Roger Goodell, 22 years old and armed with a newly minted economics degree from Washington & Jefferson College, typed a letter to National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle.
“Being an avid football fan, I have always desired a career in the NFL,” Goodell wrote on July 2, 1981.
The son of a former U.S. senator, Goodell joined the NFL as an intern the following year. He never left, ascending to the league’s top post, presiding over a $10 billion global sports and entertainment behemoth that’s being inundated with criticism over his handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence affair.
Some, including the National Organization for Women, have called for Goodell’s ouster, a move sports industry executives say is unlikely. Sponsors such as McDonald’s Corp., Microsoft Corp., PepsiCo Inc. and Anheuser-Busch InBev NV are unlikely to walk away because they have a collective billion dollars invested in making sure fans of the most-watched U.S. sports league tap their tablets, gulp their beverages and devour their burgers.
“If you’re these companies, you’ve hitched your wagon to the NFL hard-core,” said Rick Burton, a former chief marketing officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee. “The sponsors need the NFL, but they’re also going to bring pressure, pressure that’s tied to their needs.”
The NFL reaps about $1 billion a year in sponsorship revenue, said Burton, whose resume includes a stint as commissioner of Australia’s National Basketball League.
About 205 million people tuned in to NFL games last year, representing 81 percent of all television homes in the U.S. The 2013 season averaged 17.6 million viewers a game, the second-most-watched season after 2010.
Safe Job
Former Oakland Raiders Chief Executive Officer Amy Trask, once among the highest-ranking women in professional sports and now an analyst with NFL broadcast partner CBS, said the hullabaloo over Rice won’t cost Goodell his job or the league sponsorship dollars.
“It will take something even more colossal, more monumental and irreparable,” she said in an e-mail without being specific.
Verizon Communications Inc. CEO Lowell McAdam, whose company is a league partner, at a conference in New York today called Goodell a man of “very high integrity,” adding that he doesn’t believe there is a conspiracy to coverup what Rice did.
The mobile-phone company has a leading domestic-violence awareness program that the NFL is seeking to emulate, McAdam said. Verizon’s team is meeting with the NFL on the matter, he said.
Goodell, who was paid $35 million in salary last season, last night said former FBI Director Robert Mueller would conduct an independent probe into the NFL’s handling of the Rice incident.
Video Sent
The announcement came hours after the league said it was looking into an Associated Press report that a law enforcement official sent the league surveillance video of Rice punching his fiancee, leaving her unconscious in the elevator of an Atlantic City, New Jersey, casino.
Goodell, 55, has repeatedly denied -- including in a memo to owners yesterday -- that he or anyone else at the NFL had seen the video before suspending the Baltimore Ravens’ running back for two games in July.
After the website TMZ posted the in-elevator video earlier this week, the Ravens cut Rice, their leading rusher the past five seasons, and Goodell suspended him indefinitely.
“Roger Goodell couldn’t have imagined when he woke up Monday that he, and not the perpetrator, would be the face of this,” Burton said.
Stricter Policy
Even the stricter domestic abuse policy established by Goodell after the elevator tape came to light -- six games for a first offense and possible banishment for a repeat offender -- is being criticized by lawmakers at too lenient.
Sixteen female senators, Democrats and Republicans, sent a letter to Goodell urging the father of two daughters to institute a zero-tolerance policy for domestic violence.
“If you violently assault a woman, you shouldn’t get a second chance to play football in the NFL,” they said in the letter.
Executive search professionals say the NFL would be wise to add women to its management team.
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy didn’t return an e-mail asking who is the highest-ranking female executive at the league’s New York headquarters.
“The gender perspective is something they need,” said Bob Reilly, founder of Reilly Partners, which led the search that placed attorney Michele Roberts as the first female executive of a major U.S. sports union, the National Basketball Players Association.
The NFL last year received a C letter-grade for gender hiring practices from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida. This year’s annual report from the institute was scheduled to be released this week but was delayed because of the Rice matter.