Commentary: Expect Roger Goodell to stay on as NFL commissioner, at least for now

LOS ANGELES—NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is dinged, dented and damaged.

He’s also employed — and almost surely will stay that way for a while.

Here’s betting that Goodell will keep his $44-million-a-year job in spite of the taint of the Ray Rice scandal and the sports world questioning when his office first saw the video of the Baltimore Ravens running back punching his fiancee in the elevator of an Atlantic City hotel.

Goodell has said the league didn’t see the video until TMZ released it this week. An anonymous law enforcement official told the Associated Press that the league had possession of the video five months ago.

Regardless, the whole mess looks terrible for the league and Goodell, who less than a week ago appeared unshakable as the No. 1 executive in the No. 1 sports league.

Barring information that he did know the NFL had a copy of the video, Goodell still has enough support among team owners to hang on to his job. In a bottom-line business, he has done too much to enrich NFL owners, lining their pockets with record-breaking TV deals and a labor agreement that tilts heavily in their favor.

But that doesn’t speak to his credibility as the league’s discipline czar, which is now obliterated. In fact, the Rice scandal could lead to a change in the way the NFL punishes players. Goodell’s authority as judge, jury and executioner is likely to become a thing of the past, and it could be that a third party handles future punishments, rather than putting that solely in the hands of the NFL.

Goodell’s stance in the Bountygate scandal has come back on him like a boomerang. When he suspended New Orleans Coach Sean Payton and General Manager Mickey Loomis, he admonished them, saying ignorance was not an excuse if they didn’t know the wrongdoings happening in their franchise.

Likewise, if Goodell didn’t know that someone in the NFL had the Rice video, ignorance should not be an excuse. That would leave him open to suspending himself.

Even the league’s investigation of itself feels clumsy and rushed. In a move that smacked of desperation, the NFL announced late Wednesday — 11 p.m. EDT at its New York headquarters — that it would launch an “independent” investigation of the handling of information in the Rice case. Former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller will conduct the probe.

Mueller is qualified, without question, but the conflict-of-interest optics are terrible. He works for WilmerHale, the law firm that recently helped the NFL negotiate a multibillion-dollar deal with DirecTV. That firm also previously represented Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, and it’s the former firm of Dick Cass, president of the Ravens.

The questions don’t stop there. The NFL owners assigned to oversee the investigation, Pittsburgh’s Art Rooney and the New York Giants’ John Mara — while both widely respected in the league — are close to Goodell. In fact, it was Rooney’s father, Dan, who informed Goodell that he would be replacing Paul Tagliabue as commissioner. It’s not about whether Rooney or Mara would do a good job. It’s about optics, and the perception of the public that the NFL is indeed fairly and squarely under the microscope.

(Something else: It took the NFL only a few hours to line up Mueller for this job. He’s among the most experienced and recognizable enforcement officials in the country, someone who ran the FBI under two presidents. And yet the league couldn’t get a copy of that elevator video from the Atlantic City police?)

The investigation will buy Goodell time, and he will keep his job in the interim. But he has been weakened as commissioner, and if he’s unable to recover from that, it’s hard to imagine owners keeping him around for the long term.

In the meantime, the Rice scandal has stolen the thunder from a phenomenal opening weekend of games. When it comes to video reviews, this isn’t what the football-loving fans had in mind.