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.

NFL Week 12: A Vast Criminal Conspiracy

"Crisis" might not be the appropriate term to describe the National Football League as Week 12 begins, but trouble is definitely brewing, and brewing in several different pots.

Take for instance this morning's Associated Press report, "Silent to News Media, Seahawks’ Marshawn Lynch Is Fined Again." Some of you will recall that in the heat of last season's Super Bowl run, the NFL went after Beast Mode for his vow of silence towards the media. A $50,000 fine was levied, which apparently was held in abeyance until now because the Seattle running back refused to talk to reporters after the Week 10 Giants game and the Week 11 Chiefs match-up. The league has added on another $50,000 for good measure.

But what is interesting is that Lynch, true to his gridiron form, is not going to go down gently; from the AP story it is apparent that he will comply with the letter of NFL's news media policy but challenge the league to try to enforce its spirit. In other words, can the league force Marshawn Lynch to say the words it wants him to say? I think not.

The league spokesman Michael Signora said penalties against Lynch would total $100,000. Along with the $50,000 for violations of the news media policy this year, the league is collecting a $50,000 fine that was imposed on Lynch for violations last season. The fine from 2013 was postponed in anticipation of future cooperation from Lynch. 

The league’s policy mandates that players be available during the week and in the locker room after all games. Lynch did not talk to reporters the past two weeks after games against the Giants and Kansas City. 

Lynch spoke at his locker for nearly 10 minutes Wednesday, but he answered almost every question by talking about music or his shoes.

Beast Mode's free-speech crusade -- free silence, rather -- is minor compared to other "headaches" the NFL currently has, foremost of which is the migraine over a pending preliminary concussion settlement. Substantive questions have been raised about the payment formula that is the basis of the settlement between the league and the class of 5,000 former players suffering from the debilitating effects of brain trauma.

For an excellent introduction to the concussion issue and the class-action suit against the National Football League, read Michael Sokolove's "How One Lawyer’s Crusade Could Change Football Forever," which appeared a couple weeks ago.

Sokolove explores the concussion class-action suit through the lens of the young attorney, Jason Luckasevic, who got it rolling. Luckasevic just happened to be friends with the forensic pathologist who published a scholarly article equating the repeated brain trauma of Steelers great Mike Webster with dementia and early death:

As Luckasevic was getting started on his legal career, his older brother, Todd, was in his medical residency at the Allegheny County medical-examiner’s office, working under a forensic pathologist named Bennet Omalu. The Nigerian-born doctor spent some Thanksgivings with the extended Luckasevic clan. He and the Luckasevic brothers sometimes went out for beers together or to hockey games. Luckasevic found Omalu to be good company, “an easy guy to be around, even though you could tell he was brilliant or even a genius.” 

In 2002, Omalu performed an autopsy on Mike Webster, a former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman and a member of pro football’s Hall of Fame. Webster was just 50 when he died, and he spent the last years of his life suffering from dementia, at times living in his pickup truck. When Omalu studied Webster’s brain in his laboratory, he noted a degeneration of tissue and other markers of decline usually present only in people decades older or sometimes in boxers suffering from “punch drunk” syndrome. Over the next few years, he autopsied five other former N.F.L. players, none of them old, and saw the same patterns: tangled brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein, a characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.

Omalu published his findings on Webster in 2005 in the journal Neurosurgery. He identified what he was seeing as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., and suggested that football caused irreversible brain damage. The N.F.L.'s response was to attack him, and N.F.L.-affiliated doctors demanded, without success, that Neurosurgery retract the article. Later his conclusions were called “preposterous” and a “misinterpretation of the facts.” 

Luckasevic by this time had begun to take on other types of cases: auto accidents, slip-and-falls — the bread and butter of the plaintiffs’ bar. He did not seem to be on the verge of initiating a landmark case. At first, his response to the public controversy picking up around Omalu, whom he occasionally employed as an expert witness, was just to step up and defend his friend. He remembers thinking: Why would Bennet make this stuff up. I mean, why would he? It’s just not done. He worried that Omalu would pay a professional price. “It looked to me like Bennet had raised his hand and said there’s a problem we need to be aware of, and he got savaged for it.”

Sokolove frames the problem facing the NFL, a corporate colossus that dominates television and posts $9 billion in revenue per year, as analogous to the tobacco industry, a deeply-embedded pastime that has been gradually shunted to the margins.

But, wait, there is more trouble for the NFL. After Sunday's Week 11 games plainclothes agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) swept in on visiting ball clubs -- Seahawks, 49ers, Buccaneers, and others -- to question team physicians about the distribution of prescription painkillers. Ken Belson reported on Monday, "Federal Investigation Into Painkillers Targets N.F.L. Teams’ Medical Staffs," that

The unannounced visits by the Drug Enforcement Administration were spurred, in part, by reports of widespread abuse of painkillers that were included in a class-action lawsuit against the N.F.L. The suit, which is being heard in federal court in California, claims that team doctors routinely dispensed Percocet, Toradol, Novocain and other drugs to energize players before games and relieve pain afterward. 

More broadly, the agency has increased its policing of prescription drugs in recent years as addiction and abuse of painkillers and other medications have skyrocketed.

A spokesman for the agency characterized the inquiries on Sunday as administrative in nature and said agents were looking to ensure that team doctors and other medical-staff employees were properly licensed to possess and distribute prescription medicine outside their home states. They also wanted to confirm that team trainers and other nonlicensed staff members were not handling prescription drugs. 

“Our role is law enforcement, and we have the regulatory authority to make sure anyone who has a license operates within the law,” said Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the D.E.A.

In addition to the concussions settlement there is the painkiller class-action suit against the league:

Lawsuits contending that N.F.L. doctors have mishandled prescription drugs date back at least to 2011. That year, a dozen former players accused the league and its teams of repeatedly administering the painkiller Toradol before and during games, worsening high-risk injuries such as concussions. 

The players also contend that the league and its teams failed to warn them of the consequences of taking the drug, a blood thinner that, according to the suit, “can prevent the feeling of injury” and therefore made it harder for players to recognize when they had concussions. 

The dozen retired players, including Joe Horn and Jerome Pathon, played in the late 1990s and early 2000s and said they had anxiety, depression, short-term memory loss, severe headaches, sleeping problems and dizziness. 

“We took it like clockwork,” said Horn, a receiver who played 12 years with the Kansas City Chiefs, the New Orleans Saints and the Atlanta Falcons and who said he was now experiencing bouts of dizziness and blackouts. 

In a class-action suit filed this year, hundreds of former players said that team doctors often dispensed painkillers “without a prescription and with little regard for a player’s medical history or potentially fatal interactions with other medications.” 

The complaint also said that the N.F.L. “sanctioned and/or encouraged the misuse of narcotic pain medications” in combination with other anesthetics and alcohol as a way to help players deal with a demanding slate of games. 

The N.F.L. has asked a federal judge to dismiss the suit. 

Toradol and other painkillers have been routinely distributed in baseball, hockey and other sports, and have been an open secret in locker rooms for years. 

But their use in the N.F.L. is notable because of the violence of the game and because painkillers taken as prophylactics before games can mask injuries, including concussions. 

The N.F.L. has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle a suit brought by about 5,000 former players who said the league hid from them the dangers of concussions and repeated hits to the head. A federal judge in Philadelphia will hear objections to that proposed settlement this week.

Then there are the Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice domestic violence imbroglio's. Peterson was charged with a felony for taking a switch to his young son's genitals; that was plea-bargained down to misdemeanor reckless assault. The NFL suspended him for a year. An arbitrator will hear that case in December. Ray Rice punched his wife unconscious in a hotel elevator, a moment captured on video that went viral. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, after tacking back and forth, suspended Rice for the year. Rice is appealing that suspension. An arbitrator will decide that appeal.

Even if in both cases the arbitrators side with the league, Belson, in another Monday story, "Adrian Peterson’s Path to Reinstatement Is Bogged Down in N.F.L.'s Complex Process," sees an erosion in Goodell's -- and the league's -- power:

The N.F.L. has been scrambling to overhaul its personal conduct policy in the wake of the debate over its handling of the Rice case. One of the effects of that controversy is that Commissioner Roger Goodell, who in past cases often heard appeals, was forced to bring in an outside arbitrator, an erosion of his power. 

Though no formal decision has been made about whether arbitrators will be used in all future cases, it is notable that an independent arbitrator was chosen to hear Peterson’s appeal. 

“You will see a trend away from the N.F.L. controlling everything,” said Mark Conrad, who teaches sports law at Fordham University’s School of Business, referring to the league’s personal conduct policy. “I don’t think the owners will want to do it all at once because it would be a sign of weakness.” 

To avoid ad hoc responses to player conduct cases in the future, the union has called on the N.F.L. to collectively bargain any changes to its personal conduct policy, which allows the commissioner broad discretion to penalize players. 

The league has said that it has consulted with the players and their union about potential changes to its personal conduct policy but that it remains the province of the league.

To add heft to the issue of domestic violence in the NFL, and no doubt ratchet up the stress in the NFL corporate suites, was a two-part series published on Monday and Tuesday by the Gray Lady.

Titled "Nowhere to Turn," reporter Steve Eder outlines a system where teams use off-duty police, "Whisked Out of Jail, and Back to the N.F.L.: N.F.L. Teams’ Ties to Police Put Victims of Domestic Violence in a Bind," as well as official personnel, "N.F.L. Was Family, Until Wives Reported Domestic Abuse," to make sure domestic violence goes unreported.

All in all it has been a brutal week for the NFL.

Right now on the field I'd say the two best teams are the Packers and the Patriots.

This Sunday the defending Super Bowl champs have a huge test when the Cardinals come to Seattle to try to silence the 12th Man for the second year running. The Seahawks must win four of the next six games to squeak into the playoffs as a wild card.

As I see it they cannot drop anymore games at home. So in essence the season for the Seahawks comes down to Sunday.

NFL Week 2: Long, Bruising Season Ahead

The collapse of the 49ers in the second half of the Sunday night game against Chicago, the primetime debut of San Francisco's new home in Santa Clara, presages a long, difficult season. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was supposed to be there but he was a no show; he wanted to avoid the fallout from the League's botched handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence imbroglio. Since this past Sunday the situation has grown worse, with new players joining Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson in the lineup for aggravated assault against women and children.

This violence has always been there. What's different? What's different is that the National Football League is the center of a fragmenting national identity. The NFL is a huge business; it is the only reason most people watch broadcast television anymore; it is the only thing we do in common as a nation.

That means the players are on a new level now; they are more akin to prominent politicians and movie superstars. There is an eager market for their dirty laundry.

The San Diego Chargers domination of the vaunted Super Bowl Champion Seahawks defense also points the way to a long, bruising season. There will be no coronations.

NFL Season Opener

The National Football League season began last night in Denver with a 49-27 Broncos demolition of the Super Bowl Champion Baltimore Ravens. Peyton Manning threw seven touchdown passes, the first player since the great Joe Kapp, who I passed one time on a sunny weekend Berkeley sidewalk while he ate an ice cream cone, did it in September of 1969.

I was late getting home, having to run a few errands after work. I missed the lightning-storm delay. I watched the second quarter and some of the third before shutting off the TV, which I don't think I had turned on -- maybe once -- since the Super Bowl.

I was impressed by the Broncos TE Julius Thomas. I noted the freshness of Ray Rice's legs. The Ravens miss Ed Reed and Dennis Pitta. Dallas Clark's drop of a sure TD pass from Joe Flacco was big.

So another NFL season begins. A lot of commercials on the menu for the next five-plus months. I am conflicted. I couldn't stop thinking about the war machine being amped up as I watched the Bronco cheerleaders and listened to the play-by-play delivered by one-percenters Al Michaels and Chris Collingsworth.