Big Game

by Mark Leibovich

  On the eve of Concussion’s release, one of the league’s brightest young stars, the Giants’ Odell Beckham Jr., decided that a late-season game against Carolina would be the perfect time to build up a 20-yard head of steam and hurl himself into the helmet of Panthers cornerback Josh Norman, with whom he had been in a trash-talking war all afternoon. Beckham’s running launch could have knocked Norman unconscious or who knows what else. It would earn Beckham the first of three unnecessary roughness fouls and lead to a series of wild fights between Beckham and Norman that afternoon that would dominate the week’s highlight packages. Eventually, Beckham would earn a one-game suspension for initiating “forcible contact” with the head of a defenseless player and trying to injure Norman.

  Whatever Sony might have done to tone down Concussion, the film still packed a wallop. Reviews were largely positive, including from active and retired NFL players, many of whom reported that the film left them shaken and angry. Nonetheless, Concussion bombed at the box office as spectacularly as the NFL kept dominating TV ratings.

  At around the time of the Beckham-Norman melee, quarterback Case Keenum, then of the Rams, suffered a concussion late in a game against the Ravens. Keenum was thrown down by the Baltimore defender and had his head snap back violently against the turf. He grabbed his helmet and writhed on the ground for several seconds before being helped to his feet by teammates. It was clear to anyone watching that Keenum was concussed (a diagnosis confirmed after the game). But the action on the field barely stopped. Keenum was not checked for a concussion, as he should have been according to the league’s new “protocols.” He wobbled back to the Rams huddle and ran two plays before fumbling away the game to the Ravens, whose kicker won it for them, 16–13, with a last-second field goal.

  The video of the Keenum incident would be played and replayed as a companion to the weekend’s montage of tiptoe catches, breakaway runs, and touchdown dances. This mishap was so damning because it was so blatant, as opposed to the concussions that transpire on any given Sunday that are never self-reported, diagnosed, or noticed. Both the NFL and NFL Players Association opened investigations. Four months later, the NFL’s vice president of football operations, Troy Vincent, announced the obvious—that the Keenum affair was “a system failure across the board.” Blame was parceled among the referees (who did not stop the game), the Rams training staff (who did not check Keenum for a concussion), and the NFL’s designated injury “spotter” at the game (who is supposed to stop the game upon detecting a woozy player).

  But the more potent enabler of these sequences is the most basic of football instincts: the hunger to compete, keep your job, and win a game. Players and coaches share in it, and so implicitly do the fans. Even fans who, like me, watched the Keenum event with reflexive contempt for the league’s continued ability to generate fiascos. I exhaled my obligatory umbrage. I sniffed disgust at the Keystone Kops of Park Ave and spouted off (I’m sure) about how the NFL does not really care about player safety. They run a football league, not a humanity business.

  If I’m being honest, though—and I always am honest, being a Pats fan—watching Keenum stumble around was an almost academic outrage. I had zero stake in the game, either team, or in Keenum’s livelihood. He was a middling quarterback playing in a meaningless game for a team going nowhere. But there was also a similar scenario that had occurred ten months earlier, involving a team and game I did have a stake in.

  The Patriots were trailing Seattle by ten with just under eleven minutes left in the Super Bowl. They faced a third and 14 from their own 28. Brady then completed a 21-yard pass over the middle to receiver Julian Edelman, who was whacked so hard by Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor that NBC announcer Cris Collinsworth let out a sickened moan at the second of impact. Edelman somehow hung on to the ball. He sprang to his feet in one punch-drunk motion and ran another 10 yards down the field even though he was ruled down and the whistle had blown. He seemed disoriented. It should have been evident to anyone watching, and apparently was to the game’s concussion “spotter,” who had been overheard by reporters radioing down to the Patriots sideline in a frantic effort to communicate that Edelman did not look right and needed to be examined.

  But the Patriots, desperate to get back into the game, were running a hurry-up offense. Their drive continued. Two plays later, Edelman caught another pass over the middle to the 3-yard line and, in a strange motion, crawled a few yards forward on his stomach before struggling to his feet (Al Michaels observed that Edelman was “a little slow getting up” and pointed out that he had been bothered by a hip injury). Brady threw a touchdown pass to Danny Amendola on the next play that cut the deficit to 24–21. Edelman was finally examined when he arrived back on the sideline and was cleared to return.

  The incident was also studied by the league and led to the creation of the so-called Julian Edelman Rule. Starting the following season, booth spotters would be empowered to contact referees directly to stop the game. The player they suspected might be concussed would have to miss at least one play while doctors looked him over. Credit the league, I suppose, for being responsive and taking corrective action following another televised misadventure.

  But maybe the larger takeaway here was what I remember thinking as I watched the sequence unfold. I remember explicitly saying to myself, if not to the fellow Pats fans I was watching with, “Please get the hell up, Julian Edelman.” Or “Please don’t have a concussion, we need you.” I also remember thinking (or saying) something to the effect of, “I really hope no referee just saw the little stagger-stumble I saw.” If they did, they might stop the game. It would not surprise me at all if Edelman, Brady, the Patriots on the sideline, everyone in the coaches’ booth and owner’s box were all thinking the same. “Get the hell up, we need you.”

  Implicit in this exhortation was that even if Edelman felt dazed, this was no time for high-minded concussion protocols. Even if he was concussed, he must not act concussed. He needed to do everything in his power to hide the effects. Sure, safety is important—nothing is more important than a player’s safety, we hear this time and time again, so it must be true. Certainly we all care about #11’s well-being, caring and empathic people that we are. More important, though (if I’m being honest), this was a desperate moment in the Super Bowl. Edelman was Brady’s favorite receiver and essential to the Patriots’ coming back and winning that game. They did, with Edelman catching the decisive touchdown pass from Brady three minutes later. It was a great Super Bowl, epic ending, and 114.5 million viewers tuned in for what would at the time be the most watched TV broadcast in United States history.

  Edelman caught no heat, at least that I saw, for playing through a possible concussion. And if the Patriots were criticized for not identifying signs of trauma in him, it was mild heat at best—certainly nothing compared with the scrutiny and sanction the team would endure for its sins involving matters of football deflation. Edelman in fact was celebrated for his toughness and clutch performance. He embodied the old-school mentality that allows a player to keep grinding no matter how badly he had “got dinged,” as head injuries used to be called in football. “Getting dinged” always had such a lighthearted connotation, as if the experience were like getting a little queasy on a Ferris wheel, all part of the fun. That was before everyone started using more serious words, like “concussion,” or ominous abbreviations (“CTE”).

  “Dinged” is safe because it implies something confined in a moment. It’s something that will wear off, something to power through, as Edelman did. And good for Jules, I say. But then I’m not related to him, except by flatscreen.

  11.

  WHUPPINGS

  December 1, 2015

  Before the day the Ray Rice video popped up on TMZ, the roughest episode of Goodell’s commissionership took place in 2009 at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on concussions. He had been called to testify at a time of growing evidence linking football with an array of
cognitive maladies. The session was a bloodbath for the NFL. It was marked by unrelenting criticism of the Shield—namely the owners’ human Shield, or commissioner. Goodell came in badly underarmed. He gave stilted answers and referred questions to doctors who were not in the room.

  “The NFL sort of has this blanket denial or minimizing of the fact that there may be this link,” Representative Linda T. Sánchez, Democrat of California, said to Mr. Goodell in what would become the indelible moment from that day. “And it sort of reminds me of the tobacco companies pre-nineties when they kept saying, ‘Oh, there’s no link between smoking and damage to your health.’”

  The tableau drew comparisons to the iconic image associated with Big Tobacco’s death by hubris: top executives from seven tobacco companies standing side by side, right hands raised, while being sworn in before a congressional hearing in 1994. They would then assert, once again, that nicotine was not addictive. The NFL recoiled from any correlation to an industry whose trajectory haunted them. Almost from the day Goodell suffered this inquisition at the Capitol, the league had moved to beef up its legal and lobbying efforts in Washington. In a letter to the New York Times, a lawyer for the NFL described the cigarette industry as “perhaps the most odious industry in American history.” And the league resists any suggestion that it has taken cues from Big Tobacco in how best to deal with legal challenges and government regulation. But the parallels between the two industries’ courses—and certain tactics—are unmistakable. Like pro football, tobacco operated for decades as an unstoppable force. If the NFL owned a day of the week, tobacco was so basic to American life that it was part of the air we breathed. The industry pushed hard against research and news accounts that exposed its dangers. It discredited scientists and researchers as being “alarmists” driven by “agendas.” It denied for years any link between cigarettes and cancer, just as the NFL refused until recently to acknowledge any causal relationship between football and CTE. It blamed the media for caring more about the perils of cigarettes than about the preferences of “real people”; Paul Tagliabue in 1994 dismissed concussions in the NFL as “one of those pack journalism issues.”

  The tobacco industry was fully aware of smoking’s dangers but worked to hide or obscure damning evidence. It touted questionable science and research studies to bolster its case. It spent a fortune on lawyers, marketing gurus, and lobbyists—some of whom would go on to do work for the NFL. After a dirge of testimonials from longtime smokers and their survivors, awareness about the dangers of smoking reached critical mass. Attitudes had shifted. Lawsuits and regulations came in rapid fire. The industry still hummed along for a while, fostering an impression that maybe tobacco could survive as some version of the behemoth it once was—scaled down but a behemoth nonetheless.

  But the plummet continued. The fall from grace felt sudden, even though the spiral had begun decades before. Smoking was now gross and cancerous. It had become a private shame. The industry shriveled.

  There were years—decades—where it felt like the NFL would just hum along forever. Pete Rozelle would always be there, smoking Marlboros and drinking Rusty Nails, working it out. He was too big to fail, and so was his league. Rozelle was the first, and only, sports executive to ever be named Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated. No one knew what CTE was, or TMZ, or CBAs.

  Not that the NFL was without crises under Rozelle, or did not fret over things that could spoil the whole banquet. But Rozelle also had the luxury to operate in a much simpler field. In April 1963, after the Packers had won their second consecutive NFL title, Rozelle had concluded that two of the game’s biggest stars—Green Bay running back Paul “Golden Boy” Hornung and Detroit’s defensive tackle Alex Karras—had bet extensively on NFL games, including ones that they had played in. Rozelle ordered a full investigation that uncovered proof of what would become pro football’s biggest scandal in decades. Would this be the mess too toxic for the NFL to clean up and survive?

  Consider how a similar situation might play out today if two of the game’s seminal performers—say Aaron Rodgers and J. J. Watt—were busted like that. No question it would result in massive litigation, haggling with the union, and endless appeals. It would yield enough hot-take tonnage to melt a hundred more ozone layers. And that was before the president even started tweeting about it.

  But in 1963, Rozelle merely summoned Hornung’s coach, Vince Lombardi, to his office in New York. He handed Lombardi a brief laying out his conclusions. Rozelle told Lombardi he planned to suspend the players for a season. “You have no choice,” Lombardi agreed. “Let’s go get a drink and lunch.”

  Early on in his commissionership, Goodell staked his public brand on being a tough disciplinarian. He was big into the whole “new sheriff in town” model of leadership, which followed on the more remote and cerebral style of Paul Tagliabue.

  A brilliant lawyer, Tagliabue had worn out his welcome with the Membership over his seventeen years as commissioner. The feeling was somewhat mutual. Unlike Goodell, the senator’s son, Tagliabue lacked the political gene that would have made him more attentive to the needs and neediness of his most important constituency, the owners. He cared less about his public image than Goodell did. But compared with Goodell, Tagliabue had a particular gift for avoiding the high-profile and self-inflicted fiascos. “Paul had an expression, ‘All’s well that ends,’” said Joe Browne, the NFL’s longtime head of public relations and a top deputy and confidant of the former commissioner. Tagliabue was less interested in making big disciplinary splashes.

  Goodell by contrast presented himself as the righteous arbiter of all things precious in pro football. Tough disciplinary measures were basic to safeguarding “the integrity of the game” and “protecting the Shield” and all that. In some of his initial moves as commissioner, Goodell issued splashy rulings against a pair of recidivist player-criminals, Pacman Jones, then of Tennessee (suspended for the 2007 season), and Chris Henry, then of the Bengals (eight games). “We must protect the integrity of the NFL,” Goodell said in a statement at the time. And protect other things.

  “There was a great deal of sensitivity and attention paid to ‘How does this play?’ ‘How does this reflect on our image?’” Ray Anderson, the NFL’s vice president of football operations at the time, told me. Sheriff Goodell made for an effective persona for a few years, culminating with a 2012 Time magazine story in which Goodell was lionized on the cover as “The Enforcer.” “They essentially had him as a king, on a throne with a sword,” said Anderson, who left the NFL after the 2013 season and is now the athletic director at Arizona State University. “They depicted him as all-powerful. And that wasn’t by accident. In my view, that was part of the mistake in terms of the image they were trying to portray. It translated into more of a dictatorship rather than something more collaborative or a partnership. Roger definitely had more of a singular leadership mentality.”

  Goodell was wielding the baton and restoring order at a time of eroding confidence in American institutions. George W. Bush’s second term was becoming a disaster, the Iraq War was spiraling, Congress had suffered a wave of corruption and sex scandals, and the economy was about to collapse. Yet somehow football kept enduring as the rare point of civic connectedness in so many communities. And at least there was a tough guy in charge of our cultural hunger games.

  In 2011, Goodell helped negotiate a collective bargaining agreement at terms judged favorable to the owners. The deal ensured ten more years of relative labor peace. Goodell’s highest-profile punishments—handing down long suspensions to Atlanta quarterback Michael Vick for his role in running an illegal dog-fighting ring and to the participants in the New Orleans “Bountygate” case—were met with initial approval from fans. They seemed commensurate with the outrage stirred by both cases.

  But the Bountygate suspensions were overturned by an independent arbitrator—none other than Paul Tagliabue himself, one of the many “mentors” Goodell had
cultivated during his quarter-century climb up the greasy pole of the NFL hierarchy. This was an embarrassing cock-block of the Enforcer. It also ushered in a losing streak of botched disciplinary cases, court decisions, and a growing disrespect for Goodell from players and an overall tarnishing of the Shield and the sheriff’s badge.

  Nothing epitomized the sense of a flailing Park Avenue better than the case of Ray Rice. A quickie refresher: 1) The role model running back beats up his fiancée (troubling). 2) A security video shows Rice dragging his fiancée’s limp body out of the elevator (more troubling). 3) Commissioner suspends Rice for two games; Rice shows remorse (kind of). 4) But then another video surfaces, this one from inside the elevator, courtesy of TMZ (brutal). The video hit early on a Monday and was flooding the nation’s screens by mid-morning. 5) Hell breaks loose.

  Oh, the hell. NFL officials claimed they never saw the video. “I would have loved to have seen that tape,” Goodell said in a press conference in which he apologized for his handling of the case. The commissioner was responding to a question from a TMZ reporter, who pointed out that the tabloid video site had obtained the tape by making a single phone call. “You guys have a whole legal department,” the reporter asked. “Can you explain that?” Goodell said he could not. As John Oliver pointed out on his HBO show, “You know things are not going well when you lose the moral high ground to a TMZ reporter.”

  Reeling, the league adopted a standard damage-control playbook. Goodell was serially apologetic. His PR team pushed a three-pronged message asserting that 1) the commissioner gets that he blew it; 2) he recognizes the seriousness of domestic violence; and 3) he is committed to doing better (and to prove it, watch him revamp the league’s personal conduct policy). A SWAT team of in-house and outside flacks “worked with” sympathetic reporters to “message” the league’s resolve. The highlight (or lowlight) came in a front-page Wall Street Journal story portraying a most remorseful Roger in his full hands-on-and-fully-engaged-in-a-time-of-crisis mode. NFL’S ROGER GOODELL SEEKS TO RIGHT PAST WRONGS was the headline.