Roger Goodell and the Cheating Scandal
The NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, appears soon to hear the claims of one Matt Walsh, a former Patriots videographer. From reports, it appears Walsh will claim that the Patriots went so far as to record the "walk-through" practices that teams sometimes conduct on the eve of games. The particular game in question involves none other than the Super Bowl of 2002 against the St. Louis Rams. Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter stands at the ready to appear in any more headlines the story earns. What's holding things up is some sort of indemnification commitment (see it all explained here) Walsh's lawyers are seeking from the NFL. On their part, the Patriots have denied all wrongdoing, going so far as to suggest that, if Walsh indeed recorded the practice, he did so on his own.
What a mess. A murky mix of legal maneuvering, sports spying, and grandstanding politics. In a case like this, only the carefully worded pedantry of an able law professor could clear things up. Unfortunately those people are very expensive and busy. You'll have to take what the lowly TSLP is peddling for free.
So who's primarily to blame for all this bickering? The over-competitive Belichick? The grasping former assistant Walsh? The insufferable Specter? None of the above.
It's the righteous one, Commissioner Roger Goodell.
1. I was worried about Goodell from the day he was appointed commissioner. He's not like most executives in sports. He's not a businessman spending his latter years and earned wealth fulfilling a lifelong love of sports. He's not a lawyer whose successful big-firm practice translated into an "inside" job with this most public corporate giant. He's not an accomplished political leader gracing the sports world with his savvy and worldliness. No, Goodell has never been successful at anything outside of football. He graduated from a small, middling liberal arts college one year and joined the NFL as an intern the next, and basically he's never left. No advanced degrees, no professional achievement, no major milestones. Although he moved around the NFL office a bit, it seems most of his years and job functions were devoted to public relations. This man is a bureaucrat. It took five votes for the owners to agree to his hiring. His first big job? How about Commissioner of the NFL? It amazes me that the most profitable sports league in the world could do no better.
2. Of course academic credentials and career accomplishment are not a necessary qualification for the job of league commissioner. Perhaps a lifetime's investment in league affairs provides a plausible (or even superior) substitute. In the right person, it would be. But I worry about hiring people because they appear to be "the right person," especially where the resume falls a bit short of the norm. In the law school business this mistake is made all the time. A candidate for a faculty position comes in with an incredible resume and an interesting set of early-career publications, but will often fail to get the job offer because the faculty relies more on its impression of the candidate formed after the personal interview. The personal stuff counts, a little, but sometimes we give it too much credit and override the years of work and accomplishment reflected in the resume. (We also give ourselves too much credit in thinking we can say something meaningful about a person's personality and make a prediction about a person's career path after just a few hours' exposure.) When the objective criteria fall a bit short, you'd better be darn sure the personal characteristics are very exceptional.
3. So here's my worry about Roger Goodell, the person. Sometimes, certainly not always or even usually, but sometimes people who don't have a lot of higher education or a lot of occupational accomplishment can tend to be a bit moralistic. Not dumb, not uneducated, not unable or untalented, but moralistic: they tend to see the world in stark colors (usually in black and white, as the saying goes) and feel the need to define most ethical issues accordingly, no matter how nuanced, subtle or difficult the ethical issues may be. They're just not very thoughtful or reflective about matters that require it. Of course higher education or success in business doesn't guarantee more completely theorized and qualified ethical reasoning, but on balance it does predict it. Education has some value, right? We all know what I mean by a moralist: the kind of person who prefers to arrive at the facile, stark ethical conclusion than to perform the heavy mental exercise of making fine distinctions that might produce a better answer. I might add that, in my limited experience, career regulators seem particularly susceptible to this particular tendency: the regulators come to view the regulated as mischievous miscreants who need to be watched.
4. The job of a sports commissioner is charged with moral reasoning. The commissioner hears discipline cases, metes out punishment, protects the integrity of the game, leads the owners and the players in reaching labor agreements, and represents the league to media and other public concerns. In my mind the job cries out for intelligence, passion and sagacity. The best? Bart Giamatti, lover of baseball, doctoral graduate of Yale, professor of literature. Another? David Stern, graduate of a top law school, accomplished lawyer, successful commissioner of the NBA. Both men understood the moral demands of the job. Giamatti banned Pete Rose, but by all evidence (including from Rose himself) planned to grant Rose's petition to return after a year. Stern dealt forcefully with the Detroit brawl, but at the same time handled the politically charged Kobe Bryant rape trial with deftness.
5. Do we see similar promise from Goodell? Has he shown, in his first year on the job, an ability to handle difficulties with a deft hand? With all respect, I would suggest quite the opposite. Instead of issuing the Patriots a fine and moving on, Goodell termed the "Spygate" incident "a calculated and deliberate attempt to avoid long-standing rules designed to encourage fair play and promote honest competition on the playing field." All they did was videotape signs! Sign stealing is legal in football; it was the videotaping that was the problem. Yet despite Belichick's contention that he had in good faith interpreted the rules (see here, if you want my take on the interpretation, plus a lot of debate), Goodell chose to call Belichick essentially a liar, in public. Or take the Pacman Jones suspension. Exactly why is that young man suspended? (I know the answer, but I had to look it up.) Yet I've asked a number of sports-minded people that question and no one's quite sure. Don't you think before Goodell utilizes his nuclear weapon he ought to be pretty clear and public about exactly why? Why does Pacman deserve what is approaching a two-year suspension? I'm not saying he doesn't, or that Goodell is not entitled to conclude Belichick is a liar. My point is that Goodell is starting to look like an unthinking moralist.
6. Now we hear that Goodell is going after "cheating" in other forms. He intends to require team employees to report (presumably to him) actual or even suspected violations of league rules. He plans to make unannounced inspections of locker rooms and press boxes. All this to "preserve public confidence in the integrity of the game." Is it in doubt? Do fans think the games are fixed or that teams are cheating? Strongly enough to justify these measures? If the public thinks so, it's in part because Goodell called the integrity of the games into question by his treatment of the Patriots. What kind of Commissioner would create an issue (theretofore undiscussed) of the integrity of the games (namely the Patriots') and then, ostensibly to calm the fears he had generated, institute these suspicious activity reports and unannounced searches? An unthinking moralist who sees corruption where there is none and makes it his mission to eradicate it.
7. The moralist never rests, not as long as "unfairness" remains on the loose. So now Goodell is engaging in this long flirtation with Walsh, the former Patriots video recorder. Why? What possible purpose does Goodell have in investigating conduct that may have happened in 2002, long before Goodell became commissioner? Is this a truth and reconciliation exercise? Will Roger right every historical wrong? First he'll strip the Patriots of their 2002 title; what's next? Reverse the Tuck Call? Require a do-over on the 2006 shafting of the Seahawks in the Super Bowl? Recall the titles of the steroid-ed Steelers of the 1970's? Maybe the 1925 title will be awarded finally to the Pottsville Maroons. If Goodell thought this through, he'd close the book on the Patriots and tell Walsh to get lost with his requests for indemnity. Instead he continues to drag one of his flagship franchises through the mud, taking the image of his league along with it. If the integrity of the game is in question it's because Roger puts it there every day.
8. What will Roger do now? I saw where one of the Steelers, linebacker James Harrison, recently was arrested for domestic violence. If Pacman gets two years for a barroom brawl and related mischief, how much for striking a woman in the face? It seems to me there's quite a bit of the latter in the realm of professional athletics, much as there is in other walks of life in this country. Surely that's a year's suspension. And what about the honors to be accorded to Brett Favre, retiring hero who publicly admitted to a drug addiction. Surely sometimes those drugs (painkillers) were taken illegally (without a prescription) and were used to help Favre get back on the playing field. In fact Favre has admitted as much. Now I'm not saying Favre deserves condemnation for this, but shouldn't Goodell condemn this use of drugs to "cheat" and deny Favre admission to the Hall of Fame? Or do we need to start making some ethical distinctions here and treat these athletes and coaches more carefully?
9. People learn and grow. By all accounts Goodell is a good and smart guy. I suspect he may have painted himself into a corner with the severity of some of his sanctions. He's already given Belichick the harshest penalty he can in terms of a fine, and that's just for violating a poorly worded rule appearing in the game operations manual. What will he do with a team that tampers, as must have been the case given the speed at which free agent players come to terms with new teams? What about teams that he finds have monkeyed with the audio capabilities for play-callers? Isn't player tampering (affects game personnel) worse than audio tampering (affects game play), which is in turn worse than videotaping (used for future games)? Belichick got the max. Will Goodell take more draft picks and impose lengthy suspensions to clean up a sport no one thought was dirty until he arrived?
10. The ever-widening cheating scandal that now plagues the NFL would never have happened under Paul Tagliabue's watch. He would have quietly fined the Patriots and moved on. A commissioner only has so much moral capital to expend and moral condemnation to express. Tagliabue would have saved his for something more important than sign stealing.
What a mess. A murky mix of legal maneuvering, sports spying, and grandstanding politics. In a case like this, only the carefully worded pedantry of an able law professor could clear things up. Unfortunately those people are very expensive and busy. You'll have to take what the lowly TSLP is peddling for free.
So who's primarily to blame for all this bickering? The over-competitive Belichick? The grasping former assistant Walsh? The insufferable Specter? None of the above.
It's the righteous one, Commissioner Roger Goodell.
1. I was worried about Goodell from the day he was appointed commissioner. He's not like most executives in sports. He's not a businessman spending his latter years and earned wealth fulfilling a lifelong love of sports. He's not a lawyer whose successful big-firm practice translated into an "inside" job with this most public corporate giant. He's not an accomplished political leader gracing the sports world with his savvy and worldliness. No, Goodell has never been successful at anything outside of football. He graduated from a small, middling liberal arts college one year and joined the NFL as an intern the next, and basically he's never left. No advanced degrees, no professional achievement, no major milestones. Although he moved around the NFL office a bit, it seems most of his years and job functions were devoted to public relations. This man is a bureaucrat. It took five votes for the owners to agree to his hiring. His first big job? How about Commissioner of the NFL? It amazes me that the most profitable sports league in the world could do no better.
2. Of course academic credentials and career accomplishment are not a necessary qualification for the job of league commissioner. Perhaps a lifetime's investment in league affairs provides a plausible (or even superior) substitute. In the right person, it would be. But I worry about hiring people because they appear to be "the right person," especially where the resume falls a bit short of the norm. In the law school business this mistake is made all the time. A candidate for a faculty position comes in with an incredible resume and an interesting set of early-career publications, but will often fail to get the job offer because the faculty relies more on its impression of the candidate formed after the personal interview. The personal stuff counts, a little, but sometimes we give it too much credit and override the years of work and accomplishment reflected in the resume. (We also give ourselves too much credit in thinking we can say something meaningful about a person's personality and make a prediction about a person's career path after just a few hours' exposure.) When the objective criteria fall a bit short, you'd better be darn sure the personal characteristics are very exceptional.
3. So here's my worry about Roger Goodell, the person. Sometimes, certainly not always or even usually, but sometimes people who don't have a lot of higher education or a lot of occupational accomplishment can tend to be a bit moralistic. Not dumb, not uneducated, not unable or untalented, but moralistic: they tend to see the world in stark colors (usually in black and white, as the saying goes) and feel the need to define most ethical issues accordingly, no matter how nuanced, subtle or difficult the ethical issues may be. They're just not very thoughtful or reflective about matters that require it. Of course higher education or success in business doesn't guarantee more completely theorized and qualified ethical reasoning, but on balance it does predict it. Education has some value, right? We all know what I mean by a moralist: the kind of person who prefers to arrive at the facile, stark ethical conclusion than to perform the heavy mental exercise of making fine distinctions that might produce a better answer. I might add that, in my limited experience, career regulators seem particularly susceptible to this particular tendency: the regulators come to view the regulated as mischievous miscreants who need to be watched.
4. The job of a sports commissioner is charged with moral reasoning. The commissioner hears discipline cases, metes out punishment, protects the integrity of the game, leads the owners and the players in reaching labor agreements, and represents the league to media and other public concerns. In my mind the job cries out for intelligence, passion and sagacity. The best? Bart Giamatti, lover of baseball, doctoral graduate of Yale, professor of literature. Another? David Stern, graduate of a top law school, accomplished lawyer, successful commissioner of the NBA. Both men understood the moral demands of the job. Giamatti banned Pete Rose, but by all evidence (including from Rose himself) planned to grant Rose's petition to return after a year. Stern dealt forcefully with the Detroit brawl, but at the same time handled the politically charged Kobe Bryant rape trial with deftness.
5. Do we see similar promise from Goodell? Has he shown, in his first year on the job, an ability to handle difficulties with a deft hand? With all respect, I would suggest quite the opposite. Instead of issuing the Patriots a fine and moving on, Goodell termed the "Spygate" incident "a calculated and deliberate attempt to avoid long-standing rules designed to encourage fair play and promote honest competition on the playing field." All they did was videotape signs! Sign stealing is legal in football; it was the videotaping that was the problem. Yet despite Belichick's contention that he had in good faith interpreted the rules (see here, if you want my take on the interpretation, plus a lot of debate), Goodell chose to call Belichick essentially a liar, in public. Or take the Pacman Jones suspension. Exactly why is that young man suspended? (I know the answer, but I had to look it up.) Yet I've asked a number of sports-minded people that question and no one's quite sure. Don't you think before Goodell utilizes his nuclear weapon he ought to be pretty clear and public about exactly why? Why does Pacman deserve what is approaching a two-year suspension? I'm not saying he doesn't, or that Goodell is not entitled to conclude Belichick is a liar. My point is that Goodell is starting to look like an unthinking moralist.
6. Now we hear that Goodell is going after "cheating" in other forms. He intends to require team employees to report (presumably to him) actual or even suspected violations of league rules. He plans to make unannounced inspections of locker rooms and press boxes. All this to "preserve public confidence in the integrity of the game." Is it in doubt? Do fans think the games are fixed or that teams are cheating? Strongly enough to justify these measures? If the public thinks so, it's in part because Goodell called the integrity of the games into question by his treatment of the Patriots. What kind of Commissioner would create an issue (theretofore undiscussed) of the integrity of the games (namely the Patriots') and then, ostensibly to calm the fears he had generated, institute these suspicious activity reports and unannounced searches? An unthinking moralist who sees corruption where there is none and makes it his mission to eradicate it.
7. The moralist never rests, not as long as "unfairness" remains on the loose. So now Goodell is engaging in this long flirtation with Walsh, the former Patriots video recorder. Why? What possible purpose does Goodell have in investigating conduct that may have happened in 2002, long before Goodell became commissioner? Is this a truth and reconciliation exercise? Will Roger right every historical wrong? First he'll strip the Patriots of their 2002 title; what's next? Reverse the Tuck Call? Require a do-over on the 2006 shafting of the Seahawks in the Super Bowl? Recall the titles of the steroid-ed Steelers of the 1970's? Maybe the 1925 title will be awarded finally to the Pottsville Maroons. If Goodell thought this through, he'd close the book on the Patriots and tell Walsh to get lost with his requests for indemnity. Instead he continues to drag one of his flagship franchises through the mud, taking the image of his league along with it. If the integrity of the game is in question it's because Roger puts it there every day.
8. What will Roger do now? I saw where one of the Steelers, linebacker James Harrison, recently was arrested for domestic violence. If Pacman gets two years for a barroom brawl and related mischief, how much for striking a woman in the face? It seems to me there's quite a bit of the latter in the realm of professional athletics, much as there is in other walks of life in this country. Surely that's a year's suspension. And what about the honors to be accorded to Brett Favre, retiring hero who publicly admitted to a drug addiction. Surely sometimes those drugs (painkillers) were taken illegally (without a prescription) and were used to help Favre get back on the playing field. In fact Favre has admitted as much. Now I'm not saying Favre deserves condemnation for this, but shouldn't Goodell condemn this use of drugs to "cheat" and deny Favre admission to the Hall of Fame? Or do we need to start making some ethical distinctions here and treat these athletes and coaches more carefully?
9. People learn and grow. By all accounts Goodell is a good and smart guy. I suspect he may have painted himself into a corner with the severity of some of his sanctions. He's already given Belichick the harshest penalty he can in terms of a fine, and that's just for violating a poorly worded rule appearing in the game operations manual. What will he do with a team that tampers, as must have been the case given the speed at which free agent players come to terms with new teams? What about teams that he finds have monkeyed with the audio capabilities for play-callers? Isn't player tampering (affects game personnel) worse than audio tampering (affects game play), which is in turn worse than videotaping (used for future games)? Belichick got the max. Will Goodell take more draft picks and impose lengthy suspensions to clean up a sport no one thought was dirty until he arrived?
10. The ever-widening cheating scandal that now plagues the NFL would never have happened under Paul Tagliabue's watch. He would have quietly fined the Patriots and moved on. A commissioner only has so much moral capital to expend and moral condemnation to express. Tagliabue would have saved his for something more important than sign stealing.
posted by TSLP at 3/10/2008
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