What the game looks like by then \u2014 who it rewards and whether growth made it better or just bigger \u2014 will be his answer for everything that came before it.<\/p>\n
A labor negotiation, a fight over expansion, and an international schedule still being written will define the next four years. On top of all of it sits a media rights cycle that has grown lucrative beyond anything the league imagined when Goodell took office, and complicated beyond anything fans were promised. There may come a point in the years ahead when Goodell has to look at the people who pay him and tell them that what they want is not what the league actually needs. That moment, if it comes, will tell us more about his legacy than anything that came before it.<\/p>\n
Two decades of his commissionership have been a sustained exercise in giving the 32 owners more \u2014 more revenue, more games, more of everything that makes the NFL the dominant force in American sports. That is not necessarily a criticism so much as a description of the job as it has been defined. He has done it exceptionally well.<\/p>\n
The league is worth more than ever before. Even its lowest-rated broadcasts outperform almost everything else on television. Measured purely by what ownership hired him to produce, Goodell has delivered beyond any reasonable expectation. The question his final years in office are now posing is whether delivery was ever the whole job.<\/p>\n
Roger Goodell signs contract extension<\/p>\n
Jonathan Jones<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Goodell was asked during a Yale University speaker series whom he ultimately serves. His answer? The game. That\u2019s a heavier responsibility than making 32 owners wealthier. It includes the players who make the NFL worth watching and the fans who pay to do so. The next few years will test whether he is willing to protect those interests when it also means disappointing the people who employ him.<\/p>\n
Owners want an 18th game, 16 international dates a year, and most teams eventually crossing an ocean to play them. This week it was the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers, an intrastate rivalry rerouted to Melbourne, Australia, because proximity is apparently negotiable when the revenue is sufficient. Goodell himself has said he has no doubt the league will eventually place franchises outside the United States. If he is right, the league\u2019s international games have advanced from an experiment to a foundation.<\/p>\n
These are not modest ambitions. They are the goals of an ownership class that has watched everything it asked for arrive on schedule, and has stopped asking whether there is a cost.<\/p>\n
The media rights deal adds another layer of pressure. The NFL can exit most of its major agreements after the 2029 season, with ESPN\u2019s window opening after 2030. The league is already under a Justice Department investigation into potential anticompetitive practices around bundling and subscription costs \u2014 a signal that the pursuit of more has not gone unnoticed. It is growing more expensive, in every sense, to watch professional football.<\/p>\n
Owners have poll numbers to argue the public is with them. A Quinnipiac survey last fall found 60 percent of fans support an 18th game if a preseason game is removed. That\u2019s the kind of figure that ends conversations in ownership suites before they begin.<\/p>\n
What it does not settle is the question waiting on the other side of the table.<\/p>\n
Union executive director JC Tretter has openly opposed an 18th game, and the arithmetic underneath his argument is simple enough. Trimming a preseason game does little for a starter who was going to spend that August afternoon on the sideline anyway. Adding a regular-season game requires another afternoon of real punishment. Sending him overseas to play it adds an extra layer of travel and recovery that does not appear on a broadcast schedule. More football is not an abstraction for the men who generate it. It is more Mondays where a body that only gets to be young once has to answer for what Sunday asked of it.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
\n Can Roger Goodell, left, mix the wants of his owners with what the players need? (Emilee Chinn \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n
A second bye week, enforceable travel protocols and a restructured preseason would help. But they solve the problem only on paper. The real question is whether Goodell will spend some of the currency two decades of trust with ownership has accrued to secure protections that are proportionate to what the players are being asked to give.<\/p>\n
Goodell said during that same Yale conversation that his guiding instinct is to do the right thing for the long run, even when the short-term cost is real. That principle will be tested more in the next four years than it has been in the previous 20. Doing right by the league over the long run may require him to slow down what ownership wants in the short term. More football is not automatically better football. Baseball and basketball have spent years confronting whether their seasons have grown past the point of what the public \u2014 and the players \u2014 can sustain.<\/p>\n
The cost of doing this honestly is not abstract. Lifetime health coverage that outlasts a career, a path to free agency that returns something to men being asked to give up more of their primes, and revenue terms that treat expansion as a shared investment are not radical proposals. They are the minimum the moment calls for, and not coincidentally, the difference between a commissionership that expanded the game and one that actually protected it.<\/p>\n
Total NFL franchise valuations today approach $300 billion. Goodell is responsible for that and should be applauded. It also means he is the only person in the room with the juice to tell the people running the league what they are asking of the people powering it. The revenue records speak for themselves. What they cannot speak to is the league Goodell leaves behind \u2014 whether it is stronger for everyone who makes it worth watching, or just larger for everyone who profits from it.<\/p>\n
The money will keep arriving long after he is gone. The players\u2019 medical bills will, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Roger Goodell inherited a thriving domestic product when he became NFL commissioner 20 years ago and nurtured it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":892948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[436],"tags":[49,48,514,927,82],"class_list":["post-892947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nfl","tag-opinion","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/892948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}