[Elvis]

https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2 ... eter-king/

FMIA: Roger Goodell’s Successor And 8 Issues Facing NFL In Near Future

Late May. Calm after the storm. In the last 15 months, the NFL has navigated a bargaining agreement with the players union through the 2030 season, signed TV/media deals with the networks through the 2033 season, and became the only American sports league to play a full schedule through the minefield of COVID-19.

Now what?

The Next Big Thing for the NFL is not one thing. It’s a few. Inside the walls of the league, commissioner Roger Goodell is aggressively cautioning against complacency, stressing that there are many issues the league needs to focus on while the runway for the next decade is placid.

The issue that interests me the most: Roger Goodell.

The Lead: Future

There was a sense in recent years around NFL ownership that Goodell would shepherd the NFL through the CBA and media negotiations of 2020 and early 2021 and then, with his contract winding down at the end of the 2023 season, work long enough to groom his successor, then fade off into some new life by age 65.

Not so fast. Looking into the future of Goodell, 62, in the past few days, two things are apparent. He hasn’t decided yet if he will leave the league when his current contract expires in three years. There’s a sense from associates that he could stay for a year or years beyond that. Also, a clear majority of owners want him to stay beyond 2023, pointing to the recent accomplishments of the Goodell-led league office—labor peace for the next nine seasons and the $113-billion media deal that’s the envy of every sport in America. If the league isn’t broke, they posit, why try to fix it?

Goodell is approaching his 15-year anniversary as commissioner (Sept. 1), continuing a major run of continuity for the league at commissioner. He’s the third in the last 61 years; Pete Rozelle took over in early 1960, Paul Tagliabue in November 1989, and Goodell in 2006. That’s continuity on a Steelers-coach level. Digging into this over the past few days, I’ve found three reasons why Goodell is likely to stay on the job for three or more seasons:

1. Goodell doesn’t have anything else he’s dying to do. Some people who have built $17-billion businesses might have a hankering to get into the private-equity business, or cryptocurrency, or some niche thing like owning a business far from football. But Goodell isn’t that guy. He doesn’t have a big hobby, other than golf, and he has no interest in doing that every day.

2021 NFL Draft
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. (Getty Images)
2. Goodell still loves football. Solving football issues, going to games, staying on top of the changing sports landscape . . . Those are things he relishes. I’m told one of the things that gave him big-time juice was figuring a way to run the league through the craziness of 2020—the draft from his basement, the daily testing of players and staffers around the league, getting the train to run on time. He’s still into the job. As one associate told me: “There’s a lot of new avenues available for the NFL to grow—international, sports betting, growing the game. That’s more interesting to Roger than just doing something to make money. That’s never been his thing.”

3. There’s no logical successor. Three successor candidates internally, all age 50 or younger, loom: chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp (point man on the mega-media deals), EVP of Football Operations Troy Vincent (runs officiating and helped keep the game on the field in 2020), and chief strategy officer Chris Halpin (eyes on the future, including international expansion). But Goodell has been such a domineering presence that most of the league candidates have been laboring in the shadows. Vincent’s well known as a former player. Owners and executives know Rolapp and Halpin, but they’re anonymous to coaches, players and fans. It would serve Goodell well to put them more in the public eye, and to put more on each of their plates—and less on his own—to judge their worthiness for the job.

None of the four major sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL) has gone outside its own game to hire a commissioner for the last 28 years, since Gary Bettman moved from being an NBA executive to NHL commissioner in 1993. A struggling league might look to an Amazon or Google for an outside-the-box, new-age commissioner candidate. But the NFL’s the king of the hill, and it’s unlikely the league would look outside for a non-football candidate.

Other names the league could consider: Falcons CEO Rich McKay, whose age, 62, would hurt him but who has been an invaluable asset on the Competition Committee; and Rams COO Kevin Demoff, 44, who has won raves for his work with the L.A. stadium project and the hiring of Sean McVay, and has a deep internal knowledge of league affairs. Chiefs owner Clark Hunt would be a good candidate, but I don’t think he’s interested. I’m told owners, overwhelmingly, want an NFL person, likely from inside the league office, to succeed Goodell.

So I’d look for Goodell to stay on through 2024 or ’25, maybe grooming a successor in the last couple of years. Goodell has been the quarterback and head coach on virtually every decision of substance in the league for almost 15 years—which is his job—and so how would anyone know if a Rolapp has the leadership qualities to run a multi-billion-dollar business? No one else has had to do it since 2006. “Roger’s got to get some people inside the league to touch the football,” said one league insider.

Whoever succeeds Goodell is going to have another job to do. The bell will continue to toll on health and safety, and the NFL’s ramrodding of the 17-game schedule this year leads most observers to think 18 games is on the way. How can a league that professes to care about the long-term health of its players subject them to 17 games (in 2021) and maybe 18 (by 2025 or ’26) without imaginatively pursuing ways to assure players they’re not going to be guinea pigs for the NFL’s almighty dollar? The owners have dollar signs dancing in their heads over more inventory; the players should have a roadblock dancing in theirs. That may be the first major issue for the NFL’s fourth commissioner since the Kennedy Administration.

When I thought about the NFL and the future, I thought how boring it would be to have only business topics. So I’m going to intersperse real football things among some issues facing the NFL in the near future. Goodell is number one. A few more:

International Football
A few years ago, the league was bullish on putting a team or teams in London or Europe. That sentiment has cooled now; too many logistical problems that ownership feels are off-putting and potentially competitively unfair. Instead, the league wants to conquer non-U.S. markets in two ways—giving each team the chance to be the “home team” for a foreign market. The Steelers and the Rooney family as the NFL team in marketing and business ventures, say, in Dublin. Jacksonville and London, say. And expanding the schedule overseas by mandating every team play at least one game every eight years outside the United States.

I asked Chris Halpin on Friday what an ideal NFL schedule might look like in five years, in the 2026 season. “Maybe four games in London—two from the inventory of games teams voted on this year, maybe two with teams [such as Jacksonville] volunteering for games there. And maybe one in Germany and one in Mexico,” Halpin said. So six in all. That’s one more than the most the NFL has played outside the country; in 2017 and 2019, the league had four games in London and one in Mexico City. The fast-riser in international circles: Germany. The NFL is bullish on playing one game a season, starting either in 2022 or 2023, in Germany. The likely first venue would be nearly NFL-ready Allianz Stadium in Munich, home grounds for Bayern Munich. Frankfurt, Berlin and Cologne/Dusseldorf could also host.

This year, the NFL had 2.2 million people in Germany watching as an average-minute audience (that’s the way Nielsen rates NFL games here) at least part of the Super Bowl—and the game was on there in the early hours of Monday. Plus, subscriptions to the NFL’s big pay-TV model, NFL GamePass, were up 30 percent worldwide last year. That is a huge revenue stream.

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[Elvis]

Goodell isn't going anywhere. Are he and Jerry Jones good now?

[Hacksaw]

For half a billion dollars has the game really gotten that much better and more profitable? He did let the rams back to LA so that's worth half of it.....j/k