Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Mark Leibovich
Rey Maualuga checking into Betty Ford later this month, according to Adam Schefter,” praised Sports Illustrated’s Peter King. “Good Nugget.” Credit for nugget recognition in this particular case: Deadspin’s Drew Magary.) But some do not give proper shout-outs, which can be a sore spot and invite pariah status in the academy. Don’t get Schefter started, for instance, on his former employer, NFL Network, and how derelict they can be about giving props. Actually, I did get him started. He was being driven in to work one morning during the season and listening to some NFL show on Sirius Satellite Radio. “They’re saying [Bengals tight end] Tyler Eifert is going to have back surgery and be out four to six months. I’m like, ‘Really, where did you get that from?’ Nothing about ESPN. Nothing! Nothing. If I ever did that to somebody, what is done regularly to ESPN, I would be called on it every time.” Not cool!
No doubt, things can get heated inside the kettle of nuggets. Florio, of ProFootballTalk (PFT) and NBC, has developed a devoted following for his aggressive and increasingly combative tone. Several team and league officials told me they check ProFootballTalk—and Florio’s Twitter feed—first thing in the morning and several times a day. He can be refreshingly edgy toward subjects and competitors alike—though not everyone finds him refreshing. “He’s not a journalist,” ESPN nugget-monger Chris Mortensen said dismissively to me about Florio. “He’s really not a good person.”
Florio has even been accused of being (gasp) unclassy! After the 2018 Super Bowl, Florio went out on a lonely limb to report that Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels was having second thoughts about becoming the next coach of the Colts—though several outlets had reported his hiring as a done deal. When Schefter reported that McDaniels would be staying in New England after all, Florio made a point of tweeting thus: “Attention everyone who assumed I was making it all up: SUCK IT.”
FOR AS FOCUSED AS THEY ARE ON THEIR PHONES AND NEXT HITS and receiving their just shout-outs, nugget hunters have a sixth sense whenever Big Game enters their perimeter: a head coach or chatty owner, perhaps, or the occasional Moby-Dick himself. As Goodell moved through the summit grounds like a traveling sheikh, a siren might as well have sounded in Insider Village, such was the state of high alert. No one would expect the commissioner to actually feed anybody anything, but still, witness must be borne to the ruddy-faced emperor. The son of the late Republican senator of New York Charles Goodell, the commissioner’s politician genes are evident. He is a most prodigious slapper of backs, knower of names, gladder of hands, and toucher of bases. He moved among his constituents in a former jock’s ballet of bro hugs and two-handed handgrips and shoulder squeezes punctuated with backslaps. He received guests, laughing easily, maybe for real, or maybe not.
“Good to see you, Coach,” Goodell called out to Carolina Panthers headman Ron Rivera in a central patio. Goodell’s orange hair looks especially bright and shiny in the sunlit room, as does the Creamsicle hue of his face. “Great season this year,” Goodell tells Coach Rivera. Their handshake flowers into a hug. Goodell then sees the Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, one of the thirty-two most important bases he has to touch, walking in his direction. He stops and has a word. The commissioner nods and is listening, quite clearly.
This is Roger’s element. He looks freshly worked out. It would please him very much to hear me say that. He works out a great deal. And he loves to talk about how he works out a lot (SoulCycle, Pilates), and also mention exactly for how long he worked out that day. Goodell likes to trash-talk colleagues who don’t get to the gym at the early hour he does. “Good afternoon,” he will taunt them as they straggle in before 7 a.m. He runs an annual 40-yard dash in his work clothes, following up on a gimmick that NFL Network’s Rich Eisen performs every year at the Scouting Combine. Before the Super Bowl, Goodell holds a press conference where he typically takes a question planted with a kid reporter who might toss up some puffball about a league public service program, like one that encourages kids to exercise for at least sixty minutes a day—“Play 60,” the initiative is called.
“Mr. Commissioner, how do YOU play sixty?” a kid asked Goodell before Super Bowl 49 in Glendale, Arizona. The beast pounced: “I played sixty-five this morning on the elliptical,” Goodell preened. I am going to venture that you’ll never meet a man in his late fifties with such rock-hard abs.
Goodell also likes to talk about how he used to play The Game himself. He played through high school till he wrecked his knee. But playing football was such a great experience for him. It gave Roger so much camaraderie and instilled so much character. If he had sons, instead of teenage twin daughters, he would by all means encourage them to play football. Other prominent parents have said they would not be so sure—Barack Obama and LeBron James have expressed ambivalence, as well as the actual father of Tom Brady, knowing what we know now; Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, too, and a bunch of others. But Goodell says there are no sure things in life, whether you’re football playing or couch sitting, and he does his best to make the case.
Goodell is apparently required to say that his first job is to “protect the Shield” x number of times a day as a condition of the $111 million in salary and benefits his owner-bosses paid him between 2013 and 201517. The Shield evokes gallant warriors and immovable forces, but it is also a reminder that the enterprise itself requires protection—a shield for the Shield. When Goodell sits at his desk, he gazes upon a large rendering of the Shield on a back wall of his office. ‘‘It is a reminder to look out,’’ he says.
“Protecting the Shield” roughly equates to protecting “the integrity of the game,” which is another platitude the commissioner throws out all the time. What all of that essentially means is that Goodell’s first job is to protect the Membership, and often from itself.
The league, for instance, would prefer it if the Membership left the discussion of brain health to the experts, or at least to Dr. Goodell. It is part of the commissioner’s job, after all, to cushion billionaire brain farts on this issue. When health and safety questions are asked of the Membership, as they inevitably are, the moguls are careful to inflict the repetitive sound-bite trauma that the league arms them with (“the game has never been safer”). They then move on as quickly as possible.
But owners can’t always help themselves, and at least one of them seems intent on proving this every few months. Colts owner Jim Irsay, for instance, sat in a golf cart in Boca, smoking a cigarette and holding forth with Dan Kaplan of the SportsBusiness Journal about the varying side effects of playing the sport. He likened the risks to the possible side effects of taking aspirin. “You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin,” Irsay said. “It might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body may reject it, where I would be fine.” This caused an Excedrin headache at the annual meeting, which Jerry Jones decided to assuage by brushing aside the rather obvious link between chronic traumatic encephalopathy and football. “No, that’s absurd” was Jerry’s take on whether playing football can result in CTE.
Candor can prove as problematic as ignorance. Bills general manager Doug Whaley, for instance, was trying to be philosophical when making the obvious point that football is a dangerous sport and that injuries are inevitable. “It’s a violent game,” Whaley told WGR 550 radio. It would have been fine if he ended the sentence here. But instead, Whaley ended the sentence with “. . . that I personally don’t think humans are supposed to play.” And the headline wrote itself.
Bills GM: I “don’t think humans are supposed to play” football
This was problematic since football-playing robots had not yet been invented. What’s more, Whaley was trying to convince actual human beings to come play for the Buffalo Bills. You can imagine the GM was frog-marched up to the Bills’ PR office for cleanup duty. “Clearly I used a poor choice of words,” Whaley clarified in a statement the next day. He is human after all.
So are NFL owners, just like us, although their positions grant them superhuman deference and platforms that can be irresistible. That is why league meetings, teeming with media, can be so treacherous. The Membership is forced into the sunlight—when in fact most of them are suited to the shadows. Robert Kraft made himself available to the media for twelve minutes on a back patio.