Baffoe: Fire Roger Goodell
By Tim Baffoe-
(CBS) Fire that no-good reptilian mob boss Roger Goodell.
"I'm used to criticism, I'm used to that. Every day, I have to earn my stripes," the NFL commissioner said regarding his job status. "Every day, I have to, to do a better job. And that's my responsibility to the game, to the NFL and to what I see as society."
Only, Goodell sees society as something other than so many terrible circles than have Venn diagrammed with his game. Or he just doesn't care.
Fire him for the Ray and Janay Rice travesty to intelligent and civil behavior and discourse. Goodell lied and continues to lie about this. None of the interview he did with CBS on Tuesday evening is genuine.
"Just (Monday) morning," Goodell said of when he learned of the newly released video that showed Rice knocked Janay into unconsciousness in an Atlantic City elevator in February.
It's as if we should suspend belief that Goodell doesn't have five cell phones texting and updating him on everything and anything at all times. He's a professional at misleading, distorting, placating and pushing things into such a rhetorical gelatin that cigarette CEOs of the 1990s weep for not having him message the truth and tumors away from the general conscious.
Fire the awful, despicable Roger Goodell.
Fire him for pushing the editor-in-chief of NFL Pravda out there to treat us like morons.
Again, this is a lie. NFL security is comprised of ex-FBI and other law enforcement heavies. To assume all information, video and otherwise, of the Rice incident weren'tknown in their entirety by league honchos is naïve at best and toxic at worst.
ESPN's highly-respected senior NFL reporter, Chris Mortensen, noted Monday afternoon that a league source explained explicit details of the events that transpired … and that those details were consistent with the evidence from the tape. The conclusion being that it would be hard for these details to be so closely aligned with what transpired in the video without the source having actually seen the video. And if this source therefore did indeed see the video, they one must presume his superiors were made aware of the details, and of course, those superiors answer to Goodell.
Separately, ESPN W's highly-respected reporter, Jane McManus, made similar claims on Monday's Outside the Lines. Namely, that a source provided accounts of what happened in a manner which would strongly suggest that the source had seen the video witnessed by thousands today.
If we want to play a game of semantics, it's remotely possible in a theoretical physics-like way that Goodell's eyes never fell on the actual tape until this week, but being aware of the exact details — the concrete facts of zero gray area of what occurred in that elevator that Deadspin had accurate tips about the day after the punching happened — is just the same. And to pretend that somehow the NFL couldn't slip an envelope under the table for the tape the way TMZ did is willfully ignorant. Or, again, just plain lying.
Fire the lying, greasy Roger Goodell.
Fire him for this being another in a long line of example after example of a culture Goodell didn't create but damn well has cultivated and perpetuated. That of disregard for the well-being of one's fellow man, and in too often the case, fellow woman. Goodell has worked to cover up and retard the stream of information about the adverse effects of football on the human body, and that's a battle the game itself will eventually have to reconcile. But of late he has worked to deliberately mislead media and fans as to the league's problem with women, even using player head injuries to mask it.
Writes Jeb Lund for the guardian.com of the murder-suicide involving Jovan Belcher:
Two years ago, it was a stark horror; now, thanks to the media machine orbiting the NFL, it might as well be jurassic. By focusing almost exclusively on Belcher potentially suffering from concussive dementia, the machine omitted discussion of misogyny in the league. The latter is a more problematic topic, reflecting the reality fans want to take a break from, but a woman being gunned down and a woman being knocked down are just steps along the same path if the culture you inhabit thinks of them as having no agency but to reflect and please you.
Fire the lecherous pleaser of cognitive dissonance Roger Goodell.
Fire him for being a pimp of the highest order, for using the mass of stupid fans indifferent to domestic violence and mistreatment of women to negotiate the profiteering of pain and misery. Goodell doesn't care if an NFL employee beats a woman. He cares if that employee gets caught and if enough people complain about it.
As ESPN's Keith Olbermann said Monday, "Roger Goodell's existence, who he is, what he has turned the NFL commissioner's office into, is now symbolized by Ray Rice's brutal left hand striking Janay Palmer and striking her again. Mr. Goodell is an enabler of men who beat women."
Fire the enabler of woman-punching Roger Goodell.
Fire him for treating recreational drugs as worse than punching women. For pushing addictive, destructive pills and needles on players instead. For not caring about rampant substance addiction in his league. For condoning racism. For doing little to address player suicides.
Fire the hypocritical Roger Goodell.
Fire him, NFL owners, because as your servant he has proved himself lacking. You all may not care about the actual issues, but you (should) care about bad PR, as it translates to any loss of revenue. You should care about any lack of trust in your product, and right now the trust is deteriorating among the conscientious fan, and Roger Goodell is only speeding up that erosion.
You can find a man — or, gasp, maybe even a woman — to do your bidding, up revenue and not ham-fist the recurring pox of negative stories with propaganda, suspensions that are subjective, shell games and blatant dishonesty. Goodell isn't the bungling Bed Selig pratfall sort of commissioner. Yours is genuinely evil and a target of gallows humor, and the position doesn't have to be.
Goodell is a man whose constant look of sunburn suggests not only someone not putting in much office time but also a face basking in the sunshine of a league with a crumbling image that he continues to foster. The head of the NFL is bad for the NFL and bad for humanity. Get somebody who cares about fixing what is wrong with your league.
Fire Roger Goodell into the sun.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow him on Twitter @TimBaffoe.
