Going into Friday’s news conference in New York, the question was whether Roger Goodell would resign. Coming out of it, the question is whether he will be fired.
Not likely. This corporate employee served well his corporate bosses, the 32 NFL owners.
They were probably thrilled with his performance. Most of the rest of the free world was appalled. The reviews ranged from disappointment to horror. If this had been a Broadway play, the theater’s doors would be closing right now.
If we seek an explanation — a calmer assessment of what made this bland, robotic, clueless performance come to pass — it isn’t all that complicated.
Goodell doesn’t get it.
And if you don’t get it, you can’t communicate it.
We only need Exhibit A, the guts of this entire NFL-is-a-haven-for-domestic-abuse conclusion. When Goodell saw the video of an unconscious, soon-to-be Mrs. Ray Rice being dragged out of the elevator in the Atlantic City casino, he needed no more. What did he think happened in that elevator? And when he was told later, by investigating officials and Rice himself — that what he saw was the result of a punch — he certainly needed no more.
If you get it, it is a simple conclusion: This is a bad guy. He needs to be gone. See ya, Ray. Sayonara. Forget precedence or policy or any of that right now. The NFL is better than that, bigger than that. We’ll think about second chances and reviews later. Right now, there is only outrage, and it is human to react with it.
It is less human, and totally corporate, to react with immediate thoughts of policies and precedents and how the loss of a 100-yards-per-game rushing average might affect the Baltimore Ravens. Ah, let’s make it a two-game suspension and hope it goes away.
It was interesting to follow the immediate reactions of broadcasters, who have the vehicle and format to respond instantly.
Herm Edwards, a former NFL coach turned NFL analyst, who has a stake in keeping it nicey-nice with the NFL, blurted out at one point in his assessment about Goodell’s performance: “He gave us nothing.”
Actually, Goodell gave us everything. We now know that he doesn’t know and never will. It is not within his impenetrable corporate shell.
Kate Fagan, an ESPN broadcaster, said, “Adam Silver [the NBA commissioner] talked like a normal person.” She was comparing Goodell’s news conference to Silver’s in response to the Donald Sterling situation a few months ago.
Certainly, what we saw from Goodell was a carefully packaged production. Think of it as a shiny Porsche with no engine under the hood.
One can only imagine how many lawyers and public relations experts weighed in on this. Don’t say this. Smile when you say this. Look contrite when you say you screwed up. And make sure you schedule this on a Friday afternoon, so the less-aggressive weekend news cycles can ease the blow.
You almost feel sorry for him, having to be put through more corporatizing, when he is 99% there on his own.
But when you are making $44 million a year, and you — not the lawyers or the PR people or even the owners to whom you answer — are going to be the man under the brightest lights, you need to be honest to yourself.
In the sense that Goodell doesn’t get it, he was.
Mostly, this thing came off like a briefing on cash flow or straight-line depreciation.
When the need was to be real, be genuine, be really sorry rather than fake sorry, to speak from the heart and not a script, we got only predictible boilerplate:
“We need to learn from our mistakes.”
“We need to bring the right voices to the table.”
“We need to clean our own house.”
We expected answers, details, specifics. We assumed we’d get them. Instead, we got committees and consultants. We got confusing double-speak, answers to questions that weren’t really answers but PR spin and avoidance.
We got promises that this will be fully addressed “by the Super Bowl.” That ought to make everybody feel better.
So the games will go on. Sadly, so will the stench.
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times
