Arizona Cardinals

Roger Goodell is on a mission to mend fences with players

Published May. 25, 2017 7:38 p.m. ET

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Albert Breer/Sports Illustrated via the MMQB

CHICAGO — The NFL announced its revised policy on touchdown celebrations here at this week’s spring meeting, via an email addressed from Roger Goodell to the fans.

But don’t get it twisted. The message was, implicitly, intended for someone else.

Goodell wrote in the first sentence that, “We use [the offseason] to listen to players.” The third paragraph detailed the work he did in canvassing a cross-section of players on celebrations. The fourth paragraph explained what players told Goodell. The sixth paragraph had more on that. And the seventh and final paragraph thanked the players for their help.

None of it was by mistake.

In fact, as several sources detailed over the past week, it’s all part of a concerted effort by the NFL and the commissioner to start chipping away at the public perception — and to some degree, the reality — that Goodell and the players are perpetually at war.

The strategy? Give the players ownership. Make them know that it’s their league too.

“The commissioner has made an effort to do it,” Giants owner John Mara told me. “Going around and meeting with them on the celebration rule, I think, is just one example. That’s important. We try to engage with them on the competition committee with the rules changes every year. We get good feedback and put a lot of that into effect.

“So I think that’s always important to do that, and I know Roger has made that a priority, and hopefully that’ll pay off for both sides in the end.”

 

This story of the 2017 offseason has gone largely unnoticed. It’s one that could have big ramifications a few years down the line.

And that story really begins with the 2011 lockout and the dividing incidents since then. There was Bountygate, and the damage done to Jonathan Vilma, Will Smith, Anthony Hargrove and Scott Fujita. There was the referee lockout. There was Ray Rice and the domestic violence mess. There was Bullygate, and the de facto banishment of Richie Incognito. And there was, of course, Deflategate and the hits Tom Brady took.

All the while, the goodwill Goodell had accrued early in his term as commissioner with players like Ben Roethlisberger, Pacman Jones and Mike Vick frayed and, eventually, collapsed altogether. As a result, plenty of guys grew to distrust the league office. Worse, perception has become that all players feel that way.

So now we have an offseason in which there isn’t a major NFL-vs.-players fight, and the league has filled the vacuum by trying to more aggressively rebuild the bridges that were smoldering. And some of that effort has been pretty overt.

In February, at the Super Bowl, Goodell held a fan forum with Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald, Giants quarterback Eli Manning and Panthers tight end Greg Olsen — the three finalists for the Walter Payton Man of the Year award. The event was, as intended to be, well covered by the media.

A month and a half later Goodell invited Giants receiver Brandon Marshall to the NFL’s annual meeting in Arizona to address the owners on the league’s standing with its players. Marshall’s message: “Our relationship could be so much better.”

And then there was the effort to, in essence, let the players write the new rules on celebrations. There were boundaries the league wasn’t going to let them cross, of course. But it was pretty clear in what Goodell said Tuesday during a meeting with a small group of reporters that the new guidelines were basically the sum of what he had gathered in polling players over the preceding weeks.

Goodell declined comment on the overarching effort here. But he clearly has support.

“The players’ perspective is important — we truly are partners in the business,” Chiefs CEO/chairman Clark Hunt said. “And that’s something certainly from an ownership standpoint that we’ve never lost sight of. I think the commissioner’s initiative here in recent years to try and include them more in the decision-making process is a positive. That should serve us both well going forward.

“The benefit is making sure that the players feel like they have input. They’re as important to the success of the NFL as any of the teams are. And I think helping them feel like partners is important.”

The union has taken notice of a few things: 1) how Goodell is taking a lead role in issues (like the celebration-rule research) that may have been delegated to Troy Vincent in the past; 2) the league’s hire of Natalie Ravitz, because of her previous work to improve perception of media mogul Rupert Murdoch; and, 3) how Goodell’s handling of situations like being booed at the draft has improved.

They also know that the NFL tracks his approval rating like he’s a politician, and they know that those ratings haven’t been good this decade. As such, enough of them are skeptical that these sorts of efforts are: A) for PR, and B) pointed toward labor negotiations as the sides creep closer to the collective bargaining agreement’s expiration after the 2020 season.

No matter how you tally the score there, it’s clear the league has a ways to go.

Goodell does have solid relationships with more individual players than perception holds. On Wednesday, when asked about the effort to have players feel ownership in the league, Fitzgerald told me Goodell’s been good about bouncing ideas off him and other current and former players. “All we want is to grow the game and make it better for generations to come,” Fitzgerald says. “The commissioner sees that.”

Conversely, Goodell’s credibility gap with the larger group remains. As one player put it, over the past six years, the lockout has become a “living thing,” growing with the brush fires since, informing the players that the commissioner works for the owners and not them. That implies, too, that there are limitations to where this relationship can go.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be better. And what we’ve seen, quietly, over the past few months, is the league agreeing that it should be better.

 

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