As commissioner, Roger Goodell is in many ways the face of the NFL, and being such he’s taking the brunt of the outcries over the replacement refs situation. Goodell’s job above all else is to uphold the integrity of the game itself, point blink. But like any other employee (which many need to realize he is) he has people to answer to and they are the NFL owners, the very ones who agitated the labor dispute with the regular referees. Goodell is essentially just the messenger in this less than pleasant situation, so we can’t attack him for not getting the deal done faster, but what people can attack him for is the startling lack of leadership through one of the NFL’s darkest times.
No one said that this would be fun. Three weeks into the season and all hell is about to break loose, fans and players alike want answers, coaches are pissed off and everyone’s just collectively scratching their heads wondering when someone’s going to intervene. The NFL has chosen to be mum on the matter and feign selective blindness as the League was on the verge of crumbling. Call it arrogance if you want, but frankly put the NFL is spoiled, and us the fans are to blame. We’re too good to them in the good times and in the bad, because we never look away. The league knows this and they’ve built the way they’ve done business around this concept of near ‘holier than thou management’. There couldn’t be a more aloof figure than Roger Goodell, which is why on the surface he’s perfect as commissioner. He rarely shows emotion even when handing out swift punishment–when’s the last time the guy even smiled?
But it’s the cold, straightforward persona which the NFL and Goodell alike have mastered which may ultimately bite them in the end when it comes to this matter or matters like this in the future. There’s been a lost sense of what this is all about, remember when the NFL was a form of entertainment? Afterall, isn’t sports in general supposed to be a diversion? What’s so fun about getting involved in labor disputes between billionaire owners too stingy to pay working class folks’ pensions? Way too realistic for the average fan to get involved with, which is why if Goodell would dare take a page from the Pete Rozelle ‘How to run the most Successful Sports League in North America’ rule book he’d show some semblance of humility and explain things to us the customers.
The NFL received over 70,000 calls after the Monday Night Game and like clockwork the NFL came out with a black in white statement upholding the ruling on the field, and in the process insulting not only our intelligence but our eye sight and saying the play was a simultaneous catch. End of Story. That’s it? So for all the screaming of fans, even retired pro refs coming on TV and saying that was a clear interception and the fact that most of us have HD tvs and or can see when a guy cleanly catches a ball the NFL had the audacity to just lie to us. But don’t be mad at the NFL, we should be mad at ourselves for letting them get so powerful that they could even think we’d be so gullible as to fall back on their every word. But I digress, back to Goodell’s lack of leadership.
Goodell is coming off really bad through this three week stretch, and while we fully understand he has to please the owner that doesn’t mean he has to act fettered to their every whim. If the past few weeks of football have told us anything it’s that the NFL cares about their owners 98%, the players and staff 2% and the fans 0.000% and all that could change if the commissioner would dare address us with sincerity. Here’s the time where Goodell could stand out in his still young tenure as commissioner and either solidify or tarnish his reputation. The way I see it he could do 1 of 2 things: Forge ahead and drop the obtuse approach slightly and communicate with the public or he can pull a ‘Bud Selig’ and don rose colored glasses in the middle of crisis and expect us to just wait through the storm. His move.
There’s only two types of leaders that are remembered: good ones and bad ones. But there are three types of leaders over all: good ones, bad ones and the lame-ducks. Lame-ducks never get remembered and are never revered, their time comes and then goes and it’s onto the next one. The NFL has come way too far and has picked up way too many new fans to be run by a lame-duck commissioner through what’s one of their golden ages. If Goodell’s tenure ended today the only thing he’d be known for is running the League more like a prison warden than a sports commissioner…that’s not a good thing. Goodell is being painted as puppet doing the owners’ bidding while letting the League’s integrity take the hit. The NFL loves to boast about upholding the image and maintaining status quo, but we just stood in the midst of something which threatened to hurt the League tremendously. All eyes were fixated on Goodell to make a move and although crisis is now averted there was still damage done, and it could’ve been avoided.