Over the past 63 years Americans have known 13 presidents but just three NFL commissioners. Pete Rozelle was the chain-smoking visionary who consolidated pro football into a made-for-TV sport from the 1960s through to the 80s. Paul Tagliabue was the fin-de-siecle pragmatist who expanded the game’s reach and fought for diversity and inclusion. Roger Goodell? He’s the fair-haired political hack with the vise-like grip on the office.
On Wednesday the NFL announced that their top executive had agreed to a contract extension through 2027 – stretching Goodell’s overall tenure, which began in 2006, to at least 21 years. That’s four more than Tagliabue, his former boss and mentor, and nine years longer than Goodell’s own father served in Congress. “Quite simple, honestly” is how the 64-year-old characterized his extension talks with the league’s 32 owners, “just a matter of getting to it, frankly.”
He was equally blasé running through his gameplan for the league going forward, an agenda he punted to the owners. “When we talked about the long-range plan, we talked about, ‘This is your long-range plan,’” he droned in a typically dull news conference. “There are a lot of challenges out there, but there are also a lot of opportunities for us.”
This is Goodell in a nutshell: oblique, uninspiring and thoroughly beholden to the cabal that put him in power. He has been a faithful servant, returning not one but two franchises to Los Angeles, securing labor peace with the players through 2030 and a TV rights extension that could well hoover in more than $120bn over the next decade. The impact on team values during Goodell’s reign is no less outsized. When the Minnesota Vikings changed hands just before Goodell took over as commissioner, the closing price was $600m; earlier this year the Washington Commanders sold for 10 times that. “He’s done so much for the league with stability,” Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay said in May. “It’s a tough job, but he’s worked very hard for the NFL and its success.”
Goodell’s bald servility has made him a very rich man. His last contract extension in 2017 was speculated to have paid him $40m a year, or about what Dak Prescott makes to quarterback the Dallas Cowboys. The new extension – reportedly, an even sweeter package tied to the league’s continued economic prosperity – puts Goodell on track for $700m in career earnings, effectively making him about as rich as some of his ‘poorer’ owner bosses. When they initially huddled together last year to consider whether to continue paying Goodell, an altercation broke out between Jerry Jones, humble steward of the world’s most valuable sports franchise, and the New England Patriots’ owner and NFL’s compensation committee chair, Bob Kraft.
His fellow sports commissioners are a different breed. The NBA’s Adam Silver relates more closely to players. Baseball purists are convinced MLB’s Rob Manfred is a saboteur. Goodel, meanwhile, is a shameless brand manager who values the league’s image above all else. If you let him tell it, NFL football isn’t outright dangerous or overly masculine or ultra-conservative; rather, it’s the wholesome through-line that binds families, communities and a fragile national patchwork. The NFL’s undying popularity would seem to back him up.
On viewership alone the league is a ratings monster, more watched than any presidential address or awards show by a significant margin. The Super Bowl has reliably drawn more than 100 million viewers since 2009; clearly drunk off that success, Goodell isn’t even hiding his longing to do the unthinkable and move this American holiday to London or elsewhere abroad.
While Warner Bros’ David Zaslav and Disney’s Bob Iger sweat over fragmented audiences and eroding market share, and executives in rival sports monopolies struggle to keep eyeballs trained, Goodell leveraged an historic 17th regular-season game from the players, scored a quick $110m from Peacock for a one-off playoff broadcast and kept pace with constant demand for football. Early in his administration, he’d set an ambitious goal of pushing the NFL to $25bn in annual revenue by 2027. And while Goodell appears for the moment to be only about $6bn short of that target, given the league’s current rate of growth with its existing financial commitments, he could get close.
Certainly from the team owners’ standpoint, you couldn’t ask for a more ideal kingpin for this enterprise than Goodell – the lifer who scored an internship with then-commissioner Rozelle through a postgrad league-wide letter-writing blitz. At a trim 5ft 11in he could pass for a retired pro wideout, despite not playing football past high school. Where Goodell’s father, Charles, broke with a hawkish Congress while calling for an end to the Vietnam War, Roger lives by a single code – “protect the shield”, his oft-reaffirmed oath to put the league’s interest above all others.
More often than not, that means serving as a Tom Wambsgans-style corporate Christmas tree from which owners can hang an assortment of controversies. He absorbed an onslaught of criticism about the sport’s risk of repetitive brain injuries and called for the destruction of videotaped evidence from the 2007 investigation that caught the Patriots cheating. Goodell’s reputation is for reserving his harshest judgments for the players who step out of line, which is how buccaneering sports writer Drew Magary came to nickname him the Ginger Hammer. When the Patriots faced down more cheating allegations in 2015, the commish ostensibly treated it like a make-up call, throwing the book at the franchise and Tom Brady – and the matter wasn’t truly settled until the nation’s biggest sports league had pressured its star quarterback out of his federal lawsuit against them.
When Black players began kneeling during the national anthem to protest systemic racism in 2016, Goodell first sided with team owners, conservative politicians and right-leaning fans before eventually reversing field. At one point Goodell was so scalded by his uneven response to the spousal battery case involving Baltimore Ravens star Ray Rice that team owners were split on whether to ditch him for a more pugnacious wartime consigliere like Condoleeza Rice or a star company man like NFL media chief Brian Rolapp – who may well succeed him in the end.
But with time and lip service, Goodell weathered the storm. He perhaps better than anyone understands the one thing his customers fail to appreciate when they’re fuming – that relief is only a game away. Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin almost dying on the field last year should have been a soul-searching inflection point for the league. But when Hamlin survived and vowed to play again, it became an occasion for Goodell to celebrate the league’s rapid medical response (never mind him dragging his feet about postponing that game…) Put Goodell’s political record against his predecessors, and you may have a hard time seeing him follow his ex bosses into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where sports writers control the initial vote.
In the last two years alone the league was served with two separate lawsuits alleging systemic racial discrimination from Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores and hall of fame football writer Jim Trotter. But those headlines seem a lifetime ago. Once the NFL season got rolling last month, fans quickly pivoted to obsessing over Taylor and Travis, frothing over Dallas and anticipating the next slate of great games and major controversies. All the while Goodell keeps sweeping away the messes, taking the slings and arrows and otherwise kowtowing to his 32 masters. And when his term ultimately ends, history will remember him as the ultimate insider, one who made a lot of money without making much positive difference in the greater game.
