NYTimes: Handling of Ray Rice Case Puts Roger Goodell Under Heightened Level of Scrutiny
By Alan Schwarz
Linda Sánchez stood among her fellow members of Congress as she watched Roger Goodell enter the hearing room. It was October 2009, evidence of football damaging brains had been mounting for three years, and the House Judiciary Committee — along with many football fans — awaited what Goodell would say under oath about a subject shaking his sport.
“I remember him walking into that hearing, smiling and yukking it up like he was the big man on campus,” Sánchez, a Democrat from California, recalled in a telephone interview. “He thought he was going to charm the questions away. He was totally out of touch with what mattered to people outside the N.F.L.”
During his eight years as N.F.L. commissioner, Goodell has deflected many crises that threatened the league’s integrity and public image, from player misconduct (arrests, drug use, Michael Vick’s dogfighting ring) to team misconduct (teams spying on opponents or allegedly offering bounties to injure them). He has survived them all — largely because team owners are pleased with the league’s soaring revenue under Goodell’s stewardship. Their calculation is that the profits are worth any setbacks that result from a crisis-management style that has been called everything from clumsy to, last week, conspiratorial.
Rarely has the criticism intensified to the point it has for Goodell’s handling of Ray Rice, the star running back whom he had suspended for two games on the understanding that Rice assaulted his fiancée in a casino elevator in February. Only after an unequivocal video of Rice punching the woman unconscious emerged last Monday did Goodell suspend Rice indefinitely. Goodell has claimed that neither he nor anyone in the league office saw the video before last week or even knew the extent of the assault, an assertion about which contradictory evidence is mounting.
Women’s groups have called for Goodell’s resignation or removal. Friday brought even more embarrassing news: The N.F.L.’s legal team predicted that more than one in four retired players would develop a neurological disease, and the star Vikings running back Adrian Peterson was indicted on a charge of child abuse.
Never has the man who considers his job to “protect the shield” — the N.F.L.’s venerated logo — been more in need of a shield himself.
“People expect a lot from the N.F.L. — we accept that; we embrace that,” Goodell, 55, told CBS News last week in one of his rare public comments during the tumultuous stretch, in which he denied having seen the more graphic Rice video before Monday. “That’s our opportunity to make a difference not just in the N.F.L., but in society in general.”
Goodell’s lifelong love of the N.F.L. is unquestioned; he has said he dreamed of becoming commissioner even as a boy in Bronxville, N.Y. He joined the league in 1982 as an entry-level intern, ascended to public relations and business operations, and was ultimately chosen to succeed Paul Tagliabue as commissioner in 2006.
Only months later, the issue of football’s handling of concussions landed on Goodell’s desk after the suicide of the retired player Andre Waters, who was later found to have brain damage previously associated only with boxers. Goodell repeatedly asserted that his committee of experts had found no long-term effects of concussions among N.F.L. players and that the league’s policies — specifically the practice of allowing players to return to games in which they were concussed — were sound.
Even after three years of mounting evidence of brain damage in retired players (including one study commissioned by the N.F.L. itself) had persuaded many skeptics that there was a link between football head trauma and cognitive decline, Goodell, when asked about it by an increasingly impatient House Judiciary Committee in 2009, pleaded ignorance.
“The medical experts should be the ones to continue that debate,” Goodell said. “The bottom line is, we’re not waiting for that debate to continue. We want to make sure our game is safe, and we’re doing everything we possibly can for our players now.”
The committee chairman, John Conyers Jr., a Democrat of Michigan, said: “I just asked you a simple question. What’s the answer?”
Goodell responded: “The answer is the medical experts would know better than I would with respect to that. But we are not treating that in any way in delaying anything that we do. We are reinforcing our commitment to make sure we make the safest possible ——”
“O.K.,” Conyers interrupted. “I’ve heard it.”
Within weeks, the N.F.L. adopted far stricter rules for teams’ handling of brain injuries. Goodell said in a news release that the moves would “enhance the substantial progress we have made in recent years.” He did not address there or anywhere else his and his league’s role in preserving the conditions that begged progress. The league spokesman Joe Browne wrote on Twitter, “Goodell again shows he’s serious re: concussions.”
Goodell’s punishments of players through the league’s personal-conduct policy have confused those monitoring his appreciation for wider societal issues. When Vick’s role in a dogfighting ring brought animal cruelty to national attention, Goodell suspended Vick for six games beyond his 18-month prison term — but later reduced the punishment to two after meeting with Vick, telling reporters, “I think he’s making real progress.” The next season, when Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger faced multiple accusations of sexual assault, Goodell gave him a six-game suspension but later lowered it to four, explaining, “You have told me and the Steelers that you are committed to making better decisions.”
In those episodes, Goodell tried to make three groups happy: those wanting a statement against the behavior, those appreciating stories of redemption and, perhaps most of all, those who just wanted two of the league’s most marketable stars back on the field.
Even Goodell’s harshest punishments have had clumsy codas. In 2007, after a Patriots employee was caught filming the Jets’ defensive signals, Goodell found other instances of such spying and swiftly fined the Patriots $250,000, took away a first-round draft pick and fined Coach Bill Belichick $500,000. But the league did not reveal the other instances, and it fueled conspiracy theories by destroying the tapes with little explanation. One crisis management expert said at the time, “Roger Goodell learned what Richard Nixon did not: If the tapes are destroyed, you keep your job.”
In 2012, after Saints coaches were found to have paid bounties to defensive players who injured opponents, Goodell — hammering his continued commitment for player safety — suspended Coach Sean Payton for the entire season and four players for a combined 28 games. The reaction was predictable: “Goodell’s suspension of Saints players proves this is a new NFL,” a headline on CBSSports.com read. But the players’ suspensions were overturned by none other than Tagliabue, who had been brought out of retirement to handle the appeals. He said the facts did not support the punishments.
After accusations of bias on his part, Goodell stepped aside and appointed the defense lawyer Ted Wells to investigate last season’s primary controversy: claims that Dolphins lineman Richie Incognito was making racial and homophobic slurs and bullying his teammate Jonathan Martin amid a teamwide culture of harassment. Incognito was suspended for the rest of the season. Wells’s report confirming and detailing the Dolphins’ workplace environment was not released until two weeks after the Super Bowl.
Goodell called the independent-investigator play again last week, hiring the former F.B.I. chief Robert S. Mueller III to examine the handling of the Rice situation. But the circumstances differ from any Goodell has faced before: Under scrutiny is the conduct not of a player or a team, but of the N.F.L. — and ultimately him.
