Will John Madden be embarrassed to be seen with Roger Goodell this summer if the two of them embark on an NFL training camp tour for the second straight year?
Or will he just wear a T-shirt with an arrow that says, “I’m With Stupid?”
No one’s stock has fallen more in the past week than Goodell, the NFL commissioner who won’t make anyone forget Pete Rozelle — or even Paul Tagliabue, for that matter.
First, Goodell wrote a ridiculous Wall Street Journal op-ed piece trying to explain the reasons the owners — faced with a court battle — had locked out the players in their labor dispute.
Goodell wrote that the NFL had a great system, then tried to explain why the owners wanted to blow that system up, offering a ridiculous doomsday prediction for the league if the owners did not prevail in their fight to get out of the agreement they had made with the players in the previous negotiations.
Then the NFL suffered a beatdown at the hands of federal Judge Susan Nelson, who issued a court order lifting the lockout and then refused to grant the owners a stay on that order until the NFL could appeal the decision.
It left the league in chaos, with no idea what to do when players started showing up for work Thursday, which is what Judge Nelson had pretty much ordered — business as usual.
You had reports of armed security guards at the Tennessee Titans facilities. You had teams like the Redskins letting their players come in the building but not letting them work out. And then you had the New York Giants seemingly opening their arms to their players, letting them work out in their training facility.
The NFL was issuing new rules seemingly by the hour about how teams can conduct business. Then on Thursday night, the league said the players could come to work Friday.
While players were gathering and meeting back in their familiar work surroundings — and while new Redskins draft choice Ryan Kerrigan was being introduced at Redskins Park — there were reports that the 8th U.S. Court of Appeals had given the NFL the stay it needed to keep the lockout in place. That report was premature — the stay didn’t actually come until early evening — but the chaos and confusion that is the lead story every day for the most successful sports league in America — a $9 billion business — is shameful and embarrassing.
All this will be pinned on Goodell — who may simply have been the pick of a group of militant owners who wanted to crush the players in this labor dispute — and who may not have a very long tenure as NFL commissioner when the dust settles.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
