Observing Schefter on his manic routine, I was left to wonder: would there be a day when this fully customized insider will be replaced by some Siri- or Alexa-like oracle? Maybe named “Nuggetia”? (“Nuggetia, is Adrian Peterson too injured to start on Sunday?”)
But then you see Schefter working his sources/relationships/friends, and you sense something that approximates human warmth. There is also something earnest, even winning, about how transactional his interactions are. When I interviewed Schefter, he won me over by dismissing my small-talk efforts at the outset. “Okay, you don’t have to warm me up, time is of a premium, I got it,” Schefter said, directing me to turn on my tape recorder. “I’m going to give you whatever I can. I don’t want to waste your time.” By that, Schefter meant he did not want to waste his own time, which is almost always better spent hunting his Big Game—trophy nuggets.
On the sidelines before Super Bowl 51, Schefter was actually seen hugging Bill Belichick. This would earn him a personal foul—15 yards—from certain journalism referees. But damn, you kind of marvel. No one hugs Bill Belichick, certainly not reporters. Schefter should go into the Hall of Fame for that alone.
In Boca, I watched Schefter huddle with Berj Najarian, Belichick’s longtime consigliere—or director of football/head coach administrator (former Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe once had a dozen roses sent to Najarian on Secretary’s Day). Berj is a jittery presence generally, but particularly so whenever Belichick is not around, like a St. Bernard displaced from his master. He is just the kind of functionary whose cock-blocking and secret-keeping powers make him an essential, even feared figure inside the league. “How many people talk about the consigliere?” the retired Patriots linebacker and ESPN analyst Tedy Bruschi said by way of refusing to speak about Najarian when Bruschi was approached on the subject by the New York Times. Schefter talks to the consigliere, which is all the more impressive. It makes Berj a solid gold source/relationship/friend. Quiet chuckles emanated from the Najarian and Schefter powwow, a sense of a mutual comfort being taken.
Well-barbered ESPN insider Sal Paolantonio stood a few feet away from the duo, also yapping into his phone. “That tanned NFL guy from ESPN” is how an older gentleman in a Chicago Cubs cap described Paolantonio to his wife as they passed by the pack of media busybodies. Paolantonio has a long face and sports suede shoes and a pair of Rick Perry–vintage glasses that make him look cerebral when reporting the latest on whether quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick will return to the Jets. Like many of his Hair Club for Nuggets cohorts, “Sal Pal,” as he is known, is a former print guy. He covered the Eagles for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1990s. But when you see him working insider quorums such as this, Sal Pal brings the strut of someone who has fully “graduated” to TV “personality,” at least tripling or quadrupling his salary along the way. His earpiece might as well be made of gold. “I don’t want this to sound the wrong way,” he told me, “but I feel like I was born to do this.”
Also reporting for nugget duty was another NFL insider, ESPN’s John Clayton, who might have been my personal favorite. Slight and unassuming, Clayton looks like a parakeet with glasses, or maybe a math teacher. But he is also a machine, and one of the small victories of my career was to persuade my bosses at the Times Magazine to assign a Q and A with Clayton on the eve of the 2013 season. (First question: “You just covered twelve different team practices in the last eleven days. What did you dream about being when you grew up?”)
After I summoned the nerve to introduce myself, Clayton confirmed a previous nugget I had extracted from Sports Illustrated’s NFL kingfish Peter King: that a woman wearing an I LOVE JOHN CLAYTON T-shirt had traveled to Indianapolis during the NFL Scouting Combine to track Clayton down and announce herself to him as a John Clayton groupie. “Her name was Candy,” Clayton told me (of course it was). “The whole groupie thing is definitely a little bit creepy,” Clayton added. It’s safe to say that Clayton, who would be let go by ESPN a year later, could still walk through any airport in the United States and get hit up for more autographs and photos than the vast majority of NFL players, U.S. senators, and Nobel Prize winners.
Our quadrant of the lobby had by now also come to include Sports Illustrated’s King and Profootballtalk.com’s Mike Florio. It made for quite the impressive cluster of NFL media yentas from the Nugget Industrial Complex. If God forbid a bomb went off in here and wiped everyone out, we would suffer an immediate nugget famine, necessitating an emergency airlift to fantasy players. Seeing all of them clustered, waiting to do their “stand-ups”—or “hits”—my mind jumped to the ESPN ad tagline “We Are Men Wearing Makeup Talking About Sports.” That is indeed what they are, but it misses how dead serious their rat race is.
Nugget dealers run in a pack, and most do their best to be classy about giving shout-outs where due. (“Bengals Rey Maualuga checking into Betty Ford later this month, according to Adam Schefter,” praised Sports Illustrated’s Peter King. “Good Nugget.” Credit for nugget recognition in this particular case: Deadspin’s Drew Magary.) But some do not give proper shout-outs, which can be a sore spot and invite pariah status in the academy. Don’t get Schefter started, for instance, on his former employer, NFL Network, and how derelict they can be about giving props. Actually, I did get him started. He was being driven in to work one morning during the season and listening to some NFL show on Sirius Satellite Radio. “They’re saying [Bengals tight end] Tyler Eifert is going to have back surgery and be out four to six months. I’m like, ‘Really, where did you get that from?’ Nothing about ESPN. Nothing! Nothing. If I ever did that to somebody, what is done regularly to ESPN, I would be called on it every time.” Not cool!
No doubt, things can get heated inside the kettle of nuggets. Florio, of ProFootballTalk (PFT) and NBC, has developed a devoted following for his aggressive and increasingly combative tone. Several team and league officials told me they check ProFootballTalk—and Florio’s Twitter feed—first thing in the morning and several times a day. He can be refreshingly edgy toward subjects and competitors alike—though not everyone finds him refreshing. “He’s not a journalist,” ESPN nugget-monger Chris Mortensen said dismissively to me about Florio. “He’s really not a good person.”
Florio has even been accused of being (gasp) unclassy! After the 2018 Super Bowl, Florio went out on a lonely limb to report that Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels was having second thoughts about becoming the next coach of the Colts—though several outlets had reported his hiring as a done deal. When Schefter reported that McDaniels would be staying in New England after all, Florio made a point of tweeting thus: “Attention everyone who assumed I was making it all up: SUCK IT.”
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For as focused as they are on their phones and next hits and receiving their just shout-outs, nugget hunters have a sixth sense whenever Big Game enters their perimeter: a head coach or chatty owner, perhaps, or the occasional Moby-Dick himself. As Goodell moved through the summit grounds like a traveling sheikh, a siren might as well have sounded in Insider Village, such was the state of high alert. No one would expect the commissioner to actually feed anybody anything, but still, witness must be borne to the ruddy-faced emperor. The son of the late Republican senator of New York Charles Goodell, the commissioner’s politician genes are evident. He is a most prodigious slapper of backs, knower of names, gladder of hands, and toucher of bases. He moved among his constituents in a former jock’s ballet of bro hugs and two-handed handgrips and shoulder squeezes punctuated with backslaps. He received guests, laughing easily, maybe for real, or maybe not.
“Good to see you, Coach,” Goodell called out to Carolina Panthers headman Ron Rivera in a central patio. Goodell’s orange hair looks especially bright and shiny in the sunlit room, as does the Creamsicle hue of his face. “Great season this year,” Goodell tells Coach Rivera. Their handshake flowers into a hug. Goodell then sees the Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey L
urie, one of the thirty-two most important bases he has to touch, walking in his direction. He stops and has a word. The commissioner nods and is listening, quite clearly.
This is Roger’s element. He looks freshly worked out. It would please him very much to hear me say that. He works out a great deal. And he loves to talk about how he works out a lot (SoulCycle, Pilates), and also mention exactly for how long he worked out that day. Goodell likes to trash-talk colleagues who don’t get to the gym at the early hour he does. “Good afternoon,” he will taunt them as they straggle in before 7 a.m. He runs an annual 40-yard dash in his work clothes, following up on a gimmick that NFL Network’s Rich Eisen performs every year at the Scouting Combine. Before the Super Bowl, Goodell holds a press conference where he typically takes a question planted with a kid reporter who might toss up some puffball about a league public service program, like one that encourages kids to exercise for at least sixty minutes a day—“Play 60,” the initiative is called.
“Mr. Commissioner, how do YOU play sixty?” a kid asked Goodell before Super Bowl 49 in Glendale, Arizona. The beast pounced: “I played sixty-five this morning on the elliptical,” Goodell preened. I am going to venture that you’ll never meet a man in his late fifties with such rock-hard abs.
Goodell also likes to talk about how he used to play The Game himself. He played through high school till he wrecked his knee. But playing football was such a great experience for him. It gave Roger so much camaraderie and instilled so much character. If he had sons, instead of teenage twin daughters, he would by all means encourage them to play football. Other prominent parents have said they would not be so sure—Barack Obama and LeBron James have expressed ambivalence, as well as the actual father of Tom Brady, knowing what we know now; Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, too, and a bunch of others. But Goodell says there are no sure things in life, whether you’re football playing or couch sitting, and he does his best to make the case.
Goodell is apparently required to say that his first job is to “protect the Shield” x number of times a day as a condition of the $111 million in salary and benefits his owner-bosses paid him between 2013 and 2015. The Shield evokes gallant warriors and immovable forces, but it is also a reminder that the enterprise itself requires protection—a shield for the Shield. When Goodell sits at his desk, he gazes upon a large rendering of the Shield on a back wall of his office. ‘‘It is a reminder to look out,’’ he says.
“Protecting the Shield” roughly equates to protecting “the integrity of the game,” which is another platitude the commissioner throws out all the time. What all of that essentially means is that Goodell’s first job is to protect the Membership, and often from itself.
The league, for instance, would prefer it if the Membership left the discussion of brain health to the experts, or at least to Dr. Goodell. It is part of the commissioner’s job, after all, to cushion billionaire brain farts on this issue. When health and safety questions are asked of the Membership, as they inevitably are, the moguls are careful to inflict the repetitive sound-bite trauma that the league arms them with (“the game has never been safer”). They then move on as quickly as possible.
But owners can’t always help themselves, and at least one of them seems intent on proving this every few months. Colts owner Jim Irsay, for instance, sat in a golf cart in Boca, smoking a cigarette and holding forth with Dan Kaplan of the SportsBusiness Journal about the varying side effects of playing the sport. He likened the risks to the possible side effects of taking aspirin. “You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin,” Irsay said. “It might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body may reject it, where I would be fine.” This caused an Excedrin headache at the annual meeting, which Jerry Jones decided to assuage by brushing aside the rather obvious link between chronic traumatic encephalopathy and football. “No, that’s absurd” was Jerry’s take on whether playing football can result in CTE.
Candor can prove as problematic as ignorance. Bills general manager Doug Whaley, for instance, was trying to be philosophical when making the obvious point that football is a dangerous sport and that injuries are inevitable. “It’s a violent game,” Whaley told WGR 550 radio. It would have been fine if he ended the sentence here. But instead, Whaley ended the sentence with “. . . that I personally don’t think humans are supposed to play.” And the headline wrote itself.
Bills GM: I “don’t think humans are supposed to play” football
This was problematic since football-playing robots had not yet been invented. What’s more, Whaley was trying to convince actual human beings to come play for the Buffalo Bills. You can imagine the GM was frog-marched up to the Bills’ PR office for cleanup duty. “Clearly I used a poor choice of words,” Whaley clarified in a statement the next day. He is human after all.
So are NFL owners, just like us, although their positions grant them superhuman deference and platforms that can be irresistible. That is why league meetings, teeming with media, can be so treacherous. The Membership is forced into the sunlight—when in fact most of them are suited to the shadows. Robert Kraft made himself available to the media for twelve minutes on a back patio. RKK had a message to convey. His audience was about twenty reporters and camera people, most from New England outlets. Kraft said he is proud of all the great things the Patriots have accomplished during his twenty-three years as owner. We know this because he is always saying so and listing all the accomplishments (the Super Bowls, conference championship games, the consecutive sellouts). He does again: “It’s nice to step back a little bit and contemplate,” he said. But what RKK really wanted to say is that he is still angry over Deflategate. It’s important for New England fans to hear that, because they, too, are still angry and probably will be even if Brady wins another ten Super Bowls.
“I want our fans to know that I empathize with the way they feel,” Kraft said. (Robert is a mogul of empathy kill!) Not only that, but he has written a letter—a letter!—requesting that the commissioner return the first- and fourth-round draft picks he had docked the Pats over Brady’s alleged and horrible crimes. Kraft said the league was derelict in not considering the Ideal Gas Law when determining the team’s guilt or innocence (the Ideal Gas Law, as Joey from Quincy and most the rest of Pats Nation could explain much better than me, is an old physics rule explaining why a football might naturally lose air pressure in cold weather without the intervention of, say, a needle administered by a locker room attendant whose nickname is “The Deflator”). You can be certain that Mr. Kraft’s letter was a succinct biting missive written in his own hand, perhaps on stationery from the Ritz Paris.
This flaccid protest was Kraft’s attempt to pander to New England fans while not losing his seat at the Membership Big Boy table or jeopardizing his still-close relationship with Goodell. He tries to have it both ways, which elicits eye-rolls from owners and league officials who are on to him. They call him “Krafty” (behind his back) and “needy Bob Kraft” (longtime Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy).
One nugget-hungry pest in Boca asked Kraft the requisite question about concussions. He parried it with the requisite sound bites about how “the game has never been safer” and how he used to play football himself (“lightweight” football at Columbia, gives him a certain authority). Another reporter pressed him to assess the overall performance of Goodell, who had just completed his tenth season as commissioner. “Putting personal situations aside,” Kraft straddled, “I think he’s done a very good job.”
Translation: forgiveness comes easier when you’re making reams of cash.
The Patriots’ longtime PR man Stacey James halted the session with a “thanks guys” in time for me to catch Woody Johnson doing a similar gaggle in a nearby conference room. Johnson does not often speak publicly. This is not atypical for hapless franchise bosses who oversee periodic coach and GM shake-ups in big media markets like Woody and the New York J-E-T-S, JETS JETS JETS! Johnson also has an amusing gift f
or knucklehead statements, which makes him a recurring character on Shit the Membership Says (a sitcom I plan to develop someday). My favorite Woody wisdom occurred after Schefter had produced a nugget quoting an anonymous Jets assistant coach critical of quarterback Christian Hackenberg. The Jets rookie, according to the coach, “couldn’t hit the ocean” with one of his passes. Asked whether he agreed, Johnson said he had indeed seen Schefter’s ESPN report, and then tried to defuse the situation with, uh, humor. “I guess it depends on which ocean,” Johnson said. “Maybe it was a small ocean.” (He makes a fair point.) “The EPA describes that as an ocean. Anyway, no, that’s not funny.”
Johnson always looks slightly daydreamy and disoriented. He is like an overgrown third-grader who collects toy trains and rotten quarterbacks. His press session in Boca was no different, though he wore the game expression of a kid hopping back on a jumpy horse.
He was immediately asked the evergreen question about the Jets’ quarterback situation. What was the Jets’ interest in free agent Robert Griffin III, who had visited the team? Johnson was noncommittal but generous enough to describe Griffin as being “very presentable,” an innovative construction in the tradition of Very White Men Describing Black Quarterbacks. He also offered a twist on the standard response to the concussion question, saying that he cares passionately about the issue because “I come from a health background.” (Being the great-grandson of the Johnson & Johnson cofounder would, I suppose, technically qualify someone for a “health background.”) Regardless, the Wood Man was not going any further on the issue. “I’ll leave that to the neurologists,” he said, presentably.
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