Is Roger Goodell Good For the NFL?

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Originally Posted by Dirtbag359

Outside of suspending players Goodell has been turrible.

For starters whats with the talk of bringing a team to Europe? For God's sake they can't even get a team in LA. I personally don't mind the one game a year in London. If anything it's nice exposure for the league in one of the worlds nicest stadiums. However bringing a team to Europe is about 40 or 50 years to early. Unlike the NHL/NBA/MLB the NFL isn't competing worldwide for talent and media attention seeing as how football is exclusively an American game.

Then theres the labor negotiations. I don't know how Paul Taglibune would have done but I was under the impression that the commissioner's interest was the well being of the league, not serving as a white knight for the owners. Instead of having the owners, players, and commissioner at the negotiating table you have the owners with the commissioner and the union.

However the cardinal sin of Goodell is the 18 game season. Sure it will get the league more money but who's going to want to watch when a good amount of starters are on the sidelines due to injury. The funniest part though is Goodell talking about how excited fans are about the prospect of two extra games. Go to any blog and you'll find two types of responses. The people who absolutely hate it and the people who could care less. I don't know about you but that doesn't sound like support for the two extra games. Sure they're trying to change the rules now to prevent injuries while posturing for the two extra games but the fact of the matter is that you can't change football enough to make two extra games a year a worthwhile risk.

Then theres the record books......in short the whole thing is a mess.

Per PK's MMQB:

I've thought all along that the majority of fans don't really support the idea of an 18-game schedule. In an injury-free world, they would; who wouldn't? But Commissioner Roger Goodell keeps saying fans favor the 18-game schedule. They only favor it, in my opinion, in order to NOT have four preseason games they have to pay regular-season prices for. But that's a different story than actually saying you want 18 games when so many players are getting hurt every week. And so on Friday, I asked my Twitter followers if they favored either:
a. Two preseason games and 18 regular-season games.
b. Four preseason games and 16 regular-season games.
c. Two preseason games and 16 regular-season games.
The results, over a 40-hour voting period, give us a pretty good sample -- 1,200 votes in all. How the voters came down:
C (2+16): 622 votes, 51.8 percent.
B (4+16): 363 votes, 30.3 percent.
A (2+18): 215 votes, 17.9 percent.
That means 18 percent of 1,200 football fans (presumably they are if they follow me on Twitter), less than one out of every five, want what Goodell says they want. And 82 percent want to keep it at 16 regular-season games.


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