of making tough and principled decisions, he says. He keeps a copy of his father’s Vietnam Disengagement Act on the wall of his office.
Goodell is married to Jane Skinner, a former Fox News anchor and the daughter of Samuel Skinner, a former transportation secretary and White House chief of staff under George Bush. As troubles have swirled around the league, Goodell has relied heavily on the counsel of Glover Park Group, the Washington lobbying, crisis and public-affairs giant. Joe Lockhart, a Glover Park founder and the White House press secretary for the Monica Lewinsky-era Bill Clinton, was recently named the N.F.L.’s executive vice president of communications; Cynthia Hogan, former counsel to Vice President Joe Biden, was hired after the Ray Rice affair to run the league’s strengthened public policy and government affairs arm.
One key to being a good politician is an ability to identify and prioritize constituencies. Goodell keeps a call sheet at his desk with the names of all the team owners. Their ranks are mostly male and mostly white, with a few exceptions, including Martha Firestone Ford, the 90-year-old widow of the Detroit Lions’ longtime owner, William Clay Ford, and Shahid Khan, the Pakistani-born businessman who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Goodell checks in with the Members at least once a month. He is solicitous and attentive and learns what issues are important to them — precisely what a good legislative leader would do with his caucus. By contrast, Goodell’s predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, had a more distant and even contemptuous relationship with the Membership.
He would deal with seven or eight prominent owners and mostly leave the rest to his staff. One player agent described Tagliabue, a cerebral lawyer, as a parental and elusive figure whom the Membership grew tired of, and vice versa. Tagliabue was the longtime outside counsel to the league, while Goodell spent his entire career in the league office. With Goodell, the Membership hired someone more like a younger brother.
Goodell serves at the Membership’s pleasure and carries out their wishes, except when he is fining them, taking their draft picks away and damaging their reputations. ‘‘How many jobs do you have where you actually can end up disciplining your boss?’’ Goodell wondered. But Goodell, who started working at the league after graduating from Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, never wanted to work anywhere else. ‘‘If there is one thing I want to accomplish in my life besides becoming commissioner of the N.F.L.,’’ he wrote to his father in a letter while in high school, ‘‘it is to make you proud of me.’’
Near the end of the N.F.L.’s regular season, I traveled to Arlington, Tex., to visit AT&T Stadium, the 80,000-seat pleasure palace that is home to the Dallas Cowboys and known as ‘‘Jerry’s World,’’ after the Cowboys’ owner. In keeping with modern N.F.L. meccas, football is just part of the broader entertainment and commercial experience there.
It includes a huge souvenir shop, which looks as if it could bring in more annual revenue than some National Hockey League franchises; a retractable roof; a massive high-definition video screen, which spans the two 20-yard lines; a gallery of contemporary art; and a $1.15 billion price tag. ‘‘We got the best hot dogs, the best French fries,’’ Jones told me as I walked with him through a private dining room bigger than my entire house.
Jones might be one of the more castigated owners in sports, in large part over his continued insistence after 27 years on being exhaustively involved in the team’s football operations (he holds the title of general manager, a rare designation among owners). The once-dynastic Cowboys have not been to a Super Bowl in two decades. ‘‘It’s numbing, it’s numbing, what’s happened to us,’’ Jones said as his team’s record sat at 3-8.
He is, in some ways, the embodiment of today’s N.F.L.: rich, bold, distracted, insecure and more than a little tone-deaf. He can also be irresistibly fun, with a big taste for Scotch, a gleam in his icy aqua eyes and a penchant for stem-winding parables that he will often stumble over but that will still make a strange kind of sense.
When I asked him why the N.F.L. could hum along so profitably despite the perennial crises it faces, Jones launched into something he once heard from a friend who owned a chain of Howard Johnson’s restaurants. He asked this friend how he could keep the tastes and flavors of the food consistent from franchise to franchise.
The answer: intensity. ‘‘If something is supposed to be cold, make it as cold as hot ice,’’ Jones said. ‘‘If it’s supposed to be hot, have it burn the roof of their mouth. Intensity covers up a lot of frailty in the taste and preparation.’’ Likewise, the intensity and drama of football can obscure the dangers, decadence and moral ambiguities inherent to the beloved blood sport.
Goodell with referees before the N.F.C. championship. Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
Owners like Jones tend to think of themselves as the geniuses behind the league. They are the ones who build the stadiums, lead the committees, spend their own money and then see their egos tossed up and down on a scoreboard every week. ‘‘Each team is a sovereign nation unto itself,’’ said Nate Jackson, who played six years in the N.F.L. with the Denver Broncos and later wrote a memoir, ‘‘Slow Getting Up.’’ ‘‘They have their own general and their own infantry. They have young men fighting old men’s battles.’’
The owners’ ranks are composed of a mix of new money and legacy owners from old-line N.F.L. families. Rivalries and petty grudges can play out in meetings, but the real face-offs happen by proxy. I talked by phone to Mark Wilf, a co-owner of the Minnesota Vikings, a few days after the Vikings were defeated by the Seattle Seahawks in the first round of the playoffs when the Vikings’ kicker, Blair Walsh, missed a 27-yard field goal in the final seconds (and later openly sobbed at his locker). Wilf grew up a Giants fan in New Jersey and used to take losses hard, he said. He remembered his father telling him: ‘‘It could be worse. You could be the owner.’’
I had watched the final seconds of the Vikings-Seahawks game on a TV in the concourse of Fed-Ex Field in suburban Maryland, where the Washington Redskins were hosting the Packers. I have always been fascinated by Daniel M. Snyder, the Redskins’ owner, whose unpopularity represents an extremely rare point of agreement among Democrats and Republicans in the capital. He has been pilloried on a variety of issues, from running off accomplished coaches and meddling in football decisions (the Redskins have made the playoffs only five times since he bought the team in 1999) to refusing to change the team name, which offends many.
I met Snyder for the first time a few days later in Houston, where he had joined his fellow Members in a special session to resolve which team, or teams, would move to Los Angeles. Snyder, who made his fortune in marketing, is known for aggressive revenue initiatives (at one point charging fans to watch training camp). These tactics might be unpopular to customers, but they have made the Redskins one of the league’s most valuable franchises.
Snyder was joined by Tony Wyllie, the Redskins’ public-relations representative, whose sole reason for flying all the way to Houston on Snyder’s jet seemed to be to babysit for my 10-minute meeting. Wyllie suggested strongly to me beforehand that Snyder does not like discussing ‘‘the name issue.’’
I found Snyder jittery and vulnerable and eager to present himself well. He said he supported Goodell (‘‘the Shield comes first’’). He struggled keeping eye contact. But what struck me most was the devastation that came over Snyder when he brought up his team’s loss to the Packers a few days earlier — which he did six separate times. ‘‘I can’t even talk about it,’’ Snyder said, shaking his head, and then talking about it. ‘‘I thought we were going to win that game, man.’’
He marveled over how great Aaron Rodgers, the Packers’ quarterback, was. ‘‘God almighty, this is just terrible,’’ he said. ‘‘This really, really hurts.’’ He said he grows jealous of other owners whose teams are still playing. I asked him how long it would take him to recover. ‘‘I’ll probably start to feel better after the Super Bowl,’’ he told me. ‘‘When all the teams are unbeaten again.’’
Certain members of the Membership are more influential than others to Goodell, though he will never admit this. Paul Allen, a Microsoft founder and the owner of the Seahawks, is almost never seen or heard from by the league. Neither is the Lions’ matriarch, Martha Firestone Ford, although she did browbeat Goodell at a meeting over terrible officiating. Goodell speaks most days to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ chairman, Daniel M. Rooney, the commissioner told me. Rooney, 83, is a former ambassador to Ireland and an N.F.L. elder statesman who knocked on the door of Goodell’s hotel room in 2006 to tell him that he had been elected commissioner.
There is a core of men you always hear described as ‘‘key owners.’’ They include heirs to old-line N.F.L. families — Art Rooney II of Pittsburgh (Daniel’s son), John K. Mara of the New York Giants and Clark Hunt of the Kansas City Chiefs. Then there are (relatively) newer, more classically entrepreneurial owners — Robert McNair in Houston, Jerry Richardson in Carolina, Jerry Jones in Dallas and Robert K. Kraft in New England.
It also says something about the generational and demographic makeup of the Membership that these influential ‘‘newer’’ owners are all white men in their 70s. They skew Republican. Mitt Romney was ridiculed in 2012 for asserting his love of football by boasting that some of his good friends owned N.F.L. teams; the Jets’ owner, Woody Johnson, is the national finance chairman for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign; McNair, the Texans’ owner and a big Republican donor, gave $10,000 last year to help repeal a ballot initiative in Houston that protected gays and lesbians from forms of discrimination.
McNair, 78, has a bald oval head and bears a slight resemblance to Mr. Clean. He speaks in a blunt drawl. I asked him what he thought of having his team featured last summer on the HBO reality show ‘‘Hard Knocks,’’ about life at an N.F.L. training camp. He said it was a net plus, although he was distraught over how much swearing there was and joked that Coach Bill O’Brien should introduce a cuss jar.
I asked McNair if he was as sensitive to other offensive language, specifically the N.F.L. team in the nation’s capital’s being named the Redskins. McNair told me that he grew up in western North Carolina, around many Cherokee Indians. ‘‘Everybody respected their courage,’’ McNair told me of the Indians. ‘‘They might not have respected the way they held their whiskey, but. . . .’’ He laughed. ‘‘We respected their courage. They’re very brave people.’’ Put McNair down as not offended by ‘‘Redskins.’’
In the middle of January, a kind of reality version of ‘‘Game of Thrones’’ played out among the Membership in Houston, as the owners tried to end the long-running saga to place a team in Los Angeles for the first time in 22 years. When I mentioned to Goodell that ‘‘The Membership’’ would be a good name for a reality-TV series (also for a Mafia movie, though I did not mention that), he said: ‘‘Oh, you could have a real good reality-TV show in our owners’ meetings.’’ Unfortunately, I was not allowed inside, and neither were any of the 200 or so media types who descended on this Membership huddle.
Outside, the citizens of various kingdoms massed. I befriended a group of Oakland Raiders fans who had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Westin Memorial City Hotel. They had traveled here from as far away as Northern California to display a giant black-and-silver flag and show support for their team’s staying in Oakland despite the efforts of the team owner, Mark Davis, to move the team to Los Angeles. They were joined, in smaller numbers, by fans of the San Diego Chargers and the St. Louis Rams, who were also at risk of seeing their teams bolt.
‘‘The Raiders are bigger than football,’’ a college student named Ray Perez said. Perez, who calls himself Dr. Death, wore a frizzy black wig and striped black-and-white jail pants. He relayed to me an important lesson that his Raider Nation mentor, Raider Jerry, had once imparted. Being a part of this brotherhood involves much more than being a sports fan. It is a form of giving back. Raider Nation is not a club, it’s a movement. ‘‘And it is a people-driven movement,’’ Dr. Death added. ‘‘We show the power of people coming together for something that we love and believe in.’’
Their power was limited here. The Membership ground through their day of private votes and deliberations in a meeting room upstairs. They were debating the merits of a proposed stadium project south of Los Angeles in Carson, Calif., that would become the home of the Chargers and possibly the Raiders, as well as a more ambitious extravaganza in Inglewood, on a 60-acre tract near Hollywood Park, that had been imagined by the Rams’ owner, Stan Kroenke.
Late in the day, Jerry Jones announced to the commissioner that if discussions went on much longer, he would have no choice but to escape to the hotel bar with the Lions’ Martha Firestone Ford (beer and wine were brought into the meeting room). Paul Allen, who never attends league meetings, showed up for the first time in five years and, according to one owner afterward, ‘‘didn’t shut up.’’
By nightfall, the tired tycoons began moving through the lobby en route to waiting limos that would ferry them to private jets and the hell out of Houston. Word emerged that the Membership had voted by secret ballot — 30-to-2 — in support of the Rams’ multibillion-dollar project in Inglewood. After the vote, Kroenke, a clunky-mannered real estate magnate with a charm quotient to rival the Rams’ meager win totals of recent years, joined Goodell for a news conference.
He has a pale and jowly countenance, an unruly comb-over and a ’70s-vintage mustache. He is known as ‘‘Silent Stan,’’ and the news conference was about as much as he had spoken publicly in years. ‘‘We spend a lot of resources trying to make sure that we stay relevant,’’ he said in a monotone-mumble. Ray Ratto, a Bay Area sportswriter, observed via Twitter that Kroenke looked as if he were ‘‘overdue for his next baby wombat blood injection.’’
I parked myself in the lobby and watched the owners escape. ‘‘Hey, y’all,’’ said Tom Benson, the New Orleans Saints’ 88-year-old owner, while rolling his wheelchair by. Jones held forth nursing a tumbler of Scotch. The Jets’ owner, Woody Johnson, strolled past him unbothered, wearing a suit and a Jansport backpack over both shoulders. ‘‘Everybody wins in this deal,’’ the Miami Dolphins’ owner, Stephen M. Ross, declared to a bank of reporters as he trailed Johnson out the door. ‘‘What about the fans of St. Louis?’’ someone in the gallery cracked. Ross shrugged. ‘‘Well, somebody has to lose,’’ he said.
Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who represents the abandoned fans of St. Louis, worked closely on the Rams’ relocation process. What is rankling about the league, she said afterward, is its insistence that it is driven by factors beyond the bottom line. ‘‘The money involved in the L.A. plan was irresistible for a league that is focused on growing it to a $25 billion enterprise,’’ McCaskill told me. She described Goodell as ‘‘careful.’’ ‘‘He is always trying to measure the most important constituency, which are the 32 owners, against all the other pressures,’’ she said.
The loser among the Membership was Mark Davis, the Everyman spawn of the Raiders’ outlaw founder, Al Davis. His father, who died in 2011, was at constant war with the league. He still engenders bad will among certain owners in a way that does no favors for his son. (‘‘Oakland gets nothing,’’ Robert McNair told me. ‘‘Al used to sue us all the time.’’) Mark Davis sports a blond version of the Jim Carrey bowl cut from ‘‘Dumb and Dumber.’’ (I could also see Captain Kangaroo.)
He wears a fanny pack, drives a 1997 Dodge Caravan, used to frequent Hooters for its all-you-can-eat-wings specials and looks every bit the misfit cousin who keeps showing up at the Membership’s Thanksgiving table. It could not have been easy being Al Davis’s son. As a practical matter, Mark Davis’s family baggage also includes a most unfortunate pre-existing condition — the worst ‘‘facility’’ in the league, Oakland’s O.co Coliseum, which he shares with the Athletics baseball team.
I found Mark Davis leaning against a couch and talking to a group of Raiders fans in the bar of the Westin late that night. He had changed into a powder blue sweatshirt and black-and-white sneakers and wore a relaxed air of resignation. I asked whether he was mad at Goodell. ‘‘Nah, I call Roger the pope,’’ Davis told me. I wondered why. ‘‘I like to bust his chops.’’ He is fully aware of his runt-of-the-litter standing within the Membership. ‘‘Everyone thinks I have no money,” Davis said. ‘‘But I’ve got $500 million and a team.’’
Back in September, the Patriots hosted the Pittsburgh Steelers in the N.F.L. Kick-Off. The season’s first game occurred just a week after a federal judge, Richard Berman, vacated the commissioner’s four-game suspension of Tom Brady over Deflategate, clearing him to start in the season opener. Goodell was nowhere to be found, except for his name and his face appearing on nasty signs throughout the stadium (‘‘Fire Goodell — Raise Your Moral Compass, N.F.L.’’). Brady led his team onto the field as the championship banner was unfurled and fireworks shot into the sky. Robert Kraft, the team’s owner, held up the team’s latest Super Bowl trophy, WWE style.
Two weeks earlier, Joe Thomas, a star offensive tackle for the Cleveland Browns, compared Goodell to the professional-wrestling impresario Vince McMahon in an ESPN interview. Thomas did this while voicing support for Brady, saying that the punishment for whatever the quarterback might have done with his footballs was akin to getting the death penalty for a minor traffic violation. Thomas also called the commissioner’s tactics ‘‘brilliant.’’
‘‘He’s made the N.F.L. relevant 365 [days a year] by having these outrageous, ridiculous witch hunts,’’ Thomas said of Goodell. ‘‘It’s made the game more popular than ever, and it’s become so much more of an entertainment business, and it’s making so much money.’’ He added: ‘‘It’s almost like the Kim Kardashian factor — that any news is good news when you’re in the N.F.L.’’ The Membership knows the power of a well-placed villain in the name of relevance. ‘‘Make no mistake about it: Legitimate negative criticism does not diminish interest,’’ Jones told me. ‘‘I know we have a huge element of fans that dislike the Cowboys,’’ he added with some pride.
I asked Goodell what it was like to be hated. Not just unpopular, but really hated, the way sports fans hate these days, with threats and vulgar tweets and increased police vigilance at his vacation home in Maine during the summer of Deflategate. He said it is part of the job. ‘‘You get knocked down, and you get up,’’ Goodell said. ‘‘Nobody cheers for the commissioner,’’ he added, quoting something the former commissioner Pete Rozelle used to tell him.
But Rozelle ran a much different N.F.L. and, maybe more to the point, at a very different time. The N.F.L. did not aspire to year-round relevance; the early N.F.L. drafts were a few dozen people in a hotel ballroom, as opposed to the three-day, nationally televised arena pageant they have now become. Limits were not pushed as far. ‘‘It’s like this thing I say around the office, ‘Believe in better,’ ’’ Goodell told me. ‘‘Everything can get better. It doesn’t matter if it’s ratings or attendance or anything. We can make it better if we really work at it.’’
The one nagging exception is the limits of what human bodies can endure. What if the players can’t keep up with the growth of the business and the intensity of the spectacle? What if they don’t want to and stop playing? Like anyone who has spent time around the league, Nate Jackson, the former Bronco, has heard a great deal about the Shield. ‘‘The thing is, isn’t a shield supposed to protect you?’’ Jackson asked me. ‘‘They want players to put their bodies in front of the shield, to sacrifice for this shield.’’
A few days before the conference championship games, Antwaan Randle El, a former wide receiver for the Steelers and the Redskins, said in an interview that he wished he had played baseball instead of football. At only 36, Randle El said he has bouts of memory loss. Goodell spun this news as a triumph of elevated awareness and more open discourse. ‘‘It’s part of the conversation,’’ he told me, meaning that players and former players feel free to ‘‘come forward’’ to discuss medical issues.
Rather than ever admitting the obvious — that the N.F.L. was late to recognize the frequency and dangers of concussions — he is fond of pointing out the number of ‘‘safety-related rule changes’’ the league has made during his tenure: 39, to be precise. And yet the number of concussions throughout the league is actually up this season.
Nate Jackson told me that for all Goodell’s evangelism about making the game safer, back in the locker room, it’s the same conversation as always. ‘‘Hit them as hard as you [expletive] can.’’ He called Goodell ‘‘a football politician, which is his perfect job’’ — someone who has brilliantly nurtured a system that grows the pie, expands to Europe and possibly Latin America and gains eyeballs trained on the ever-present Shield. The Shield is financial and cultural gold, proof that the system is working — at least for the Membership.
‘‘To me, the Shield was my loss of identity within a system,’’ Jackson said. ‘‘It was the suggestion that it was not about me. I was prepared to die to make a play. But the reason football is so dangerous is that the men making the decisions are not the ones getting hit.’’
As the kickoff of the N.F.C. championship game approached, Bank of America Stadium kept getting louder, until it got quiet. ‘‘Where’s the flag? I can’t find the flag,’’ Goodell said, scanning the field while preparing to observe ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’’ But instead of the song, it was a prayer that would precede the anthem and the rumble, and the commissioner closed his eyes and lowered his head.
Mark Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for the magazine. His last feature was a profile of Donald Trump.
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http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...y-regarding-al-davis-still-influences-owners/
Animosity regarding Al Davis still influences owners
Posted by Mike Florio on February 3, 2016
In most businesses where decisions are influenced by factors that for any number of reasons shouldn’t influence decisions (in other words, in all businesses), discretion is exercised. When it comes to the NFL and decisions made involving the Raiders, discretion flies out the window, apparently.
An excellent, thorough, and at times biting portrait of the modern NFL and its Commissioner from Mark Leibovich of the New York Times Magazine includes new details about the January 12 ownership meeting that resulted in the Rams getting the first L.A. golden ticket.
“Everybody wins in this deal,’’ Dolphins owner Stephen M. Ross said to reporters while leaving the meeting.
‘‘What about the fans of St. Louis?’’ he was asked.
‘‘Well, somebody has to lose,’’ Ross said.
The Raiders also lose, and for reasons not entirely related to business merit. The Raiders lose because their partners hold a grudge.
‘‘Oakland gets nothing,’’ Texans owner Robert McNair. ‘‘Al used to sue us all the time.’’
McNair didn’t even join the league until 2002, and yet his feelings about the litigiousness of a man who had been dead for more than four years are blunt and raw. How do the owners who actually lived through the worst of the legal battles feel?
The comments from McNair underscore a sense that has been percolating around the league for years. The Raiders won’t move to L.A. as long as Mark Davis owns the team.
For his part, Davis seems to think his status comes from a perception that he’s not nearly as rich as his billionaire colleagues.
‘‘Everyone thinks I have no money,” Davis told Leibovich. ‘‘But I’ve got $500 million and a team.’’
As long as Davis still has that team, that team likely won’t have a spot in L.A., even if the Chargers decide to stay in San Diego. And the league, based on the attitude expressed by McNair, won’t be likely to do Davis any favors as a result of the perceived sins of his father, who if anything was decades ahead of the curve in pushing back against a business model that, as it always has been constructed, potentially violates multiple federal antitrust laws on a regular basis.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/m...l-machine.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
Roger Goodell on the sidelines before the N.F.C. championship game. Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
Why Haven’t Concussions Hurt the N.F.L.?
For all the revelations about the dangers pro football poses to its players, the sport is more popular than ever. How the commissioner Roger Goodell and a group of billionaire owners manage the league
in a time of crisis — and record profits.
By MARK LEIBOVICH/FEB. 3, 2016
Everywhere you go at the National Football League’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan, a Park Avenue enclave that feels both futuristic and retro at the same time, you encounter ‘‘the Shield.’’ The star-studded, upside-down nipple with a football floating on top adorns the front doors; it is painted on walls, carved into trophies, printed on napkins and mouse pads, inlaid in silver on a conference table, etched into cuff links and iced onto cookies.
All employees receive a Lucite Shield at the beginning of the season. Security guards in the lobby wear tiny Shield pins. The Shield is sacrosanct. It is a symbol of almost mystical power, and its display seems to be governed by some Constitution-like power. It stands for big notions, like ‘‘Respect,’’ ‘‘Resilience,’’ ‘‘Integrity’’ and ‘‘Responsibility to Team.’’ These words greet you in big letters on the glass entrance door.
‘‘The game has so many elements I think our country admires and respects,’’ Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, told me on Sunday, Jan. 24, about an hour before the Arizona Cardinals and the Carolina Panthers would kick off at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C. ‘‘It unites people. It gives people a chance to sort of come together and enjoy people around this country today.’’
On days like that, with back-to-back conference championship games, or this Sunday, with the 50th Super Bowl, the Shield might as well be the American flag. The sport provides a belief system at a time when faith in so many community institutions — government, religion, actual families — is weakening.
Though the Shield is itself a symbol of defense, it still requires safeguarding. Goodell, the league’s tightly coiled and sometimes embattled commissioner, is always going on about how his first job is to ‘‘protect the Shield.’’ It’s as if he is paid another huge bonus if he mentions the Shield enough. The Shield evokes gallant warriors and immovable forces, but it is also a reminder that the enterprise is under siege. When Goodell sits at his desk, he gazes upon a large rendering of the Shield on a back wall of his office. ‘‘It is a reminder to look out,’’ he says.
These are days of both great confidence and unease in professional football. As with any empire, there is a sense that for all its riches and popularity, the league is never far from some catastrophic demise. You hear talk of the N.F.L.’s ‘‘existential’’ challenges over player health and safety; the nation’s growing concern over concussions and degenerative brain disease; the drop in youth-football participation; lawsuits, regulatory roadblocks and disruptions to the broadcast model that the league’s modern business has been built on.
And yet, everyone wants a piece of the Shield. Put it on TV, and people will watch; put it on a jersey, they will wear it. The N.F.L.’s total revenue in 2015 ($12.4 billion) is nearly double that of a decade earlier ($6.6 billion). The price of television ads during the Super Bowl has increased by more than 75 percent over the last decade.
This year’s conference championship games set yet another viewership record for the league: 53.3 million people watched the A.F.C. game on CBS; 45.7 million watched the N.F.C. game on Fox. Goodell talks constantly about ‘‘growing the pie,’’ finding new revenue streams and ways to make the N.F.L. a ‘‘year-round’’ experience rather than just during fall and winter.
He has said he wants the N.F.L. to achieve $25 billion in gross revenue by 2027. No league is as relentless when it comes to growth and making cash for its billionaire cartel. It’s reminiscent of a shark that will die if it doesn’t keep moving and ripping little fish to shreds.
For as familiar as the Shield is, the group that owns it is a closed and mysterious club. These are the proprietors of the league’s teams — 31 of which are owned by individuals, families or partnerships, while the other (the Green Bay Packers) is owned by shareholder fans. As a collective, the N.F.L. owners are known within the league as the Membership.
The sport might represent the great spectacle of 21st-century America, played by extraordinary, bulked-up specimens before millions of viewers. But it’s these needy billionaires who own it. They are the heads of the football city-states that stir our civic passions and twist our moods from September to February. They are cutthroat businessmen and competitors, but they also envision themselves as noble stewards of the community.
‘‘We offer a respite,’’ Jerry Jones, the rascally owner of the Dallas Cowboys, told me. ‘‘We are a respite that moves you away from your trials and missteps, or my trials and missteps.’’ Jones describes a weekly display in which representatives from my town and your town meet up. ‘‘And we’ll just have a big old time, being relevant to one another.’’
‘‘Relevant’’ is a curiously timid concept in light of the N.F.L.’s dominance. But it, too, is heard with regularity in N.F.L. circles. Of course the league is relevant to contemporary America — as the Beatles are relevant to rock ’n’ roll. I thought of the news conference Bill Clinton gave in 1995 at a particularly low moment of his presidency. ‘‘I am relevant,’’ the most powerful man in the free world felt the need to say. ‘‘The Constitution gives me relevance.’’
For its current state of unmatched relevance, the Membership praises Roger Goodell, even if a good part of the football-watching and football-playing public does not. Since Goodell became the league commissioner in 2006, most of the Membership has seen the value of its franchises double (20 are now among the 50 most valuable sports franchises on the planet, according to Forbes).
Goodell understands leverage. ‘‘Whenever you have immense power like that, you’ve got the whip hand,’’ said Senator John McCain, who this season criticized the N.F.L. for charging the Department of Defense for promotional events for the military at league games. Goodell thinks little of success, more of the alternative. ‘‘I’m driven,’’ Goodell said. ‘‘I don’t like failure. Everything can change so fast in our society, for me or anyone else.’’
Another mantra I heard repeated around the N.F.L. headquarters is ‘‘Only the paranoid survive.’’ The phrase — popularized by Andrew Grove of Intel — is a Goodell favorite. During my three visits to the N.F.L.’s Park Avenue offices, I was always struck by the thick propaganda of the place. The N.F.L. Network plays at all times on big screens.
Every corporate office celebrates itself, to some degree, but the N.F.L.’s is particularly overwhelming, as if it were the sanctum of a highly successful megachurch marrying ESPN and Scientology. I had the strange feeling, as I waited in the lobby, that I was being watched, if not filmed.
On my first visit, Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.’s longtime communications director, took me to the cafeteria, known as the Huddle. We passed photo murals celebrating the various Members in their moments of triumph. He brought me an iced tea, sat me down and told me good stuff about the commissioner, good things about the league, big and heady numbers. He handed me positive fact sheets and articles and then, unprompted, summed things up: ‘‘Roger wins.’’
On another visit to the Huddle, I met Tod Leiweke, the league’s chief operating officer, who was hired last summer. Leiweke, a former Seattle Seahawks president, has brushed-back white hair, a sunny and almost New Agey manner and a beakish nose that makes him somewhat resemble an actual sea hawk. He wore a beige sweater with the Shield embroidered across his chest. Leiweke got to know Goodell on a climb up Mount Rainier with other executives.
Over lunch, he hurled mountain metaphors at me. ‘‘There are challenges to running the most successful league in the world,’’ he told me. ‘‘It’s like clouds on Rainier. Not everything’s perfect, but you fight through it.’’ He continued: ‘‘The league is trying to climb new mountains of its own.’’
He described Goodell as ‘‘convicted,’’ meaning, it seemed, having strong convictions. ‘‘Roger is hard-working, dedicated, convicted, tenacious,’’ he said. ‘‘He is an amazing, convicted guy.’’ He closed on message. ‘‘And he’s a winner.’’
My impression of Goodell, before I met him, was not favorable. I am a fan of the New England Patriots and like pretty much all Pats fans have an unshakeable belief that Goodell was farcically unfair to Tom Brady with his heavy-handed treatment of the quarterback’s possibly being ‘‘generally aware’’ that a minuscule amount of air pressure might have been removed from the footballs he used in last year’s A.F.C. championship game — the so-called Deflategate scandal.
Pats fans have company in their distaste for the commissioner. Goodell has come under blistering public criticism, periodic calls for his resignation and a procession of rebukes in court over a host of incidents and scandals — each knowable in shorthand (Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, the various ‘‘-gates’’). He is booed every year at the N.F.L. draft. There are sports bars with dartboards featuring his likeness. Goodell’s high profile is itself a testament to football’s runaway prosperity and popularity.
‘‘It’s like the old saying,’’ the Houston Texans’ owner, Robert C. McNair, told me. ‘‘The higher up the palm tree the monkey climbs, the more of his ass is exposed.’’ McNair laughed. He supports Goodell, although he thinks his astronomical salary makes him a target of easy resentment ($44 million in 2012 and $35 million in 2013 in salary and bonuses, the last years those numbers were available).
Every chief-executive job involves political duties, but watching Goodell, who is 56, evokes a most familiar mastery. I live in Washington and usually write about politics; Goodell — whose father, Charles Goodell, was a senator from New York — seems very much of that world. On camera, Goodell can come off as tight, smug and sanctimonious — a politician, and not a particularly compelling one.
Since the Ray Rice domestic-violence scandal of 2014, he rarely speaks to the news media in unsafe settings. He repeats himself often and recites talking points. ‘‘We’d like to see him more relaxed and smiling and answering the questions,’’ McNair said. ‘‘You know, he’s got all these legal advisers telling him you can’t say this or you can’t say that.’’
But as he worked the stadium from midfield before the N.F.C. championship game, Goodell’s schmoozing genes were elite. He moved among his constituents in a former jock’s ballet of bro-hugs and two-handed handgrips, punctuated with backslaps. He received guests, laughing easily if not for real. Goodell made sure to seek out Panthers executives, the Cardinals’ owner, referees and each head coach.
‘‘Come on, let’s walk,’’ Goodell told me. ‘‘If we don’t get away from the crowd, we’ll never get this done.’’ Goodell said he spends many N.F.L. Sundays watching games at home in Bronxville, north of New York City. He boasted about his man cave equipped with three TVs, which he watches simultaneously while checking multiple laptops.
He watches as a fan, as the commissioner and as a micromanager, firing off emails, making calls to his staff about everything from a referee’s call to something an announcer said to a promotion he caught that should not have aired. Goodell told me he spends most weekends watching game after game of football — pro, college and even high school. I asked him if he had seen ‘‘Concussion,’’ the Will Smith film about the devastating toll of head injuries in N.F.L. players and the league’s complicity in either ignoring or covering up the problem.
Goodell said he would get around to it. ‘‘I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been to a movie,’’ he told me, although in the next breath he said he had seen ‘‘The Intern,’’ starring Robert DeNiro, with his twin teenage daughters during the snowstorm the night before. Goodell then shoveled out his driveway so he and his wife could go to Soul Cycle on Sunday morning before he flew down to Charlotte via N.F.L. corporate jet. He likes people to know that he’s a workout fiend.
He gets up at 5:30, does his weights and cardio and gets ‘‘jazzed up’’ to start his day. He has no visible belly but always seems to be flexing his torso under tight blue suits. Goodell also likes it known that he used to play football in high school, and he appears to be especially energetic around N.F.L. players in their workplace.
More and more, the commissioner’s job is to serve as a protective buffer for the Membership. He talks about head injuries so that the owner of, say, the Buffalo Bills does not have to. No one called for the resignation of the Ravens’ owner, Steve Bisciotti, after the video of Ray Rice knocking out his girlfriend in an Atlantic City elevator went public.
Goodell testified before Congress on concussions in 2009 and listened to Representative Linda T. Sánchez of California compare the N.F.L. to the tobacco industry for its indifference to the physical harm being done to its players. ‘‘He is smooth, very smooth,” Jerry Jones said of Goodell. ‘‘I’d say he’s very classy. You see that kind of discipline and refinement.’’
Goodell was the middle of five boys born in seven years to Jean and Charles Goodell. His father was a moderate Republican congressman who was appointed to succeed Senator Robert F. Kennedy after Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. Charles Goodell was a favorite of President Richard M. Nixon until he turned against the Vietnam War and introduced a bill to end it.
The White House then turned against Goodell and worked to defeat him in the 1970 election. Roger, only a boy, followed his father everywhere on the campaign trail. From this, the commissioner learned the value of making tough and principled decisions, he says. He keeps a copy of his father’s Vietnam Disengagement Act on the wall of his office.
Goodell is married to Jane Skinner, a former Fox News anchor and the daughter of Samuel Skinner, a former transportation secretary and White House chief of staff under George Bush. As troubles have swirled around the league, Goodell has relied heavily on the counsel of Glover Park Group, the Washington lobbying, crisis and public-affairs giant. Joe Lockhart, a Glover Park founder and the White House press secretary for the Monica Lewinsky-era Bill Clinton, was recently named the N.F.L.’s executive vice president of communications; Cynthia Hogan, former counsel to Vice President Joe Biden, was hired after the Ray Rice affair to run the league’s strengthened public policy and government affairs arm.
One key to being a good politician is an ability to identify and prioritize constituencies. Goodell keeps a call sheet at his desk with the names of all the team owners. Their ranks are mostly male and mostly white, with a few exceptions, including Martha Firestone Ford, the 90-year-old widow of the Detroit Lions’ longtime owner, William Clay Ford, and Shahid Khan, the Pakistani-born businessman who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Goodell checks in with the Members at least once a month. He is solicitous and attentive and learns what issues are important to them — precisely what a good legislative leader would do with his caucus. By contrast, Goodell’s predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, had a more distant and even contemptuous relationship with the Membership.
He would deal with seven or eight prominent owners and mostly leave the rest to his staff. One player agent described Tagliabue, a cerebral lawyer, as a parental and elusive figure whom the Membership grew tired of, and vice versa. Tagliabue was the longtime outside counsel to the league, while Goodell spent his entire career in the league office. With Goodell, the Membership hired someone more like a younger brother.
Goodell serves at the Membership’s pleasure and carries out their wishes, except when he is fining them, taking their draft picks away and damaging their reputations. ‘‘How many jobs do you have where you actually can end up disciplining your boss?’’ Goodell wondered. But Goodell, who started working at the league after graduating from Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, never wanted to work anywhere else. ‘‘If there is one thing I want to accomplish in my life besides becoming commissioner of the N.F.L.,’’ he wrote to his father in a letter while in high school, ‘‘it is to make you proud of me.’’
Near the end of the N.F.L.’s regular season, I traveled to Arlington, Tex., to visit AT&T Stadium, the 80,000-seat pleasure palace that is home to the Dallas Cowboys and known as ‘‘Jerry’s World,’’ after the Cowboys’ owner. In keeping with modern N.F.L. meccas, football is just part of the broader entertainment and commercial experience there.
It includes a huge souvenir shop, which looks as if it could bring in more annual revenue than some National Hockey League franchises; a retractable roof; a massive high-definition video screen, which spans the two 20-yard lines; a gallery of contemporary art; and a $1.15 billion price tag. ‘‘We got the best hot dogs, the best French fries,’’ Jones told me as I walked with him through a private dining room bigger than my entire house.
Jones might be one of the more castigated owners in sports, in large part over his continued insistence after 27 years on being exhaustively involved in the team’s football operations (he holds the title of general manager, a rare designation among owners). The once-dynastic Cowboys have not been to a Super Bowl in two decades. ‘‘It’s numbing, it’s numbing, what’s happened to us,’’ Jones said as his team’s record sat at 3-8.
He is, in some ways, the embodiment of today’s N.F.L.: rich, bold, distracted, insecure and more than a little tone-deaf. He can also be irresistibly fun, with a big taste for Scotch, a gleam in his icy aqua eyes and a penchant for stem-winding parables that he will often stumble over but that will still make a strange kind of sense.
When I asked him why the N.F.L. could hum along so profitably despite the perennial crises it faces, Jones launched into something he once heard from a friend who owned a chain of Howard Johnson’s restaurants. He asked this friend how he could keep the tastes and flavors of the food consistent from franchise to franchise.
The answer: intensity. ‘‘If something is supposed to be cold, make it as cold as hot ice,’’ Jones said. ‘‘If it’s supposed to be hot, have it burn the roof of their mouth. Intensity covers up a lot of frailty in the taste and preparation.’’ Likewise, the intensity and drama of football can obscure the dangers, decadence and moral ambiguities inherent to the beloved blood sport.
Goodell with referees before the N.F.C. championship. Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
Owners like Jones tend to think of themselves as the geniuses behind the league. They are the ones who build the stadiums, lead the committees, spend their own money and then see their egos tossed up and down on a scoreboard every week. ‘‘Each team is a sovereign nation unto itself,’’ said Nate Jackson, who played six years in the N.F.L. with the Denver Broncos and later wrote a memoir, ‘‘Slow Getting Up.’’ ‘‘They have their own general and their own infantry. They have young men fighting old men’s battles.’’
The owners’ ranks are composed of a mix of new money and legacy owners from old-line N.F.L. families. Rivalries and petty grudges can play out in meetings, but the real face-offs happen by proxy. I talked by phone to Mark Wilf, a co-owner of the Minnesota Vikings, a few days after the Vikings were defeated by the Seattle Seahawks in the first round of the playoffs when the Vikings’ kicker, Blair Walsh, missed a 27-yard field goal in the final seconds (and later openly sobbed at his locker). Wilf grew up a Giants fan in New Jersey and used to take losses hard, he said. He remembered his father telling him: ‘‘It could be worse. You could be the owner.’’
I had watched the final seconds of the Vikings-Seahawks game on a TV in the concourse of Fed-Ex Field in suburban Maryland, where the Washington Redskins were hosting the Packers. I have always been fascinated by Daniel M. Snyder, the Redskins’ owner, whose unpopularity represents an extremely rare point of agreement among Democrats and Republicans in the capital. He has been pilloried on a variety of issues, from running off accomplished coaches and meddling in football decisions (the Redskins have made the playoffs only five times since he bought the team in 1999) to refusing to change the team name, which offends many.
I met Snyder for the first time a few days later in Houston, where he had joined his fellow Members in a special session to resolve which team, or teams, would move to Los Angeles. Snyder, who made his fortune in marketing, is known for aggressive revenue initiatives (at one point charging fans to watch training camp). These tactics might be unpopular to customers, but they have made the Redskins one of the league’s most valuable franchises.
Snyder was joined by Tony Wyllie, the Redskins’ public-relations representative, whose sole reason for flying all the way to Houston on Snyder’s jet seemed to be to babysit for my 10-minute meeting. Wyllie suggested strongly to me beforehand that Snyder does not like discussing ‘‘the name issue.’’
I found Snyder jittery and vulnerable and eager to present himself well. He said he supported Goodell (‘‘the Shield comes first’’). He struggled keeping eye contact. But what struck me most was the devastation that came over Snyder when he brought up his team’s loss to the Packers a few days earlier — which he did six separate times. ‘‘I can’t even talk about it,’’ Snyder said, shaking his head, and then talking about it. ‘‘I thought we were going to win that game, man.’’
He marveled over how great Aaron Rodgers, the Packers’ quarterback, was. ‘‘God almighty, this is just terrible,’’ he said. ‘‘This really, really hurts.’’ He said he grows jealous of other owners whose teams are still playing. I asked him how long it would take him to recover. ‘‘I’ll probably start to feel better after the Super Bowl,’’ he told me. ‘‘When all the teams are unbeaten again.’’
Certain members of the Membership are more influential than others to Goodell, though he will never admit this. Paul Allen, a Microsoft founder and the owner of the Seahawks, is almost never seen or heard from by the league. Neither is the Lions’ matriarch, Martha Firestone Ford, although she did browbeat Goodell at a meeting over terrible officiating. Goodell speaks most days to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ chairman, Daniel M. Rooney, the commissioner told me. Rooney, 83, is a former ambassador to Ireland and an N.F.L. elder statesman who knocked on the door of Goodell’s hotel room in 2006 to tell him that he had been elected commissioner.
There is a core of men you always hear described as ‘‘key owners.’’ They include heirs to old-line N.F.L. families — Art Rooney II of Pittsburgh (Daniel’s son), John K. Mara of the New York Giants and Clark Hunt of the Kansas City Chiefs. Then there are (relatively) newer, more classically entrepreneurial owners — Robert McNair in Houston, Jerry Richardson in Carolina, Jerry Jones in Dallas and Robert K. Kraft in New England.
It also says something about the generational and demographic makeup of the Membership that these influential ‘‘newer’’ owners are all white men in their 70s. They skew Republican. Mitt Romney was ridiculed in 2012 for asserting his love of football by boasting that some of his good friends owned N.F.L. teams; the Jets’ owner, Woody Johnson, is the national finance chairman for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign; McNair, the Texans’ owner and a big Republican donor, gave $10,000 last year to help repeal a ballot initiative in Houston that protected gays and lesbians from forms of discrimination.
McNair, 78, has a bald oval head and bears a slight resemblance to Mr. Clean. He speaks in a blunt drawl. I asked him what he thought of having his team featured last summer on the HBO reality show ‘‘Hard Knocks,’’ about life at an N.F.L. training camp. He said it was a net plus, although he was distraught over how much swearing there was and joked that Coach Bill O’Brien should introduce a cuss jar.
I asked McNair if he was as sensitive to other offensive language, specifically the N.F.L. team in the nation’s capital’s being named the Redskins. McNair told me that he grew up in western North Carolina, around many Cherokee Indians. ‘‘Everybody respected their courage,’’ McNair told me of the Indians. ‘‘They might not have respected the way they held their whiskey, but. . . .’’ He laughed. ‘‘We respected their courage. They’re very brave people.’’ Put McNair down as not offended by ‘‘Redskins.’’
In the middle of January, a kind of reality version of ‘‘Game of Thrones’’ played out among the Membership in Houston, as the owners tried to end the long-running saga to place a team in Los Angeles for the first time in 22 years. When I mentioned to Goodell that ‘‘The Membership’’ would be a good name for a reality-TV series (also for a Mafia movie, though I did not mention that), he said: ‘‘Oh, you could have a real good reality-TV show in our owners’ meetings.’’ Unfortunately, I was not allowed inside, and neither were any of the 200 or so media types who descended on this Membership huddle.
Outside, the citizens of various kingdoms massed. I befriended a group of Oakland Raiders fans who had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Westin Memorial City Hotel. They had traveled here from as far away as Northern California to display a giant black-and-silver flag and show support for their team’s staying in Oakland despite the efforts of the team owner, Mark Davis, to move the team to Los Angeles. They were joined, in smaller numbers, by fans of the San Diego Chargers and the St. Louis Rams, who were also at risk of seeing their teams bolt.
‘‘The Raiders are bigger than football,’’ a college student named Ray Perez said. Perez, who calls himself Dr. Death, wore a frizzy black wig and striped black-and-white jail pants. He relayed to me an important lesson that his Raider Nation mentor, Raider Jerry, had once imparted. Being a part of this brotherhood involves much more than being a sports fan. It is a form of giving back. Raider Nation is not a club, it’s a movement. ‘‘And it is a people-driven movement,’’ Dr. Death added. ‘‘We show the power of people coming together for something that we love and believe in.’’
Their power was limited here. The Membership ground through their day of private votes and deliberations in a meeting room upstairs. They were debating the merits of a proposed stadium project south of Los Angeles in Carson, Calif., that would become the home of the Chargers and possibly the Raiders, as well as a more ambitious extravaganza in Inglewood, on a 60-acre tract near Hollywood Park, that had been imagined by the Rams’ owner, Stan Kroenke.
Late in the day, Jerry Jones announced to the commissioner that if discussions went on much longer, he would have no choice but to escape to the hotel bar with the Lions’ Martha Firestone Ford (beer and wine were brought into the meeting room). Paul Allen, who never attends league meetings, showed up for the first time in five years and, according to one owner afterward, ‘‘didn’t shut up.’’
By nightfall, the tired tycoons began moving through the lobby en route to waiting limos that would ferry them to private jets and the hell out of Houston. Word emerged that the Membership had voted by secret ballot — 30-to-2 — in support of the Rams’ multibillion-dollar project in Inglewood. After the vote, Kroenke, a clunky-mannered real estate magnate with a charm quotient to rival the Rams’ meager win totals of recent years, joined Goodell for a news conference.
He has a pale and jowly countenance, an unruly comb-over and a ’70s-vintage mustache. He is known as ‘‘Silent Stan,’’ and the news conference was about as much as he had spoken publicly in years. ‘‘We spend a lot of resources trying to make sure that we stay relevant,’’ he said in a monotone-mumble. Ray Ratto, a Bay Area sportswriter, observed via Twitter that Kroenke looked as if he were ‘‘overdue for his next baby wombat blood injection.’’
I parked myself in the lobby and watched the owners escape. ‘‘Hey, y’all,’’ said Tom Benson, the New Orleans Saints’ 88-year-old owner, while rolling his wheelchair by. Jones held forth nursing a tumbler of Scotch. The Jets’ owner, Woody Johnson, strolled past him unbothered, wearing a suit and a Jansport backpack over both shoulders. ‘‘Everybody wins in this deal,’’ the Miami Dolphins’ owner, Stephen M. Ross, declared to a bank of reporters as he trailed Johnson out the door. ‘‘What about the fans of St. Louis?’’ someone in the gallery cracked. Ross shrugged. ‘‘Well, somebody has to lose,’’ he said.
Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who represents the abandoned fans of St. Louis, worked closely on the Rams’ relocation process. What is rankling about the league, she said afterward, is its insistence that it is driven by factors beyond the bottom line. ‘‘The money involved in the L.A. plan was irresistible for a league that is focused on growing it to a $25 billion enterprise,’’ McCaskill told me. She described Goodell as ‘‘careful.’’ ‘‘He is always trying to measure the most important constituency, which are the 32 owners, against all the other pressures,’’ she said.
The loser among the Membership was Mark Davis, the Everyman spawn of the Raiders’ outlaw founder, Al Davis. His father, who died in 2011, was at constant war with the league. He still engenders bad will among certain owners in a way that does no favors for his son. (‘‘Oakland gets nothing,’’ Robert McNair told me. ‘‘Al used to sue us all the time.’’) Mark Davis sports a blond version of the Jim Carrey bowl cut from ‘‘Dumb and Dumber.’’ (I could also see Captain Kangaroo.)
He wears a fanny pack, drives a 1997 Dodge Caravan, used to frequent Hooters for its all-you-can-eat-wings specials and looks every bit the misfit cousin who keeps showing up at the Membership’s Thanksgiving table. It could not have been easy being Al Davis’s son. As a practical matter, Mark Davis’s family baggage also includes a most unfortunate pre-existing condition — the worst ‘‘facility’’ in the league, Oakland’s O.co Coliseum, which he shares with the Athletics baseball team.
I found Mark Davis leaning against a couch and talking to a group of Raiders fans in the bar of the Westin late that night. He had changed into a powder blue sweatshirt and black-and-white sneakers and wore a relaxed air of resignation. I asked whether he was mad at Goodell. ‘‘Nah, I call Roger the pope,’’ Davis told me. I wondered why. ‘‘I like to bust his chops.’’ He is fully aware of his runt-of-the-litter standing within the Membership. ‘‘Everyone thinks I have no money,” Davis said. ‘‘But I’ve got $500 million and a team.’’
Back in September, the Patriots hosted the Pittsburgh Steelers in the N.F.L. Kick-Off. The season’s first game occurred just a week after a federal judge, Richard Berman, vacated the commissioner’s four-game suspension of Tom Brady over Deflategate, clearing him to start in the season opener. Goodell was nowhere to be found, except for his name and his face appearing on nasty signs throughout the stadium (‘‘Fire Goodell — Raise Your Moral Compass, N.F.L.’’). Brady led his team onto the field as the championship banner was unfurled and fireworks shot into the sky. Robert Kraft, the team’s owner, held up the team’s latest Super Bowl trophy, WWE style.
Two weeks earlier, Joe Thomas, a star offensive tackle for the Cleveland Browns, compared Goodell to the professional-wrestling impresario Vince McMahon in an ESPN interview. Thomas did this while voicing support for Brady, saying that the punishment for whatever the quarterback might have done with his footballs was akin to getting the death penalty for a minor traffic violation. Thomas also called the commissioner’s tactics ‘‘brilliant.’’
‘‘He’s made the N.F.L. relevant 365 [days a year] by having these outrageous, ridiculous witch hunts,’’ Thomas said of Goodell. ‘‘It’s made the game more popular than ever, and it’s become so much more of an entertainment business, and it’s making so much money.’’ He added: ‘‘It’s almost like the Kim Kardashian factor — that any news is good news when you’re in the N.F.L.’’ The Membership knows the power of a well-placed villain in the name of relevance. ‘‘Make no mistake about it: Legitimate negative criticism does not diminish interest,’’ Jones told me. ‘‘I know we have a huge element of fans that dislike the Cowboys,’’ he added with some pride.
I asked Goodell what it was like to be hated. Not just unpopular, but really hated, the way sports fans hate these days, with threats and vulgar tweets and increased police vigilance at his vacation home in Maine during the summer of Deflategate. He said it is part of the job. ‘‘You get knocked down, and you get up,’’ Goodell said. ‘‘Nobody cheers for the commissioner,’’ he added, quoting something the former commissioner Pete Rozelle used to tell him.
But Rozelle ran a much different N.F.L. and, maybe more to the point, at a very different time. The N.F.L. did not aspire to year-round relevance; the early N.F.L. drafts were a few dozen people in a hotel ballroom, as opposed to the three-day, nationally televised arena pageant they have now become. Limits were not pushed as far. ‘‘It’s like this thing I say around the office, ‘Believe in better,’ ’’ Goodell told me. ‘‘Everything can get better. It doesn’t matter if it’s ratings or attendance or anything. We can make it better if we really work at it.’’
The one nagging exception is the limits of what human bodies can endure. What if the players can’t keep up with the growth of the business and the intensity of the spectacle? What if they don’t want to and stop playing? Like anyone who has spent time around the league, Nate Jackson, the former Bronco, has heard a great deal about the Shield. ‘‘The thing is, isn’t a shield supposed to protect you?’’ Jackson asked me. ‘‘They want players to put their bodies in front of the shield, to sacrifice for this shield.’’
A few days before the conference championship games, Antwaan Randle El, a former wide receiver for the Steelers and the Redskins, said in an interview that he wished he had played baseball instead of football. At only 36, Randle El said he has bouts of memory loss. Goodell spun this news as a triumph of elevated awareness and more open discourse. ‘‘It’s part of the conversation,’’ he told me, meaning that players and former players feel free to ‘‘come forward’’ to discuss medical issues.
Rather than ever admitting the obvious — that the N.F.L. was late to recognize the frequency and dangers of concussions — he is fond of pointing out the number of ‘‘safety-related rule changes’’ the league has made during his tenure: 39, to be precise. And yet the number of concussions throughout the league is actually up this season.
Nate Jackson told me that for all Goodell’s evangelism about making the game safer, back in the locker room, it’s the same conversation as always. ‘‘Hit them as hard as you [expletive] can.’’ He called Goodell ‘‘a football politician, which is his perfect job’’ — someone who has brilliantly nurtured a system that grows the pie, expands to Europe and possibly Latin America and gains eyeballs trained on the ever-present Shield. The Shield is financial and cultural gold, proof that the system is working — at least for the Membership.
‘‘To me, the Shield was my loss of identity within a system,’’ Jackson said. ‘‘It was the suggestion that it was not about me. I was prepared to die to make a play. But the reason football is so dangerous is that the men making the decisions are not the ones getting hit.’’
As the kickoff of the N.F.C. championship game approached, Bank of America Stadium kept getting louder, until it got quiet. ‘‘Where’s the flag? I can’t find the flag,’’ Goodell said, scanning the field while preparing to observe ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’’ But instead of the song, it was a prayer that would precede the anthem and the rumble, and the commissioner closed his eyes and lowered his head.
Mark Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for the magazine. His last feature was a profile of Donald Trump.
