Everyone has worked at a job with a colleague who is completely incompetent yet still remains employed. Maybe he knows someone in power, maybe his continued employment is simply an oversight by those in charge, maybe it’s just that no one has the heart to fire him. But day after day, week after week, he’s still there, messing up everything he touches and doing it with zero consequences. After a while, his substandard performance becomes part of the culture of the company, one of the annoying things that just come with the job – like people making microwave popcorn in the break room. In fact, his failings are so expected that no one even seems to care much anymore. Of course he is going to screw things up. That’s the standard he has created. He’ll be there as long as the company stays in business.
Roger Goodell is now that guy in the NFL league office. He’s the idiot co-worker who set his job performance bar at total failure and repeatedly meets the standard. The only difference between Goodell and Kevin two cubicles over, the guy who once drifted asleep in a sales meeting and fell off his chair, is that Roger is paid more than $30m a year and leads a multi-billion dollar organization. He is Kevin’s role model.
As Goodell finds himself trying to defend the NFL’s role in the Josh Brown case at the same time the league’s TV ratings continue to plummet, think for a moment about what is missing. Two years ago, in the fall of 2014, as it was revealed the NFL did absolutely everything wrong in handling Ray Rice, there were countless calls for Goodell to lose his job. Back then there was the sense that Goodell was on the ropes and could be dismissed at any moment ... but if anything would save him, it would be the league’s continued popularity. And then that seemed to be borne out: ratings stayed strong and Goodell remained gainfully employed.
But here we are full two years later and the calls for Goodell to be canned are hard to find. But it’s not because he has drastically improved as a commissioner since 2014. In fact, he’s significantly worse. In the Rice fallout, Goodell proudly unveiled a new domestic violence policy – one he developed around the same time he claimed he was “moved to tears” after dropping in to the National Domestic Violence Hotline center in Austin, Texas, for a visit. “I take responsibility both for the decision and for ensuring that our actions in the future properly reflect our values,” Goodell said, announcing the policy in 2014, which included a six-game suspension without pay for a first offense and a lifetime ban from the NFL for a second. “I didn’t get it right. Simply put, we have to do better. And we will.”
They have not.
And not only has Goodell botched everything with Josh Brown despite the new NFL policy and the hotline tears, but he’s done so in the most cynical way. Same as with the Rice case two years ago, the NFL’s first reaction was to blame its failings on the police. The Sheriff’s Office in King County, Washington, had none of it. Then Goodell told the BBC over the weekend that the public is simply too dumb to grasp the greatness in which the league handled the Brown case: “I understand the public’s misunderstanding of those things and how that can be difficult for them to understand how we get to those positions,” Goodell said. “But those are things that we have to do. I think it’s a lot deeper and a lot more complicated than it appears but it gets a lot of focus.” Jeez, Rog. Even the office idiot knows not to insult the customers.
There is almost something Trumpian about Goodell’s commissionership at this point. He does so much wrong and makes mistakes that are so bad – decisions that would be textbook examples of what to absolutely not do – that you almost wonder if he doesn’t really want the job. It feels like self-sabotage. But why would Goodell want to lose a job in which he makes $34m a year to do nothing but screw up? Getting paid a ton of money for nothing? That’s the American Dream.
So we continue to have Goodell at the top of America’s most popular sports league, handing out fines for players twerking in the end zone, strangling the goose that laid the golden eggs, and blaming the ratings decline on ... well, who really knows?
“Everyone’s got theories [on the drop in ratings],” he said last week. “You guys got theories, others got theories. We also know that the primetime ratings we’re seeing the most dramatic decrease. It went straight up against two very significant debates. There are a lot of factors to be considered.”
When asked why fewer people want to consume his league’s product, the best he can come up with: “Everyone’s got theories.” Try that at your job tomorrow.
“Johnson, why are these sales numbers down so much?”
“Well, everyone’s got theories.”
“I like how you think. Can I interest you in raising your salary to $34m a year?”
Goodell made it through 2014 with his job and it seems like no one has the energy to try to take him down again even though he’s somehow worse at his job and doesn’t seem to know, or care. He’s entrenched. The NFL commissioner we’re stuck with if not the one we deserve. There are no undefeated teams left in this awful NFL this season, but there is someone in football who can’t be beaten: Roger Goodell.
