NFL Week 13: Goodell Caught Lying

Every year I travel down to California to spend Thanksgiving with my father. We run a local turkey trot at the community college and then spend the rest of the day snacking on chips and watching the NFL games.

This year was a treat because of the Seahawks-49ers match-up. Last season's NFC Championship game caused a brief "family feud" between the two of us -- my father thought Richard Sherman's post-game assertion of his superiority thuggish; I accused my father of being racist. The Thanksgiving evening rematch on national television provided an opportunity for me and my father to relive those events and approach the divisional rivalry with more reserve.

As it turned out, the game itself, as one-sided as it was, didn't generate much heat. It was a bitter, bilious Thanksgiving meal served cold to the San Francisco faithful. Seattle dominated in all aspects of play: the defense smothered Frank Gore and the impressive lineup of 49ers receivers, and Kaepernick never found a rhythm; while on offense, the great Marshawn Lynch piled up 100 yards on the ground and Russell Wilson scrambled and connected with receivers for over 200 yards.

All in all it was statement game and that statement was twofold: one, the Seattle defense is back to playoff form; and two, San Francisco is a franchise that has a lot of problems. A Raiders victory next week is not unthinkable.

Next week the shutdown Seattle D will be tested by Chip Kelly's hurry-up offense. Mark Sanchez repeatedly led the Eagles down the field to paydirt at the beginning of the game in Dallas against the Cowboys.

The Dallas D did not have an answer. Sanchez was never harried and LeSean McCoy cracked off huge runs. On offense the Cowboys were never able to establish a passing attack off the strong running of DeMarco Murray. That's how the Cowboys win: they pound the ball with Murray, and then Romo goes to the play-action pass. Murray was able to run effectively in the first half. But Romo was unable to connect to Witten or Dez Bryant. Then in the second half Dallas was too far behind to stick with its run-first offense. Romo is not the player he was; his bad back is a real limitation.

Given what I saw on Thanksgiving, it is not hard to imagine the Eagles in the NFC Championship game.

Somehow Rob Ryan's Saints defense shut them down in the playoffs last season. McCoy was held in check. If I remember correctly, the game-time temperature was in the low 20s;  I think it bothered Philadelphia, even though the Eagles had home field, more than New Orleans. So that is the ticket to stopping Chip Kelly's hurry-up: Stop LeSean McCoy and Darren Sproles and let Mark Sanchez try to beat you. I think Seattle should match up pretty well.

The bombshell of NFL Week 13 is not any victory on the gridiron but the reinstatement, announced yesterday, of Ray Rice by arbitrator Barbara S. Jones, a former federal district court judge.

The basis of Judge Jones' decision to reinstate Rice, as Ken Belson makes clear in an excellent frontpage account in today's paper, "Ray Rice Wins Reinstatement to N.F.L. in Arbitration," is that NFL commissioner Goodell punished Rice twice for the same incident. Initially, Goodell ruled Rice would have to serve a two-game suspension for knocking out his fiance, now wife, Janay in a hotel elevator. Then after video of the assault went viral, Goodell went back and ruled that Rice would be suspended indefinitely. The Baltimore Ravens followed suit by releasing him.

In order to make the indefinite suspension seem credible and not merely a capricious reaction to public outrage Goodell made two contentions: 1) that he never saw the video of Rice knocking out his honeybunch prior to his initial ruling, and 2) Rice misrepresented the incident in his disciplinarian hearing, calling it a slap.

Well, now we know, thanks to Judge Jones's decision, that Goodell lied in characterizing Rice's testimony as misleading. As Belson says,

In the Rice case, after his initial two-game ban drew the ire of fans and women’s groups who thought it minimized what had occurred, Mr. Goodell acknowledged a month later that he had “got it wrong.” He then announced a new policy in which first-time offenders in domestic violence cases would miss at least six games. Judge Jones, in her decision, noted that Mr. Goodell called Mr. Rice then to let him know that the six-game rule would not affect him because he had already been penalized. 

That promise was scrapped two weeks later, on Sept. 8., after the video of Mr. Rice punching Janay Palmer, who is now his wife, became public. That, in turn, led to the appeal by Mr. Rice. 

In her ruling, Judge Jones devoted considerable attention to what Mr. Rice actually said at the June 16 meeting with Mr. Goodell. She said that the commissioner, in his testimony at the arbitration hearing, recalled Mr. Rice telling him in June that he “slapped” Ms. Palmer. Other N.F.L. executives had similar recollections. 

Judge Jones noted that Mr. Goodell’s actual notes of the June 16 meeting were not detailed and did not contain the word “slap” but did contain the word “struck.” More persuasive, Judge Jones added, were the “detailed and careful notes” that Heather McPhee, a players union lawyer, took at the meeting. Those notes include Mr. Rice stating, in quotation marks: “And then I hit her.” 

Judge Jones noted that Ms. McPhee testified she used the quotation marks because those were Rice’s exact words.

If Goodell lied about what Rice said in his disciplinary hearing he's probably lying about when he saw the knockout video. As Belson notes, Goodell has problems:

Judge Jones’s ruling is hardly the last word in the Rice matter. Mr. Goodell’s handling of the suspension is also being investigated by Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director, who was hired by the N.F.L. to find out what, among other things, the league knew about the graphic video of Mr. Rice and when. Mr. Goodell has insisted that he did not see that video before his initial meeting with Mr. Rice last June. If that turns out not to be true, the league’s owners, who have thus far stood behind Mr. Goodell, may take a dimmer view of his leadership.

At the very least, the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson imbroglios have forced the NFL to relinquish its privileged status as the final arbiter on discipline. Judge Jones' ruling should put an end to that. As Juliet Macur points out in "Ray Rice Ruling Highlights Roger Goodell’s Missteps," the league office no longer has any credibility:

He threw out Rice’s two-game ban, and made it possibly for good. Yet what he might have thought was a good idea to appease the public has just left the league without ballast. Instead of a strong leader when the league needs it most, he has been an inconsistent and weak one. 

Goodell has made so many mistakes in the case that it is hard to keep track of them. He has been breaking the rules that he has been making up as he goes along. The owners either see that and don’t care because Goodell has made them so much money, or they continue to wear blinders.

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The league is now at the mercy of arbitrators to clean up its messes. Another one next week will hear the case of Adrian Peterson, who was suspended at least until April 15 for hitting his 4-year-old son with a stick and leaving wounds. It is another chance for Goodell to fall even deeper into a hole that has now turned into a canyon.

Earlier in the month Dave Zirin, "Beyond the Drug Raids: Why the Feds Are Fed Up With the NFL," saw evidence that the vast criminal conspiracy that is the National Football League is no longer the sacred cow it once was in Washington D.C.:

Let’s be clear: the recent raid on five NFL teams by the Drug Enforcement Agency to see if teams were doubling as illegal painkiller dispensaries has little to do with concerns about how our nation’s Sunday heroes Novocain themselves for gridiron glory. The fact that the NFL and their teams of doctors and nurses give out prescription pills like Halloween candy and break out syringes to top off sessions of physical therapy has been public knowledge for over forty years. Player memoirs like the 1970s Out of their League, by Cardinal linebacker Dave Meggyesy, and Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Peter Gent’s semi-autobiographical bestseller North Dallas Forty, addressed such things with a nonchalant frankness bordering on the blasé. These practices are also discussed by former players with a shrug as just the price they pay for keeping the trains—those same trains carrying billions of dollars in revenue—running on schedule. Players tend to come from poverty and play an average of just three and a half years on largely non-guaranteed contracts. They will do what they have to do to get out there on Sunday, and teams will be only too happy to oblige. 

The real story here is that these raids happened at all. The NFL employs twenty-six full-time lobbyists and spends about $1.5 million per election cycle to make sure that the feds leave the league alone and no one looks too closely at how the sausages are made. Pro football is supposed to be an entity that operates in a magical constitution-free zone of antitrust exemptions and tax breaks, with numbing opiates in every locker. But those days appear to be as dead as playoff hopes in Oakland. 

A combination of the bumbling Clouseau-esque stewardship of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, public pressure and a never-ending cascade of scandals has created a relationship between the NFL and the federal government described to me by a hill lobbyist as “something south of toxic.” In September they hired democratic operative Cynthia Hogan to head their lobbying operation in an effort at making their relationship with this administration at least better than poisonous, but this is beyond Cynthia Hogan. Hell, this is beyond Olivia Pope. The federal government is out for a chunk of Roger Goodell’s flesh and the evidence of this is there for anyone who cares to look. 

Over the last three months, we have seen the Federal Communications Commission—a body appointed by the Obama administration—both rescind the decades-old NFL blackout rule and threaten to ban the dictionary-defined slur that brands the Washington football team from being uttered over broadcast television. We have seen rage by public officials over how the NFL and especially Roger Goodell has ignored or even covered up issues of violence against women. We have seen Goodell again and again, whether in the Ray Rice domestic violence case or in his recent ruling on Adrian Peterson’s season-long suspension for hitting his child with a stick, careening from one crisis to the next, absent of a moral compass while thumbing his nose at the Players Association, public pressure or common sense. We have seen the open questioning on Capitol Hill of the NFL corporate office’s tax-free status, something estimated to save the league $10 million dollars a year—a move championed by now-retired Republican senator from Oklahoma Tom Coburn. We have also seen the unthinkable: senators asking the “Emperor has no clothes” question of why the NFL gets any special treatment at all. 

When politicians see the once bullet-proof NFL shield, with all of its cultural capital, as a target for scoring easy political points, it speaks volumes all by itself. This humiliating DEA raid is really just a dash a salt on an already simmering stew. Goodell’s league has long carried itself like the sporting equivalent of Goldman-Sachs; simply too big to fail. Those days of anti-accountability are over. Roger Goodell and the collection of owners that pull his string are failing at the most fundamental task of a league built on the broken bodies of its players: keeping people’s attention firmly focused on the field. Now people—and politicians—are looking at what is behind the curtain and scrutiny does them no favors. It is perfectly understandable why many would see conflict between the federal government and the powers that be in the world of football as the Kang vs. Kodos of political battles. But this is a sport that is being victimized less by big government than by their own arrogance and negligence. Whether we are talking about the covered-up dangers of youth football, the plantation economy of the NCAA, or the corporate culture of the NFL, the feds are not done with the people who run this sport. Not by a longshot.

I am doubtful that Goodell is in a death spiral. The Mueller report will likely be a skillful graywash. The power of the league office will be curtailed but not so much that the owners will force Goodell onto his sword.

As for Ray Rice, I will be surprised if any team signs him this season. He is too toxic. There is the "No More" ad campaign, which strikes me as fresh and effective. We are still -- thanks to the popularity of the NFL -- a TV nation. Ray Rice will have to bide his time.

In the "Super Bowl preview" match-up tomorrow between the Patriots and the Packers at Lambeau Field, I like Green Bay. Revis and Browner have been touted as the best cornerback tandem in the league this year. My sense is that Jordy Nelson and Randall Cobb will beat them, allowing Aaron Rodgers to connect over the top. Plus, there are the screens to Eddy Lacy. The Packers defense is good enough to slow down Brady. In a scoring contest between Rodgers and Brady, take Rodgers.