Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta Jr.

Standing Down and Roger Goodell Has a Jerry Jones Problem

Standing Down

Nobody knew where to sit. Side by side or across from one another?

It was the final question raised by a group of eleven NFL team owners as they mingled inside the sixth-floor conference room at the league’s Park Avenue headquarters in New York City, minutes before they were to meet with a group of twelve players, one former player, and three union leaders on the morning of Tuesday, October 17. The day already had been stressful, and the meeting hadn’t even started. League executives had spent that morning as they had the previous four weeks: grappling with a series of events the league and owners could not control, unleashed by President Donald Trump’s harsh criticism of the decision by a handful of players to kneel during the national anthem.

Morale was bad inside the league office, and the pressure was not letting up. There was the looming notion that sponsors would leave the NFL—not just because of the protests but because of an array of challenges confronting the league, including the continuing decline in TV ratings. Nearly all of the league’s longtime sponsors, from Papa John’s to USAA, were rattled, and fissures within the league offices and teams, to say nothing of the players, were starting to expand.

Among many league and team executives, the games had become, improbably, an afterthought. These two days of New York meetings held the potential to provide a measure of hope—a way for owners to formulate a plan with players that would satisfy disenchanted fans and advertisers. It was no secret that commissioner Roger Goodell and the owners wanted the players to stop kneeling during the anthem immediately. A week earlier, Goodell said that he hoped owners and players could “move past” the anthem issue at the meetings. If and how that could be accomplished was unclear. After Goodell’s statement, Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys owner, threatened to bench any player who knelt, the only owner to issue such an ultimatum, one that won praise in Texas and across much of America’s heartland. Spurred on by Jones’s stance, some hard-line owners looked at the meetings as the opportunity to vote on a mandate that would force all players to stand for the anthem.

For weeks, Goodell had tried to get in front of the issue. One owner had complained that NBA commissioner Adam Silver got away with ordering players to stand because, unlike Goodell, he has a good relationship with the union. Another owner had remarked to a colleague that Trump would like nothing more than for players to strike over the protests, maybe forcing a suspension of the season.

As owners filed into the large conference room featuring a massive, football-shaped table, everyone feared the discussion could get ugly. NFL executive Troy Vincent, who cared deeply about the players’ concerns but had little patience for the protests, called San Francisco 49ers GM John Lynch the Saturday before the meeting. He told him that if safety Eric Reid, one of the most ardent protesters, knelt the next day, he shouldn’t “bother to show up” at the players-owners meeting because nobody would take him seriously, according to people briefed on the call. Reid knelt anyway. And he intended to show up.

Just before Reid and the other players and union leadership arrived, talk among the owners turned to a final issue, small but symbolic: the seating arrangement. In collective bargaining negotiations, the owners sat opposite players and union representatives. But Goodell told the owners their job that morning was to listen; the session was not a negotiation or anything that could be resolved by a quid pro quo. The owners decided the meeting would have to start with the tiniest of gestures:

We’ll sit side by side with the players.

The night before that meeting, Jerry Jones stood in a suite at Yankee Stadium, watching the Yankees play the Houston Astros in the ALCS but also, perhaps, catching a terrifying glimpse into his future. The Cowboys are what the Yankees once were: America’s most iconic team in America’s most iconic—and patriotic—sport. Jones was a man at the pinnacle of his profession that chilly night, the Hall of Fame owner whose power among his peers is drawn from a relentless skill at growing the NFL’s total revenues and the guile to outmuscle everyone. But those who have spoken with him sense a dull panic, as if so much of what the NFL has built—what he has built since buying the Cowboys in 1989—is eroding. Jones and his fellow owners had arrived in New York that day like heads of state, setting up shop at the Four Seasons and in their own apartments with a clear agenda: Stop Trump from attacking our business. Find a way to persuade players to stop kneeling. Get the focus back to football.

But the owners had far different ideas about how to accomplish such difficult goals, according to nearly two dozen interviews Outside the Lines conducted with owners, league and team executives, players, and lawyers briefed on the two days of closed-door meetings. For one thing, this was not the usual scandal or crisis the league could fight in the court system or the court of public opinion and then march away from. The game itself had come under a month-long attack by the president of the United States, with no letting up. It was also a prickly regional problem. The players’ protests and the president’s criticism played far differently in New England and California than they did in Texas, where Jones and Houston Texans owner Bob McNair were fielding an avalanche of complaints from outraged fans. This time, Goodell didn’t have to simply manage owners’ bruised egos and simmering feuds; this was a national political crisis threatening the league’s business and its brand, seen through a different lens by each owner depending on his or her own political leanings and each team’s fan base. It would require leadership, diplomacy and, most likely, a little luck.

Yet in many ways, the meetings would be a referendum on the same argument owners have been holding in private meetings for years: What is the NFL’s identity? Is it a strict entertainment company that Jones and others envision, controlling the behavior of its players in service of its financial bottom line? Or should it attempt to transform itself into a more socially conscious league that would strive, through the forging of a rare and fragile owners-players partnership in this moment, to use its mammoth platform to try to change society for the good, even if the cost of that process, slow and complicated, would likely be measured in short-term declining popularity and lower revenues?

Some owners left the Yankees game early, seeking a good night’s sleep before the meeting with the players the next morning. Jones could afford to stay out late. Goodell had personally decided which owners would attend, and he had not invited Jones. The commissioner, sources say, wanted to prevent the players-owners meeting from devolving into an argument about whether a player should be benched if he kneels—an argument that was more likely to break out if Jones attended. For his part, Jones, who declined comment for this story, didn’t seem bothered. He beamed in the Yankee Stadium suite alongside his oldest son, Stephen, masking worries over what was now at stake for the NFL in 2017.

Polls show that the protest issue has resonated with millions of fans who insist all players should stand for the national anthem; some are calling for an NFL boycott and vowing to never watch another NFL game. Owners are alarmed at how rapidly fans’ outrage is eroding many of the league’s key business metrics, and executives at some broadcast partners have complained to owners about how the NFL lurches from crisis to crisis. A recent Morning Consult poll revealed that the NFL’s net favorability has dropped to 11 percent from a high of 56 percent in May. Jones was furious that local TV ratings in Dallas were down, especially a 19 percent drop for this year’s game against Green Bay, compared with last year’s. “There is no question the league is suffering negative effects from these protests,” he would tell reporters after the Cowboys routed the 49ers. “All times, I want to do the right thing by [NFL sponsors] and their customers. I have a great responsibility to the people who support us.… We all get great benefits from having a lot of us watching our games. All of us do.”

Jones arrived in New York to have a good time—and to deliver a reckoning. The only question was whether his billionaire partners and Goodell would heed that reckoning.

As the historic players-owners meeting began, the players, led by retired wide receiver Anquan Boldin and Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins, entered the conference room and shook the owners’ hands, an uncommon occurrence at prior tension-filled joint meetings. The players took seats side by side with the owners. Goodell wanted to put the players at ease by allowing every one of their voices to be heard. The players said that they felt the owners—as a collective more than the small group in the room—were being duplicitous; they were empathetic to their concerns behind closed doors but not publicly. Fans needed to hear from owners that players who knelt or raised fists were good men who loved their country, they argued. Messages of support couldn’t be delivered only inside the locker rooms. Finally, New York Jets linebacker Demario Davis stood up in the center of the room and told owners: “I’m going to break it down for you guys. You guys aren’t supporting us, and until you do, there’s going to be an issue.”

Davis’s message, and passion, seemed to relieve the tension. Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank later told Davis that he’d “missed his calling” as a great public speaker. A few owners tried to separate their deep dislike of unemployed quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who started the protests a little more than a year ago, from the players’ broader message: This wasn’t an “anthem protest” but rather an “inequality in America” protest. Knowing that their motives and message had largely been lost in the political chaos, the players told stories of their personal connections to the military and showed a good grasp of the business problems suddenly confronting the league. Left unsaid was the warning issued on October 11 by Buccaneers defensive tackle Gerald McCoy about forcing players to stand: “I think it’s gonna be an uproar if that is to happen, because you’re basically taking away a constitutional right to freedom of speech.”

League executives tried to show they understood the players’ concerns. Several league staff members presented a three-pronged action plan: expand the My Cause, My Cleats initiative; help convene more meetings with lawmakers to ramp up lobbying for players’ causes on Capitol Hill and, through the clubs, in statehouses across the country; and use the NFL’s platform to promote it all. The league had scrapped a staff idea to extend an olive branch to Kaepernick—who in October filed a collusion claim against the owners—by inviting him to visit the league headquarters.

The action plan had met harsh criticism when it was first introduced inside the league office the Thursday before the owners’ meetings. Anna Isaacson, the NFL’s vice president of social responsibility, chief marketing officer Dawn Hudson, and others had presented the plan to Goodell and top executives, including public relations chief Joe Lockhart, chief operating officer Tod Leiweke, chief media and business officer Brian Rolapp, and general counsel Jeff Pash. Isaacson characterized the plan as a chance to seize the social moment and make an impact beyond football. There was also a request for a huge marketing budget. The league’s business executives ripped it, accusing Isaacson—who had joined the NFL after working in merchandising and community relations for baseball’s Brooklyn Cyclones—and Hudson of losing sight of the goal, which was to persuade all the players to stand for the anthem. The plan was “too political,” they said, and would likely invite further attacks by Trump. “How could you possibly present this to owners?” one executive asked. As the proposal was discussed, Goodell remained mostly quiet but seethed because he felt the plan was uninspired.

Neither Goodell nor the business executives liked the action plan at that moment, but what worried the business executives was that Goodell was not focused on what they deemed the priority: the very real financial problems facing the NFL. Fact was, they were right. Goodell believed that all players should stand, but he and Vincent had been working with them for more than a year on their concerns, calling them individually and holding meetings, and the commissioner deeply cared about their cause.

Now, in the meeting with players, Goodell, despite his initial reservations about Isaacson’s plan, supported it “full bore,” an owner says. Not only that, the commissioner moved around the room to guide the conversation about its pluses. Many times he told the owners they weren’t hearing the players’ core arguments. “We’re all in this together,” Goodell told them. The players and the union executives, who have been at odds with Goodell for years, were impressed. “It was the proudest I’ve ever been in the NFL,” one owner said later. This was Goodell leading in a manner they’d rarely seen: He was not playing a zero-sum game, he was not risk averse, and his compassion clearly lay with the players in the face of severe pressure from hard-line owners and business executives. “He did a great job because he didn’t say much,” Blank says. “I don’t mean that in a negative way.”

The players had arrived at NFL headquarters wanting to be their own voice rather than have the union speak for them. DeMaurice Smith, the players’ association chief, was uncharacteristically quiet during the session, having found a way to move forward on this issue with Goodell after a private meeting at Dulles International Airport on October 3. In a similar sort of way, the players concluded that Goodell seemed to be speaking for himself more than for many owners and even the league—something that stunned them because, after all, some players privately view the commissioner as the puppet of ruthless billionaire owners. “There was sincerity on both sides,” 49ers CEO Jed York says.

The meeting was going so well that even the unintentionally awkward moments were forgiven. At one point, Buffalo Bills co-owner Terry Pegula, moved by Anquan Boldin’s story about his cousin being shot and killed by a police officer, complimented him on how impressive he was but kept calling him “Antwan.” Then Pegula suggested that Boldin would be the perfect NFL spokesman on social issues not only because he had walked away from the game to pursue causes but because, the owner said, it couldn’t be a “white owner but needs to be someone who’s black.”

Some people quickly glanced at one another; others looked down, cringing. But the discussion resumed, and soon the session was running so long—by ninety minutes—that nobody knew how to end it. At one point, Robert Kraft mumbled to the two Jets players seated on either side of him, “Can we just shut the f— up and end this?” Everyone on that side of the table laughed, and the optics of the Patriots owner laughing with two players from his team’s rival seemed to have accomplished the mission.

But it was hard to tell if it was just optics. Shortly after one p.m., Goodell and Smith stepped out of the session to tell Lockhart and union spokesman George Atallah to craft a joint NFL-NFLPA statement, a symbol of rare cooperation.

Players were still skeptical that the owners and league executives beyond Goodell were motivated to act—a week later, Chargers tackle Russell Okung would label the league’s lack of urgency “disappointing” and said the players-owners meeting appeared “unproductive at best and disingenuous at worst.”

Before everyone left the room that afternoon, Davis made one last point: how important it had been that acting Jets owner Chris Johnson, the brother of Woody Johnson, now Trump’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, had visited with every player in the locker room to hear their concerns.

“Guys will stand up if you hear them,” Davis told the owners.

Two hours later, those eleven owners joined their counterparts and league executives in a third-floor conference room at the Conrad Hotel in lower Manhattan. It was uncertain and tense. Most pro-stand owners, like Dan Snyder of the Washington Redskins, had been purposefully excluded from the players’ meeting.

Inside the conference room, Goodell kicked off the session by asking each of the eleven owners to give his account of the players’ meeting. Nearly all offered slight variations on the same theme: It was a very good session; the players were passionate and very impressive; we’ve got a lot of work to do to address their concerns and to use the NFL platform to address these difficult social, racial, and justice issues. The mandate to stand wasn’t mentioned. Goodell didn’t interrupt anyone, and he summed it up by saying that the two sides were “on a good path to a partnership.”

Goodell then opened the floor to discussion, and something surprising happened: Nobody debated. Jones asked a pair of benign questions about the process for Isaacson’s proposal, a far different occurrence than in the committee meetings three weeks earlier when, according to an owner, he had “hijacked” the protest discussion. Owners were stunned. “OK,” Goodell said, “let’s move on and we’ll come back to this.” The meeting broke around five p.m., and many of the owners left for the night believing that the ones who hated the protests most had relented. But Goodell had purposefully tabled the discussion out of deference to Jones, giving him the evening to speak to owners and gauge the support for a league-wide mandate to stand.

At the Conrad on Wednesday, day 2 of the meetings began with most owners and team executives back inside the third-floor conference room. While league staffers reviewed mundane legal matters and pored over a PowerPoint presentation showcasing this season’s declining TV ratings, a strange suspense lingered over the session, given that the anthem issue remained unresolved: What would Jerry Jones say?

By late morning, Goodell finally moved the discussion to the protests. It was a “special privileged session,” with only owners plus one adviser allowed. Snyder spoke first. He said that there were real business issues at stake, and he mentioned that in his market, the defense industry and other sponsors were angry about the protests. He didn’t put any dollars on it. To many in the room, Snyder’s speech felt like an opening act for the headlining band.

After Snyder sat down, Jones stood and left no question that it was his floor. “I’m the ranking owner here,” he said.

At first, some in the room admired Jones’s pure bravado, the mix of folksy politician and visionary salesman he has perfected. But he was angry. He said the owners had to take the business impact seriously, as the league was threatened by a polarizing issue it couldn’t contain or control. To some in the room, it was clear Jones was trying to build momentum for an anthem-mandate resolution, and in the words of one owner, “he brought up a lot of fair points.” Jones believed he was one of the few showing any urgency on the matter and seemed to be more frustrated that not everybody was listening than he was passionate about the mandate.

As Jones spoke, Snyder mumbled out loud, “See, Jones gets it—96 percent of Americans are for guys standing,” a claim some dismissed as a grand overstatement. McNair, a multi-million-dollar Trump campaign contributor, spoke next, echoing many of the same business concerns. “We can’t have the inmates running the prison,” McNair said.

That statement stunned some in the room. Then Kraft, who is close friends with Trump, politely rebuked the hardliners, saying that he supported the league’s marketing proposal and predicted the issue would work itself out over time. This argument seemed to find a receptive audience in the room. An unofficial count had only nine owners in favor of a mandate, though the reasons for the opposition varied: Some owners had tired of Jones always commandeering such meetings; some were jealous of his power and eager to see him go down; some saw the players-must-stand mandate as bad policy to invoke in the middle of the season; some owners were angry with Jones’s hard-line public stance on kneeling, feeling that it had backed them all into a corner. “The majority of owners understand this is important to the players and want to be supportive, even if they don’t exactly know how to be supportive,” one owner says.

Now, suddenly, Jones found himself in an unfamiliar position: He wasn’t getting his way. He knew it, and everyone knew it. Like the numerous reasons behind the protests, the business concerns were nuanced—one major sponsor had threatened to pull out if the NFL were to issue a mandate to stand. York spoke next. Though Jones and Snyder were angry with him—they felt that if he had forced Kaepernick to stand a year ago, this crisis could have been averted—York and Jeffrey Lurie of the Eagles had emerged as thoughtful leaders. Knowing that many of the players who were still kneeling were on his 49ers, York emphasized that he understood the business concerns and that each market was different and that he had been talking to his players for a long time and would continue to do so. Lurie had spoken up during the meeting, supporting the players’ right to kneel.

After the owners finished, Troy Vincent stood up. He was offended by McNair’s characterization of the players as “inmates.” Vincent said that in all his years of playing in the NFL—during which, he said, he had been called every name in the book, including the N-word—he never felt like an “inmate.”

It was starting to get nasty. Vincent and Jones had a sharp but quick back-and-forth, with Jones finally reminding the room that rather than league office vice presidents, it was he and fellow owners who had helped build the NFL’s $15 billion-a-year business, and they would ultimately decide what to do. McNair later pulled Vincent aside and apologized, saying that he felt horrible and that his words weren’t meant to be taken literally, which Vincent appreciated. The meetings were already running long and were ending on a raw note—and there were more agenda items to hit. For the second time in a month, a few frustrated owners grumbled about Lockhart, angry that the league was, as usual, appearing to be reactive in a public-relations sense in the face of a crippling crisis. League executives worried that during upcoming events—Veterans Day and the NFL’s Salute to Service—pro-military groups might stage protests.

Goodell left the meeting room to be ushered to a news conference. The final topic of a long morning was the most salient one: the commissioner’s next contract. Jones is not technically on the six-person committee that determines Goodell’s compensation, but he has willed himself onto it. And so, before everyone could leave, he spoke for twenty minutes, delving into all of the league’s problems that everyone knew by heart. He wanted Goodell’s contract to be more incentive-based than it is. “This is the most one-sided contract ever,” he said. This speech, like the one earlier in the day by him, was not vintage Jones: His usual annoying but endearing Jerryisms were replaced by a palpable urgency; it seemed to a few owners as if only Jones could see that an opportunity to regain control of the league was slipping away.

As Jones spoke, a few owners wondered what exactly had been accomplished during the week in New York. Had Goodell won? Had the players won? Had Jones lost? For most, it was enough that the owners and players had come together and that perhaps the promise of their newly formed partnership would bury the desire of some players to take a knee or raise their fists again. As a top league executive remarked when it was over, it took a president’s attacks to get everyone to come together—or at least agree to keep talking, as they intend to do at the next owners-players summit, scheduled for October 31, a meeting that the players have invited Kaepernick to attend.

Just after two p.m., the New York meetings adjourned, two hours late. Owners filed out to meet in the lobby with reporters, explaining the league’s baby steps toward turning “protest into progress.” All of the reporters waited for Jones. A day earlier, he had tried to duck underneath a staircase at the hotel to avoid them, but about two-dozen reporters swarmed, ready to assume their common position of being his rapt audience. But Jones didn’t stop walking. He searched for a way out of the hotel and hit a dead end before turning back and going down an escalator. Jones likes to talk the most when he’s selling. For now, at least, he had nothing to sell. But there was a very real sense that he wasn’t done fighting, not on the anthem, not on Goodell’s contract, and not on his worries about the NFL’s future. As he left the meeting room, Jerry Jones was silent. And then he was gone, slipping out a hotel side door and out of New York, where so much had been discussed and so little had been decided.

Roger Goodell Has a Jerry Jones Problem

There was a pause. It was August 9, inside Roger Goodell’s sixth-floor office at the NFL’s Park Avenue headquarters in New York City—down the hall, past the executives’ offices and his assistant’s desk, and through a large, thick wooden door that is both imposing and usually left open to serve as a welcome. Goodell huddled over a speakerphone with general counsel Jeff Pash. On the other end was Jerry Jones. Adhering to the protocol of giving owners a forty-eight-hour heads-up before a major disciplinary issue involving their team is announced, Goodell and Pash informed Jones that after a thirteen-month domestic violence inquiry, the Dallas Cowboys star running back, Ezekiel Elliott, would face punishment—a six-game suspension.

The line went quiet. Seconds passed. Goodell’s decision was an unconscionable violation of trust, Jones later told associates, because he believed that the commissioner had assured him this past spring that there would be no suspension. Jones saw in Elliott a genuine opportunity, a player so good that he had made Jones believe that this year he just might win a Super Bowl for the first time since 1996. His anger was palpable. Finally, according to sources with direct knowledge of the call, Jones broke the silence. He aimed his words not only at Goodell’s decision but also at his role as judge, jury, and executioner in the case.

“I’m gonna come after you with everything I have,” Jones said. Then he mentioned Deflategate. “If you think Bob Kraft came after you hard, Bob Kraft is a p_____y compared to what I’m going to do.”

Nobody knows what Jones is going to do. But at the age of fifty-eight, Goodell is fighting to keep his job. In public, he looks fresh and energetic, and he is more resolute than ever to leave with a legacy of having come close to fixing football’s long-standing issues. Up close, though, his face has changed due to relentless stress; it is now sallow and lined and tired. Roger Goodell is in a battle few saw coming, with the league’s membership teetering on an all-out, unprecedented civil war.

A little less than a week before that contentious conference call, Goodell and Jones seemed as close as ever at Glenmoor Country Club in Canton, Ohio, even as friction burned beneath the surface. Goodell was among the guests at Jones’s multi-million-dollar Hall of Fame celebration inside a white tent big enough to accommodate a pair of Boeing 767 jets. Goodell knew that Elliott would be suspended, but he held off on the league announcement of it so that Jones could enjoy his moment. Goodell hugged Jones and offered his hearty congratulations as Justin Timberlake delivered a two-hour set, telling the crowd: “The greatest owner in the history of sports is being honored tonight!”

For years, America’s most powerful sports owner has heaped praise on America’s most powerful commissioner for being a visionary, a “grow-the-pie thinker.” Jones, now seventy-five, uses a cost-benefit analysis to measure the value of many relationships, and as the NFL grew from a $6 billion-a-year to a $14 billion-a-year enterprise under Goodell, their relationship seemed strong. But then Goodell suspended Elliott, and it’s only gotten nastier since, with that decision clarifying Jones’s long-standing worries about Goodell’s leadership, his current total annual compensation of $42 million, and the approval process for a contract extension expected to pay even more, according to documents and nearly two dozen interviews by Outside the Lines with owners, league and team executives and lawyers, and union leaders. Trust among owners and among senior executives inside the league office has all but evaporated. In early November, when Jones threatened to sue his fellow owners and the league to stop progress on Goodell’s next contract, Falcons owner and compensation committee chairman Arthur Blank told Jones, “This is not how we do things in the NFL.”

As the league’s TV ratings and favorability polls have drifted downward this autumn, a growing number of owners have expressed their dissatisfaction with Goodell’s stewardship: He has not held many executives accountable despite a long line of mishandled crises; even with tens of millions of dollars invested in new executives and consultants, Goodell still has not managed to resolve high-profile cases of player discipline without embarrassing legal battles; behind closed doors, even perfunctory policy decisions, like the posting of game highlights on Twitter, have become bitter showdowns among owners and executives. At the same time, the league has been exposed to unprecedented pressure over player protests during the national anthem that have polarized fans and players while angering sponsors and TV network partners. Even more, throughout the past few months, the war for the future of the NFL has played out uncomfortably and publicly, often through competing leaks between owners, all of which has distracted fans from the actual games.

It is a turmoil that seems new but actually began years ago in a shadow war waged inside the cloistered world of NFL offices, owners’ suites, private meetings, and conference calls, rooted in very different visions, mostly by Jerry Jones and Roger Goodell, about what the NFL’s future should be.

Before envisioning an NFL without Goodell, Jones needed him in it. More than a decade ago in a league meeting, Jones stood before his fellow owners and, in the words of an executive in the room, “all but begged” for a loan. The price tag had skyrocketed on his $1.3 billion AT&T Stadium, and he needed more cash from the league’s G3 loan program. Jones also knew that many owners were angry with him; years earlier, he had disposed of thousands of seats at Texas Stadium and replaced them with club suites, trading revenue shareable with visiting teams’ owners for money that went straight into his own pocket. So on this day, he told owners that he realized what he had done was unfair—but that he was building a stadium that would be a great showplace for the NFL and needed tens of millions in additional loans.

Goodell was silent during the meeting. Back then, he was the NFL’s chief operating officer, commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s number two, and the favorite of a clique of powerful owners to succeed Tagliabue. But after Jones’s speech, owners approved the loan, in no small part because Goodell helped muscle the proposal through in private conversations with owners, selling them on Jones’s vision of a football palace. In August 2006, Jones returned the favor. Goodell was elected commissioner, aided in part by Jones, who, along with others, twisted arms to put Goodell over his closest challenger, league attorney Gregg Levy. After Goodell won, the owners were deeply divided. Owners of the smaller-market clubs who had supported Levy worried that Goodell would leave them behind. Goodell had to find concepts that everyone could support, setting up the fight playing out today:

To fulfill the vision of Jones and others, Goodell promised to increase revenue.

To fulfill his own vision, Goodell promised to defend the brand, in his words “to protect the shield.”

At the time, nobody saw those two agendas at odds. But almost as soon as Goodell took over, the NFL plunged into crisis, from Michael Vick’s dogfighting scandal to Spygate and Bountygate. The league’s flat-footed, obfuscating response to head injuries lingered over it all. Many called for Goodell to step down, but Jones was among the owners who always publicly backed Goodell—even when he was upset with him. Jones threatened to sue the league in 2012 after being penalized $10 million in salary cap room for manipulating a contract. But in 2014, Jones publicly supported Goodell after the Ray Rice domestic violence mismanagement, Goodell’s low point as commissioner. “He’s acknowledged that he’s mishandled this,” Jones said on his Dallas radio show at the time, “and he said that he’ll do better in the future.”

What troubled Jones more than the crises was the way Goodell had responded. In most cases, Goodell expanded the power of the league office and broadened its scope, adding executives, many of whom are paid seven-figure salaries and given generous operating budgets. Among others, Goodell named former lobbyist Jeff Miller to oversee the league’s health and safety policy in response to head injuries; former Manhattan prosecutor Lisa Friel to investigate criminal allegations in the wake of Rice; longtime sports executive Tod Leiweke in 2015 as chief operating officer to manage the new cabinet; and, in 2016, former White House spokesman and league consultant Joe Lockhart to run public relations and attempt to rehabilitate Goodell’s image. Some owners, most notably Jones, quietly questioned the wisdom of such moves—especially the hiring of Friel. Before her position was established, Jones argued to owners in a closed-door meeting that creating its own law-enforcement arm might not solve the problems of the NFL and would, more likely, create a new set of them. As Steelers owner Art Rooney II says, “We’ve expanded staff in areas that ten or twenty years ago I probably would have never dreamt.”

“Roger was trying to solve two things,” former NFL attorney Jodi Balsam says. “One, cosmetic: Get people in there with the right credentials and diversity with experience to show that we are serious. It was also deeply substantive. The league needed to refresh its talent in some areas.”

Jones, though, was conditioned in the spirit of Raiders owner and mentor Al Davis to never allow the league office to amass too much power. And in recent years, Jones felt that owners were being relegated to the role of mere “suggesters.” One of the first times his anger over that power shift spilled out into plain view came during a league meeting in October 2015 in Manhattan. The owners were frustrated. The movie Concussion was about to be released, and they conceded that years of inaction and denials about football-related brain injuries had damaged the league. But more recently, owners had approved rule changes that they believed made the game safer. Some owners complained, “Why aren’t we perceived as being part of the solution?”

In his deep Arkansas drawl, Jones argued that everyone was overreacting, both about the film and the fallout over head injuries.

“This is a pimple on a baby’s ass,” Jones said, drawing an awkward silence from the room.

The frustration of Jones and other owners continued over issues big and small. Last year, TV ratings declined, and anxiety mounted. Many owners concluded that former Pepsi executive Dawn Hudson, whom Goodell hired as the league’s chief marketing officer, was providing analysis that was too optimistic. At an October 2016 league meeting in Houston, Hudson and Lockhart presented a slide that showed different variables measuring the popularity of the major sports leagues. At the top was the NFL. Various others, including Major League Soccer, were labeled “up-and-coming.” At the bottom, under the category of “eroding,” was the NBA, which had just signed a $24 billion TV deal with ESPN and TNT and was coming off its most watched Finals since 1998.

“Do you buy this bulls—t?” one owner said to another.

Owners wanted to hear an insider’s state of the union, as the league’s future depended on whether the slide reflected a temporary blip or the beginning of an alarming long-term trend. Instead, they felt they were being spun. Jones, in particular, seemed eager for a fight. And the next day, an argument erupted between Jones and other owners and league executives over the league’s in-game video and social-media policy. At the time, the league tightly controlled the posting of video highlights on social media and team sites. Jones blasted the policy.

“Why are you restricting this?” Jones asked. “We’re best suited to handle our content.”

Patriots president Jonathan Kraft, who cochairs the digital-media committee, walked to the front of the room and defended the policy, then returned to his seat. Jones dug in again, saying, “If the league can post highlights, we should be able to post highlights.”

Kraft stood up again to explain the policy. Several owners concluded that Jones didn’t understand the policy’s details, but it didn’t matter. He was hot. Kraft left the room. Jones turned to Brian Rolapp, now the NFL’s chief media and business officer, and said, “I don’t know why it has to be that difficult, Brian.”

The committee eventually amended the policy. But Jones now had league executives in his crosshairs, and, as he would tell associates, such matters ultimately reflected poorly on Goodell. Jones wasn’t alone. Bob Kraft told associates that the league office had become “bloated.” Says another owner: “Nobody knows what to expect from the league office. Who’s really making decisions?”

Suspicions ran high. League officials who visited teams used to be given the red-carpet treatment; now they often were left to wait in team lobbies and quickly ushered in and out of meetings. That tension flowed into the league’s Park Avenue headquarters. Despite Leiweke’s efforts to play peacemaker, many of the top executives didn’t and don’t trust one another. They felt they were in an impossible position, taking bullets for owners, who would turn around and complain about their performances and salaries. But owners also feel that Goodell hasn’t been served well, especially by Miller on player health, Lockhart on the league’s overall image, and Pash on player discipline. Sensing that many of his executives are afraid of him and seem unwilling to offer objective counsel on vital issues, Goodell has become exhausted and distrusting—yet more determined to succeed. Owners grumble that, as a result, Goodell has marginalized many executive vice presidents, including Leiweke—and that they have even marginalized themselves, often leaving Goodell unsupported.

“The executives want to protect themselves by isolating Roger,” one owner says. “They don’t care if they burn the league down to keep their jobs.”

Another owner, though, pointed out that for as sincere as Goodell seemed in his 2006 speech to owners pitching himself for commissioner—that he would “hire a great team” and “make people accountable”—he has been too loyal to most top executives, no matter how badly an issue has been handled. “His strengths and his weaknesses are kind of the same,” Rooney says of Goodell. “He can be very firm in his positions, and at times that frustrates people who want to have somebody with more of an open mind.”

And so Jones and other owners began to quietly ask: Are we getting the right people for what we’re paying?

At the October 2016 meetings in Houston, the league was, as usual, enduring crisis. The NFL had recently suspended Giants kicker Josh Brown for only one game after domestic assault allegations, which made it appear that Goodell had not learned the hard lessons from the Ray Rice debacle. The New York Daily News had obtained incriminating evidence from Washington-state law-enforcement authorities that Friel, with her multi-million-dollar budget, had failed to gather. It all came to a head at the meetings. (The NFL would retroactively suspend Brown for six games the following season; the entire public relations mess was exactly what Jones and other owners and executives feared and predicted could occur from the beginning.)

On the first night of the meetings, Jones and a few other executives walked into the hotel bar shortly before midnight. Friel was there. In February and July 2016, Elliott’s former girlfriend had claimed that he assaulted her on six separate days in Ohio and Florida; he had been neither arrested nor charged with any wrongdoing by the authorities in both states. Jones believed there was no case. At the bar, Friel explained to Jones that the Elliott investigation was open and would be indefinitely as she finished her job.

Jones’s eyes widened, his brow furrowed. He raised his finger and wagged it in her face. “I’m saying this as an owner!” he yelled. “Your bread and butter is going to get both of us thrown out on the street!”

The bar got quiet. Everyone stared. After a minute or so, a Cowboys executive ushered Jones up to his room.

Several months later, at the Arizona Biltmore, during the owners’ winter meetings this past March, Jones looked cocky, carrying a cocktail in the lobby—and for good reason. His power and influence were never greater. He had just helped engineer the second team relocation in fourteen months, first the Rams to Los Angeles and now the Raiders to Las Vegas—two months after being elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “He’s the shadow commissioner—or Roger is a puppet one,” an owner said at the hotel bar.

During one meeting, Jones reminded Goodell of his impatience with the ongoing Elliott inquiry. Behind closed doors, Jones repeated to other owners that the NFL shouldn’t be in the “investigative business.” Jones knew many owners agreed; Bob Kraft, for example, has complained for years that the league “wastes” money on seemingly endless player-discipline investigations, including a reported $22.5 million on Deflategate. Jones also challenged Goodell’s practice of punishing players who are not charged with crimes, let alone convicted.

Jones didn’t mention Elliott by name, but he didn’t need to.

During an executive session, Goodell left the conference room, and the topic turned to his contract, which expires in March 2019. An extension seemed like a formality; even owners who weren’t pleased with Goodell’s performance wanted him to lead negotiations against the union when the collective bargaining agreement expires in 2021. Jones, though, complained to fellow owners about the power vested in the six-member compensation committee that would negotiate the terms of Goodell’s contract with him. Jones, who was not a committee member, said that for Goodell’s next contract, all thirty-two owners should be kept apprised of all the negotiations’ key developments and be given the opportunity to approve the contract’s final terms.

The unspoken issue, again, was Elliott.

When Goodell returned to New York from the Biltmore, he told his deputies that he wanted the Elliott case closed by June to avoid having yet another disciplinary case against one of the NFL’s stars hanging over the start of the season. Elliott’s accuser and ex-girlfriend was interviewed by Kia Roberts, the NFL’s newly hired director of investigations, a total of six times—twice in person and four more times on the phone. By the spring, Roberts had concluded that the accuser was not a credible witness, an opinion she conveyed to Friel.

In May, Jones asked Goodell by phone for a status update on the Elliott investigation. Jones later told several people that he came away from their conversation with an assurance that there would be no suspension for Elliott and that Goodell felt the running back should enter counseling and perhaps issue a statement showing contrition for his behavior. Jones replied that Elliott wouldn’t be contrite about domestic violence because he hadn’t committed it. “[Jones] told me, ‘Roger told me there was nothing to worry about—the evidence just isn’t there,’ ” says a high-level source briefed on the call. “Jerry … was damn sure that Zeke was free and clear.”

Lockhart, the NFL spokesman, disputes that account: “Absolutely no assurances were given to Jerry by the commissioner that there would be no discipline, at any point in the process.”

Later that month, the owners were set to vote on granting the six-member compensation committee, led by Arthur Blank, authority to begin negotiating Goodell’s extension. To get the requisite twenty-one votes to move forward, Blank felt he needed the powerful Jones behind him. “I want you on the committee,” Blank said.

“I won’t go on the committee,” Jones replied. “I want to be an ombudsman. I want to literally represent the owners who are not on the committee.”

That position was approved. At the NFL’s spring meetings in Chicago, owners—including Jones—voted unanimously to extend Goodell’s contract, giving Blank, and Goodell, enormous leverage. Jones railed later that he and owners didn’t spend a single minute reviewing Goodell’s job performance.

Back at the league office, the Elliott investigation dragged on despite Goodell’s directive to have the case wrapped up by June. Friel’s 160-page report, listing Roberts as a coauthor, was dated June 6. In a highly unusual move, Friel did not include a punishment recommendation for Goodell. The NFL’s chief investigator always concludes an investigative report with a recommendation for the commissioner.

It left some league executives and others close to the case baffled; some agreed with Roberts’s conclusion that there were credibility questions around the accuser while others wondered whether Friel and other league executives sought a makeup call for the mishandled Josh Brown case.

After the report was written, Goodell met with Friel, Pash, and several other league executives. Roberts, however, did not attend. At Friel’s recommendation, Goodell convened a four-person panel of advisers to consider the evidence collected in the Elliott matter, hear from Elliott himself, and make recommendations—proof, a league source says, that Goodell never had assured Jones that Elliott was in the clear. And so, on June 26 in the NFL offices, the advisory group reviewed witness statements, medical records, and text messages exchanged by Elliott, his accuser, and others. The panel questioned Friel, but again, Roberts was not invited and didn’t have a chance to express her opinion. Friel later testified that she did not know whose decision it was not to invite Roberts. “I’ve never seen a situation when a league office takes an official position in federal court that they are willfully blind to key facts in their own process and owners tolerate it,” says Jeffrey Kessler, the attorney for the players. “Everybody now knows that they suppressed the findings of their own investigation—and kept their chief investigator on the sidelines—to get the result that they wanted.”

During the session, former U.S. attorney Mary Jo White asked Friel what she had concluded about the credibility of Elliott’s accuser. Friel said she found the accuser not credible on one occasion but credible overall; however, Friel did not bring up the credibility concerns raised by her investigator, Roberts. Under questioning by Kessler, Friel described Roberts’s concerns about the accuser’s credibility.

For her part, Friel has privately told colleagues that despite the resources at her disposal—the Elliott case has cost an estimated $2 million and counting—she was hamstrung without subpoena power. Her worst fears, and Jones’s, were coming true. Still, Goodell gave considerable weight to the opinions of the panelists, who unanimously concluded that Elliott deserved to be punished.

Jones didn’t know that Goodell was changing his mind. And he didn’t know that Goodell was facing pressure both from a handful of league executives who felt Elliott should be suspended and from owners wanting Jones to be humbled. Kraft had called Goodell in the summer and, referring to the Elliott case, told the commissioner, “My guy got four games for footballs and there’s still nothing on this?”

Just before the Cowboys training camp opened in Oxnard, California, Jones told reporters on July 23 there was “absolutely nothing” to the domestic violence accusations against Elliott, a refrain he repeated several days later during Hall of Fame activities. And on August 9, Blank’s compensation committee convened a dinner meeting in Manhattan to discuss Goodell’s contract; Jones attended via phone. During the session, Jones did not raise any concerns about Goodell’s contract extension, sources say.

The next day, Blank called Goodell, telling the commissioner that Jones had participated in the meeting. That’s when Goodell told Blank, “He’s not going to be too happy with me tomorrow,” explaining that Elliott’s suspension was coming.

On August 11, Goodell announced the six-game suspension of Elliott. Jones saw it as a “complete betrayal,” a source now says. “An overcorrection” by Goodell, Jones later called it publicly. Privately, Jones seethed to confidants that Goodell hadn’t studied the case’s many details, and he considered suing the NFL to get the suspension overturned. “Roger blew off his own investigator’s conclusion—it’s just patently unfair,” Jones told a confidant, a charge that a league source denies. Jones had turned on Goodell, perhaps for good. An ESPN report in mid-September detailed that Jones was impeding progress on Goodell’s contract extension. And then, at league meetings a month later, Jones took over a meeting about Goodell’s contract, irritating his colleagues by calling himself, more than once, the “ranking owner” and adding, “I’m going to be a pain in the ass” to committee members.

Lockhart has insisted that Roberts’s recommendation that she did not believe Elliott should be suspended had been communicated to Goodell. But on October 30, at another hearing over Elliott’s suspension before U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla, NFL lawyer Paul Clement suggested that it didn’t matter because of the broad authority Goodell has over player discipline. Failla asked, “Would it not have assisted [Goodell] in determining whether punishment were appropriate to hear from the very person that had been tasked with interviewing this very key witness?”

“I don’t know that it would,” Clement replied.

To Jones and to Elliott’s lawyers, Clement’s position was proof that Goodell had failed to obtain a critical fact before handing down punishment—permissible under the CBA but fundamentally unfair to Elliott. It didn’t matter: On November 9, Elliott’s six-game suspension was upheld by a federal appeals court, sending him to the sideline, after more than two months of appeals, and escalating the anger and determination of the league’s most powerful owner.

A long-held assumption has been that Goodell wants another long-term deal. Those who have discussed the contract situation with him have described him as “furious” and “emboldened” at the notion of accepting a deep pay cut after making the owners a lot of money over the years, watching their teams’ valuations skyrocket, and taking many bullets for them. ESPN has reported that he asked in August for a compensation package of about $49 million a year, if every incentive is met, plus use of a private jet for life and health care for life for his family. But most owners expect him to land in the range of $40 million a year. If owners decide to squeeze him too hard, he might walk away. He knows that there’s no clear successor, which is both a failing on his part and a source of leverage.

The owners, though, have considered other successors. A confidant of one owner reached out to gauge whether Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, would be interested in running the NFL, to which Silver immediately said no. Owners have also considered looking to the International Olympic Committee for someone with global experience to grow the game—or even installing the seventy-six-year-old Tagliabue for a year while a committee searched for the ideal successor. Jones has told confidants that he has his own candidate in mind, which Jones has publicly denied. Few owners are interested in allowing Jones to essentially handpick the next commissioner. Even so, Jones has vowed, sources say, to make Goodell’s life miserable. “Jerry’s message to Roger was ‘I run this league. You better get with it,’ ” a senior league executive says. “This is about power and control, not the contract. That’s all white noise.”

That’s why, no matter how often some team executives say not to underestimate Jones, and no matter how frustrated many owners are with the state of the league, the support to remove Goodell doesn’t seem to be there. Jones has the Redskins’ Dan Snyder and a handful of other owners on his side; there are a dozen or so owners who just want to extend Goodell and get the story out of the headlines; and the rest don’t approve of Goodell’s performance not because they agree with Jones but because they believe Goodell has empowered him to a fault, especially given the ugly situation with two relocated franchises drawing small crowds in Los Angeles. “Switching commissioners is like switching from an iPhone to a Samsung,” one ownership source says. “Do my pictures transfer? Do my contacts? Does my music? In the end, why take the risk?”

It’s Goodell who now seems more willing to take risks, as if he realizes he has less to lose than before. He defied many owners, including Jones, and many league business executives by refusing to back a mandate that all players stand for the national anthem. His relationship with the union and some players has improved this fall; he is not merely serving as the puppet of the owners, as players have long suspected. A day after Outside the Lines reported that, in an owners-only meeting in New York, Texans owner Bob McNair said, “We can’t have the inmates running the prison,” McNair released a statement insisting that he was referring to league executives as inmates, not the players, drawing skepticism. According to sources, McNair asked Goodell to publicly back him up. Goodell refused.

If Goodell does re-sign, nobody knows exactly how long he will serve. “There’s always a risk that people stay too long, and I don’t want to be in that category,” he said at a Bloomberg conference in early November. Some of the tension, sources say, has been over a severance package that could approach $100 million—should either Goodell or the owners choose to end the contract early. Few owners want a new commissioner before the expiration of the CBA in 2021; any replacement would have to repair the damaged relationship with the players’ union by giving away concessions that the owners prize. Goodell is already beginning to duplicate his most valuable contribution to the 2011 CBA deal: unifying the owners en masse against the union. Pash has advised the owners in meetings to prepare for a bloody and bitter battle in four years—a fitting possible capstone to the tumultuous Goodell era. “I’m here for you through that,” Goodell has told some owners. “After that, you guys should start having a conversation.”

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-November, three days after Elliott began serving his suspension, Jerry Jones walked onto the field at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta for a game between his Cowboys and Arthur Blank’s Falcons. Blank stood about twenty yards from Jones. The anger and suspicion were unmistakable. It had been only a few days since Blank effectively fired Jones as compensation committee ombudsman, after Jones, through an attorney, accused him of misleading owners about the details of Goodell’s extension, a charge Blank denied. After he was removed, Jones told Blank, “You’re making a big mistake.”

Nothing more needed to be said on game day. It is customary for the owner of the home team to greet the owner of the visiting team, but as this fall has revealed, this is not a season for tradition. The two men never spoke, opting instead in the coming days for power plays on letterhead: Blank’s compensation committee accused Jones of “conduct detrimental to the league’s best interests”; Jones asked for a special owners-only meeting to discuss Goodell’s new deal.

A few hours after the 27–7 Falcons rout, Jones emerged from the Cowboys locker room, looking drained but sounding defiant. Even some of his closest advisers aren’t on board with the war he is raging. In a black suit and black cowboy boots, Jones found himself in the middle of a mob of cameras and reporters. He spoke quietly, saying that he wanted to “do everything I can” to help the league improve and that “this is one of those times” when “you need to adjust.” He was asked, point-blank, whether he thought Goodell should continue as commissioner.

“I’m not going to discuss that right now,” Jones said.

A few minutes later, he moved down a long hallway at the bottom of the stadium, surrounded by four security guards. He walked with a slight limp. He said nothing. Everyone cleared out of his way, and when he exited the stadium into a cold and stiff wind, a crowd of Cowboys fans lining a fence cheered. Jones stopped, and for a moment he seemed unsure of where to go: right toward the fans or left toward the limo? Jones stood, a man alone in so many ways. He turned left, away from the fans. The cheering ceased. The idling limo pulled away. A gate was raised, opening a route out of the stadium. A police escort flared its siren, and Jones was off, with nobody knowing exactly how far he’ll go.