Missouri defensive lineman Michael Sam (52) warms up before the Cotton Bowl NCAA college football game against Oklahoma State in Arlington, Texas.NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has become the sports executive with the world’s biggest rabbit’s foot.
He scheduled an outdoor February Super Bowl and got temperatures 12 degrees above normal in the middle of arguably the harshest winter in our lifetime.
He thought he had slid through a $750 million concussion settlement before a federal judge put a brake on that. He has used a series of hand distractions and promises of more games and potentially more playoff berths to avert the attention to the too-low salary cap that carries with it a potentially shaky labor future and the shoved-under-the-rug stories about drug use in the NFL.
And still the league is an ATM, making more than $12 billion last year and shooting to make $25 billion before 2030. The NFL is a juggernaut that controls its message better than every other sport and arguably as well as any enterprise anywhere.
And Goodell in a lot of a ways deserves credit for that. He has been charged with growing the business of the league, and for the league, business is good. Very good.