Roger Goodell’s Grip on the NFL Isn’t Loosening Anytime Soon

The wound was open and fresh as Arthur Blank walked from the locker room, under scaffolding erected in the bowels of Houston’s NRG Stadium, to a media area where his coaches and players would explain the most excruciating defeat any of them had ever suffered. The side of the Falcons’ owner’s suit coat was still moist from having consoled general manager Thomas Dimitroff’s tearful son.

Then, from around a corner, came Roger Goodell. Before they said a word to each other, the NFL commissioner wrapped Blank in a bear hug. Atlanta had just seen a 28–3 lead in Super Bowl LI evaporate in a crushing loss to the Patriots. The leader of the most powerful sports league in North America didn’t need to be told how the owner felt.

“It’s gonna be O.K.,” Goodell told Blank.

It was a rare, raw moment of empathy from the commissioner, who was then 11 seasons into the job. Many who have worked for the man once nicknamed “Ginger Hammer” and been on the wrong end of his temper would be blown away to see him so vulnerable: feeling, and even prioritizing, the pain of others, and so soon after presenting the Lombardi Trophy to Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

That was February 2017. Goodell is now 66, in his 20th season as commissioner. His two decades in charge have been complicated and challenging. He’s handled a lockout, two collective bargaining agreements, landmark player discipline cases, a domestic violence crisis and attacks from the most controversial president in American history. He staged a season through a pandemic and a social justice revolution. The scars of Goodell’s early days of punishing Michael Vick and Pacman Jones remain. The metaphorical bloody knuckles from locking out the players are there, too.

So what’s the complete picture of his reign? It very much depends on who’s painting it.

The Blank encounter is juxtaposed against another side of Goodell: many colleagues, adversaries and associates casually refer to him as a bully. One well-respected decision-maker from a 2024 playoff team asserted it’s even worse: “He’s a silver spoon senator’s son who thinks he’s a bully. But he’s really not.”

(Goodell declined to be interviewed and the NFL did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

That most certainly was not what the owners were looking for in 2006. It was the opposite.

Goodell’s dad’s connections did help get his foot in the door. Charles Goodell finished his term as a U.S. senator from New York as Jack Kemp was elected to one of the state’s congressional seats in 1970. More than a decade later, Kemp, an ex-pro quarterback, put in a call recommending his fellow New Yorker’s son for a position with the league. To be fair, Goodell made efforts of his own. After graduating from Washington & Jefferson with a degree in economics in 1981, he wrote letters to all 28 teams and did internships in the league’s public relations office and with the Jets, including some coaching work under defensive coordinator Joe Gardi.

In 1984, at 25, he became a full-time assistant in the NFL PR office. It quickly became clear to senior staffers that he had a knack for dealing with people. When the NFL was fighting the USFL for talent in the 1980s, Goodell was the voice of an 800 number players’ families could call to learn about the differences between the leagues. He’d then be on the line to talk live if they had questions after his recording.

By the time Paul Tagliabue took the reins from longtime commissioner Pete Rozelle in 1989, Goodell’s potential was clear. His ambition was, too. Tagliabue elevated him to executive vice president of league and football development and leaned on him to go into cities where teams were trying to get stadiums built. Perhaps the strongest mark Goodell made was in Cleveland, after Art Modell announced he was moving the team to Baltimore in 1995. Tagliabue would tell colleagues that Goodell “took a dead balloon and blew it up” in securing a stadium deal for the new Browns franchise.

His timing was fortuitous. The NFL went through a construction boom—15 of the 30 current stadiums opened between 1995 and 2003, including 11 in five years (1998 to 2002)—and Goodell was at the center of it. According to those who knew him then, Goodell was protective of his duties, relentless as a dealmaker and intentional in using his position to build bonds with the owners, relationships that would then position him for his ultimate goal.

The time came in ’06. The NFL generally picks commissioners for the era the league is in. Rozelle, who took over in 1960, was a public relations man with television expertise, capable of elevating a game that wasn’t yet No. 1 in America and overseeing the launch of franchises such as Monday Night Football. Tagliabue, an attorney, arrived as the NFL was smarting from two strikes, needing to modernize the CBA (with true free agency on the horizon) while keeping labor peace.

By the time Tagliabue stepped aside, the NFL ownership guard had changed. Legacy families no longer were the majority. It was big-money businessmen paying escalating prices for teams. They wanted a commissioner who could take the business of football to a new level.

Kraft first saw Goodell’s ability to do that in 1994, when Kraft bought the Patriots. Other league executives in the room deferred to Goodell, then in his mid-30s. Goodell was resolute: Kraft and his family were the right buyers to keep a wayward franchise in an essential Northeast market. By 2006, Kraft was one of Goodell’s most strident backers.

“There’s no business like the NFL,” Kraft says. “It’s really complicated. I just thought the more I saw of him, [the more] he continued to grow. I wanted a strong, internal person. So a few of us got together there and made sure it happened.”

In Goodell they saw someone reflecting their worldview—and who would hand the reins back to them. “I really think this is the most important thing—he came in and we talked about an owner-operated mentality in the league office,” Kraft continues. “When we came in, they were more interested in what was good for the league office than ownership.”

Goodell ran his campaign for commissioner with cunning deference to owners’ desires. His chief competitor was NFL outside counsel Gregg Levy. The first vote was 15–13 for Goodell, well short of the two-thirds majority needed. At that point, then Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga told the room that the NFL needed a generalist, not a specialist. To that end, Goodell asked league general counsel Jeff Pash, who’d fallen out of the race, to be his right-hand man and cover his one hole—the lack of a law degree.

On the fifth vote, Goodell won. The owners’ commissioner was in place.

A slew of suspensions and, in 2011, a lockout followed. Time dubbed Goodell “The Enforcer” on a 2012 cover. By then, he had lost the trust of players who saw him as a proxy for the hawkish owners. Vick and Jones were suspended for the entire 2007 season, Goodell’s second in charge. Conversely, Spygate, a story implicating Patriots coaches and execs, broke during the first week of that season. It led to monetary and draft-pick penalties, but no bans of those coaches or execs.

The double standard wasn’t lost on the union. Quietly, though, Goodell did work to rehabilitate troubled players he’d suspended. Legendary coach Tony Dungy was paired with Vick before his reentry to the NFL with the Eagles in 2009 and Goodell was in lockstep with the owners involved.

“To Roger’s credit, when [Vick] wanted to come back and play, the league created a pathway,” says Blank, whose team had Vick for six seasons. “When he went to Philadelphia, Jeff [Lurie] had a great coach there in Andy Reid. Michael went into a great environment that allowed him to play again and be effective again, and eventually not only play at a high level, but he’s living life at a high level now.”

“Not a lot of people get a second chance. Black people don’t get second chances very often in America,” Lurie, the Eagles’ owner, adds. “This was a chance for the NFL to establish that they got the big picture. And Roger led the way.”

There was no such soft touch in 2011. Goodell carried the owners’ flag through the lockout. His chief adversary, then NFLPA chief DeMaurice Smith, saw Goodell’s resolve early, and said to coworkers, “O.K., it’s war.”

The legal fight was never going to be Goodell’s arena—and it was clear in those negotiations that Smith, Pash and NFLPA outside counsel Jeffrey Kessler had done the heavy lifting. Yet, Goodell’s keen understanding of leverage and when to exert it, which has shown repeatedly in broadcast negotiations, was a key to getting owners back to where they wanted to be (particularly with the revenue split) after the perceived failures of 2006.

Soon, though, the image problem the league carried because of its players would reflect on Goodell himself. He was the face of the bungled referee lockout in 2012, a charade over relative pennies that created a massively embarrassing September for pro football. As he would later admit, he screwed up the front end of the NFL’s domestic violence crisis of ’14, issuing the Ravens’ Ray Rice a two-game suspension for punching his fiancée in the face before video of the incident surfaced (the running back never played in the league again).

Given the significant differences in sanctions imposed on teams, owners, front office people, coaches and players, the idea that Goodell made decisions, in the words of one of his adversaries, with a “finger in the wind,” was prevalent. A nicer way of looking at it? He was a meat shield for owners, and his growing pains in handling them were significant—and good for him in the long run.

“If Rice happens in 2000, it’s not the story it became,” says an ex-colleague. “That story becomes huge national news, and that’s because the NFL was at a spot that was different than before. It hit all of us in the face, and through it, Roger became a good crisis leader. That was his formative crisis. Now, you can throw a lot of rocks at him, and he won’t break.”

Goodell’s concern for players also began to evolve. In 2015, Brandon Marshall and DeAngelo Williams approached him about building a platform for charities that mattered to individual players, which birthed My Cause, My Cleats. (Both had been fined in the past for uniform violations supporting causes important to them.) Goodell was with Damar Hamlin and Ryan Shazier through catastrophic injuries and supported the Raiders’ Carl Nassib when the defensive end came out in 2021. And, according to friends, he views player safety as central to his legacy.

One rival of Goodell says the commissioner’s finest moment came amid the social justice uprising that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, when he apologized to the players for not listening to them and for the league’s slowness to support the movement. The impetus was not just a video prominent players shot imploring the league to act, but also Goodell listening to his leadership team and the NFL’s marketing team.

“I think that was the most courageous alignment of his father’s principles with his principles,” says Smith, referencing Charles Goodell losing his Senate seat over his opposition to the Vietnam War. “And I have a hard time believing he had the blessing of the management council or the owners to say that.”

Those close to Goodell would tell you that his ability to listen to those around him, to synthesize varying opinions, is one of his best qualities. Some at NFL headquarters might not agree.

A December 2014 Wall Street Journal story recounted a scene from the league office like this: “Pizzas arrived, but no slice was taken until Mr. Goodell ate. He never did, and the slices turned cold in the box.” The next day, the top guys at the union, as a joke, sent their staff a stack of pizzas. By then, it was common knowledge that 345 Park Ave. had become an emperor’s palace.

While accounts from the Midtown offices vary, there’s little debate that it’s a challenging place to work. To Goodell loyalists, that’s a sign of what one former colleague refers to as the commissioner’s “divine discontent”—a belief that the NFL can never stand still. To those who’ve been on the wrong end of his temper, the descriptor for his leadership style would be less generous. Most on both sides believe the climate is that way intentionally, Goodell’s way of making sure people never get comfortable.

Goodell’s corporate inner circle is crowded. Before NFL chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp became CEO of the PGA Tour in June, Goodell had eight direct reports: Troy Vincent (football operations), Ted Ullyot (Pash’s successor as general counsel), Christine Dorfler (finance), Peter O’Reilly (events/international), Tim Ellis (marketing), Dasha Smith (human resources), Jeff Miller (government/public affairs) and Rolapp. Two execs who previously reported to Rolapp—EVP of media distribution Hans Schroeder and EVP chief revenue officer Renie Anderson—could move up now.

Some owners believe that list should shrink. It’s not about anyone’s qualifications. It’s about the culture of the office and the future of it.

When the commissioner and Jerry Jones were at odds over discipline handed down to Ezekiel Elliott in 2017, the Cowboys’ owner mused on whether the NFL needed to pay a commissioner Goodell’s widely reported salary of $64 million per year—or “$2 million per team,” as one club president couched it.

As the importance of media deals escalated, perception around the league grew that Rolapp was emerging as a natural successor to Goodell. He then left, like so many before him. In 2015, Tod Leiweke became the NFL’s first COO since Goodell. He resigned less than three years in. More recently, in 2022, Chris Halpin, once pegged as a potential replacement, departed for media and internet holding company IAC.

All of which fuels a consensus that Goodell doesn’t have interest in prepping his successor, lest the owners deem that person—who would undoubtedly come cheaper—ready for the job before the commissioner is ready to leave. Meanwhile, Huizenga’s “generalist” candidate has lived up to the moniker by having his hands in every facet of the business. Goodell can be forceful on minutiae one minute—in football operations meetings, he’ll sit in and survey the room, and then be heavy-handed on matters such as player fines—and guide discussion on big-picture topics like international or broadcast the next.

In some cases, it’s brought out the best in him. A decade ago, fed up with Radio City Music Hall’s scheduling conflicts (the 2014 draft was moved to May because of a Rockettes show), Goodell told New York staff who wanted to keep it a home game that the draft was moving, with or without them. It was out of necessity, to a degree, but also stemmed from his belief that the event wasn’t being maximized. A decade later, cities bid to host it and hundreds of thousands of fans attend. In 2027, it’ll be on the National Mall in D.C.

Another by-product of Goodell’s granular involvement is a vast, curated network of power brokers across American industry. So unfolded a scene at the commissioner’s tailgate in Houston at Super Bowl LI, where David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, waited in line to talk with Goodell. “You’d have thought it should be the other way around,” said one team president. Behind Solomon in line were top executives from Apple and Verizon.

Six years later, Amazon paid for the rights to the first Black Friday game—another innovation born of divine discontent. The number was significant. Soon thereafter, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was the one calling Goodell to see how they could build on its momentum.

Goodell was at Heathrow Airport in London in late October 2017 when a top aide’s phone buzzed. It was the Texans—with a staffer calling to request that the commissioner back embattled owner Bob McNair. An ESPN report had alleged that McNair said, “We can’t have the inmates running the prison” during a summit with owners to discuss the Colin Kaepernick–national anthem controversy.

The aide was instructed to tell the Texans that Goodell was already in the air, flying back to New York. Seeing this nonconfrontational version of Goodell would be surprising to some coworkers. But from that came a result you wouldn’t have seen in 2006—Goodell standing on principle, refusing to tell the media that McNair had been taken out of context in the report. Because he hadn’t been.

Goodell is still believed by many owners to play favorites with owners like Kraft and Jones. Yet, the larger group has never been more solidly behind him. Much of it, of course, relates to the NFL closing in on Goodell’s pie-in-the-sky goal of $25 billion in annual revenue, and the touch he’s had for pulling all the right levers, even when faced with opposition among the owners, to get there.

“You look at 32 different owners [in the meetings], I mean, pretty powerful, strong-willed individuals,” Giants owner John Mara says. “And you try to manage that and try to build a consensus among that group, I think that takes a unique skill set. There are very few people, if anybody, that could do it at that level.”

Goodell keeps a notecard in his pocket listing the 31 owners, and the publicly-held Packers’ chief executive, with the date that he last spoke to each jotted down. On Fridays, in a black car from Manhattan to his Westchester County home, he’ll make calls to them—putting commute time to good use. The logic behind the practice: never have a less-involved owner say, Well, all you do is talk to Robert or Jerry.

The result is relationships strong enough to withstand the most trying times. His bond with the Krafts survived Spygate and Deflategate. Jones, too, mostly backs Goodell, even with the issues he had with the commissioner’s salary and his handling of discipline.

“I didn’t know that thing about the notecard,” Kraft says. “That’s pretty smart. It’s really tough. They’re all different people, pretty big egos. He’s been able to balance it pretty good. The results? Look at our ratings. Look at the health of the league. He’s managed it very well, in my opinion.”

The league’s place in American culture in 2025 makes that an understatement.

One former coworker of Goodell’s recalls a weekend trip with him, and the commissioner asking his driver to hit a Chick-fil-A drive-thru after a trying week at work.

“I’m gonna have some bad food,” Goodell said, smiling.

It was memorable only because he so seldom lets his hair down. Even to those who know him well, those sorts of stories are scarce. He’s said to be overly generous with those he’s closest to. He cares deeply about his two daughters. His wife, former Fox News anchor Jane Skinner, is probably more protective of his image than he is. He’s been very supportive, publicly and privately, of the LGBTQ+ community, at least in part because one of his brothers is gay.

Otherwise, what he cares most about is the league he governs, which is why his grip isn’t loosening much and no succession road map has been drawn.

“Brian was on that list,” Blank says. “We’ll see. I really thought [Goodell] would move out of fifth gear a while ago, and he’s still in fifth gear. That hasn’t changed.”

No one contacted for this story thinks it will anytime soon. Goodell may be complex. He may be difficult. But to NFL owners, that’s all been worth it for the work he’s done. And, presumably, will keep doing for quite some time to come.

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