Bernstein: Roger Goodell's Absurd Production
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) He might say something today, or not, or perhaps wait until Friday or another Friday to float the outcome of Tom Brady's appeal of a four-game suspension into the more forgiving weekend information cycle. Regardless of when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell releases the decision, in a way his silence has already worked.
NFL training camps convene in a week, and already each team's local coverage is deep into positional breakdowns, schedule analysis and profiles of all the new faces on the roster. Brady and his deflated footballs of late winter have receded for now, whatever he "more likely than not" had to do with them or to what degree he was "generally aware" of their flaccidity.
With every passing day, the once-roaring controversy seems smaller and sillier to reasonable people, many of us recognizing it as such immediately at the time, pleased now to be joined by others finally sharing the belief that it was all a bit much from the outset. The size of the stage and the characters involved conflated to spawn an overheated mess that has only now cooled, and we're all the better for it. The next news will rekindle some tribal shouting from invested corners, and then the leaves are starting to turn and the ball is in the air.
Loose ends of NFL mess are tying up as another season approaches, some more neatly than others. Adrian Peterson and the Vikings seem to have reconciled with the renegotiation of his contract, his trade-me-or-else stance lacking leverage and similarly weakened over time. Greg Hardy's suspension was appealed down to four Cowboys games that he'll miss, while Ray Rice and Ray McDonald will likely remain in exile. The league moves on.
To put it in medical terms, Goodell is turning an acute problem into a chronic one, or more specifically treating an ill by holding it at bay long enough. If a disease can be controlled for a period of time beyond the human life span, that's essentially the same as finding a cure – it simply changes into a condition to be lived with.
And we will indeed live with this, whatever the decision on Brady. It will just be subsumed quickly into our respective thought patterns, coloring our opinions of him, the Patriots, Bill Belichick, Robert Kraft and Goodell himself to the extent that we each see fit. For most of us, this particular story ultimately amounts to just not much.
"Wating for Goodell" is its own production now, an easy – if apt – relation to the uncertain, attenuated atmosphere of the absurdist play. Nothing is happening, and nobody involved seems either motivated to act or certain of the ultimate meaning of their actions. "There is no timeline," Goodell said Tuesday at an event in Pennsylvania, and we can hear Beckett's Estragon lament there's "nothing to be done."
In a repetitive, seemingly endless existence where people appear to merely go through motions for their own sake in perpetual existential purposelessness, the characters wait.
From Act 1:
VLADIMIR:
That he'd have to think it over.
ESTRAGON:
In the quiet of his home.
VLADIMIR:
Consult his family.
ESTRAGON:
His friends.
VLADIMIR:
His agents.
ESTRAGON:
His correspondents.
VLADIMIR:
His books.
ESTRAGON:
His bank account.
VLADIMIR:
Before taking a decision.
ESTRAGON:
It's the normal thing.
VLADIMIR:
Is it not?
ESTRAGON:
I think it is.
VLADIMIR:
I think so too.
Silence.