When I saw that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was honored earlier this week as sports executive of the year, I thought it might have been by the American Bar Association for all the money the league is putting in the pockets of lawyers.
Then I thought maybe it was the Corleone Foundation. After all, Goodell’s business partner — DeMaurice Smith, head of the NFL Players Association — referred to the NFL as a “cartel.”
When I found it was the SportsBusiness Journal and SportsBusiness Daily — two fine publications — I assumed the award was based on amount of copy generated because no sports executive has killed more trees or consumed more bytes over the past year than Goodell.
Surely it can’t be for merit.
Goodell’s NFL is under siege. It came to the brink of endangering the 2011 season by locking out the players in a labor dispute. Then, while preparing to lock the players out in 2010, an uncapped year, he’s accused of engaging in collusion among the owners to use a secret salary cap.
The Redskins and Cowboys ignored this to get healthy financially and ignore the secret call to collude. Little did they know that the players union would agree to pretty much allow the collusion to take place.
Now the league has fined the Redskins and Cowboys a total of $46 million in salary cap space over two years. But the players union suddenly decided they were played by Goodell and the owners and filed a suit seeking billions of dollars in damages. Smith declared, “Cartels do what cartels will do when left unchecked.”
Hanging over all of this is the bounty scandal and the New Orleans Saints, which had become one of the NFL’s prized franchises. In the past two years, the Saints seem more like a crew from Carlos Marcello’s crime family. They’ve been investigated for various criminal allegations by the DEA, FBI and Louisiana State Police.
Don’t forget the proposed hearings on bountygate by Sen. Dick Durbin, which could prove to be the most explosive moment of the bombardment of shame and embarrassment, though I suspect the NFL is doing what it can to diffuse those hearings.
And, in case you forgot, more players are suing the NFL and other parties for concussion damage than the number of players who are currently on NFL rosters. It’s the greatest crisis the game has ever faced.
Last — always last — are the fans. Remember the Dallas Super Bowl debacle when the league oversold the event by 1,200 tickets? The fraud lawsuit filed by more than 400 fans against the NFL, the Cowboys and Jerry Jones is still alive, with new complaints recently filed and a federal judge rejecting the league’s request to dismiss the lawsuit.
I don’t know how they fit all this on Goodell’s plaque.
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].
