Why devote a column to Roger Goodell at the start of the baseball season and the close of the NCAA Tournament?
Because I can’t stow it. He’s infuriating. For the $70 million or whatever Goodell’s annually paid by the NFL, he has the credibility of a snake oil salesman and the on-the-job courage of the Sheriff of Nottingham. He’s so demonstrably full of it you’d be torn between demanding a polygraph exam and sending him to his room without dinner.
And the media, which share his fear of indisputable truths, continue to pretend that he represents the best interests of the sport, thus Goodell’s urged on by silence.
Item 1: Goodell, this offseason, remains active soliciting tens of millions more in TV money to create diminished interest in NFL games.
Under Goodell, the NFL has chosen to continue to challenge — dare — its fans to live without big games.
The NFL will double its inventory to two games sold for exclusive viewing behind streaming paywalls. No. 1 is the Sept. 6 Friday night Eagles “home opener” vs. TBD in Brazil.
“This landmark first international game in South America demonstrates the ongoing expansion of our global footprint,” said Goodell. “Playing on Friday night of Week 1 is a unique way to highlight our international growth and ambitions.” Not to mention the NFL’s overpriced made-in-China merchandise.
The other exclusively streaming game will, again, be a playoff game. So Goodell this season will get you coming and going.
Streaming, the NFL explains, is the wave of the future and the league doesn’t want to be left behind.
But “the future” arrived this past January, when the NFL sold its Saturday night Dolphins-Chiefs playoff game to NBC’s Peacock channel, which kicked off a posed-as-news promotional week on NBC/Universal networks.
That’s the game that literally cost fans their toes as they needed amputation after attending in sub-zero, sub-human conditions consistent with Goodell’s “It’s all about our fans” money-first conditions as that game could have been played in sunlight.
That also was the game after which NBC boasted set “Record Breaking!” sports streaming viewing totals as an estimated 23 million bought in.
But the next night’s Rams-Lions, an over-the-air game of lesser hype, attention and attraction, drew 38 millions viewers, thus streaming money greed cost the NFL at least 15 million viewers of a playoff game.
The next weekend, Goodell, the self-anointed “Fans’ Man,” scheduled Bucs-Lions indoors at 3 p.m followed by Chiefs-Bills outdoors at 6:35 p.m. But he has always held patron and player safety in similar low regard.
And those who learned from January’s Dolphins-Chiefs that they could survive without paying extra for the most attractive playoff game of the weekend are not about to forget.
No matter how many total viewers buy the NFL’s exclusively streamed games, they will be vastly fewer — tens of millions fewer — than those who normally would have watched had they remained on regular TV.
But if Goodell’s NFL truly believes that fewer viewers makes for good business strategy beyond a “Going Out Of Business” sale, he’s lost at sea behind that new wave.
Item 2: It’s difficult to miss or ignore all the unmitigated money-diving during the Goodell reign, now, from “It’s all about our fans” to his “PSLs are good investments.”
The Bills, in 2026, will move into a new, taxes-funded stadium. And in addition to the $850 million kick-in, another shoe has dropped — smack on the heads of the most loyal, devoted and prime-time game climate-abused customers.
The PSL costs — the cost to rent the seats in addition to paying for the tickets to sit in the seats — will be insane, much like the “good investment” PSL mandate that shed decades of devoted Jets and Giants fans of both attending games and remaining on ticket waiting lists as they vanished behind a toxic cloud of unrequited love.
And the Jets, on Goodell’s wobbly watch, told easily documented lies to try to close their PSL deals. Most PSLs, Giants and Jets, proved to be lousy investments, losers.
The Bills’ coming stadium, Buffalo news outlets report, will cost some preexisting PSL holders $50,000 per ticket to retain them.
According to WGRZ-TV, longtime Bills fan Joseph Lombardo already must pay $24,000 a year for his eight suite-level tickets. That tops out at $72,000 as he had to commit to three seasons in order to keep them.
As the late TV pitchman Billy Mays said, “But wait! There’s more!”
At the new park, for lesser seats, Lombardo would have to pay $50,000 per — $400,000 per season. And the seats he was offered would no longer be in a suite. He’d have to go broke to freeze, as the new stadium will only be partially shielded from rotten weather.
Lombardo: “It was just something that was nowhere near what I could afford. They didn’t offer any alternative, that was the fee, that was the price, and so I had to pass up my season tickets starting in the new stadium.”
While some PSLs will be attached to lesser punishments, Lombardo spoke for all:
“We’ve supported this team since the ’60s, and we’re grateful to have a new stadium. But we wish that we could have a new stadium that we could afford to go to, and continue our traditions.”
Not on Goodell’s watch.
Soon, Bills fans can hope for losing seasons when tickets to games that begin in sunlight as they have reduced TV money value can be bought — all you want — for 10 bucks a shot.
Item 3: Gentlemen’s Agreement: Despite hollow Goodell’s end-zone stencils to “End Racism,” certain bigotry is indulged, if not allowed.
Last week, Jets CB Sauce Gardner was allowed a mulligan to explain his “Jews run the world” comment. He even gave it that some of my best friends are Jewish thing, as Jews are part of his rep team. End of story.
Yet, throughout Goodell’s tenure, blatant player anti-semitism — the kind that would be widely and loudly condemned if aimed by a white player at players of color — have gone without public censure.
Two years ago, Goodell and the NFL proudly announced it will donate $1 million to the Contract With Black America Institute headed by rapper Ice Cube, an excessively vulgar rapper who references black men as both “n—-rs” and slightly nuanced “n—as,” also promotes astonishingly stupid and inflammatory claims that Jews plotted the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks, and has remorselessly posted Nazi Era-like Jewish hatred cartoons.
But, as per his usual pandering, Goodell was so good with this he chose Cube’s conspiratorial bigoted lunacy as worthy of sustaining via the NFL’s $1 million donation.
Where was the double-standard media on this? Cowardly hiding behind the hideous double-standards it has helped create then sustained, where else?
