Goodell favored to succeed Tagliabue as next NFL commissioner
NORTHBROOK, Ill. (AP) – Twenty years ago, Roger Goodell volunteered to chauffeur Pete Rozelle around at the Super Bowl in New Orleans when the NFL commissioner’s regular driver couldn’t make it. In a few weeks, Goodell may well be sitting in the back of the limo.
One of Paul Tagliabue’s top aides and advisers, Goodell will be the favorite to succeed him as NFL commissioner when the 32 owners begin meeting Monday at a suburban hotel to make their choice from a list of five finalists.
In truth, the 47-year-old Goodell, son of a former U.S. senator from New York, has been the favorite for a half-dozen years, or ever since he was designated the NFL’s chief operating officer.
He’s been the point man on expansion and stadium construction; he’s been deeply involved in labor negotiations and he knows almost every aspect of the league’s operation – starting as a public relations intern and (for a week) as a chauffeur.
He also knows players. One of his early tasks as a public relations aide in the league office was helping the NFL recruit college stars who were considering signing with the USFL when it was trying to compete from 1983-85.
Still, his election is not a certainty – most of the 32 NFL owners who will vote for the new commissioner are silent about their preferences and the eight members of the committee who picked the five finalists are saying nothing at all.
The final five were identified last Sunday: Goodell; Gregg Levy, the NFL’s outside counsel; Fred Nance, a Cleveland attorney deeply involved in the Browns’ return to the city; and two top financial executives: Robert L. Reynolds, chief operating officer of Fidelity investments and Mayo A. Shattuck III, president and CEO of Constellation Energy. Reynolds is a former college football referee and Shattuck’s wife is a Baltimore Ravens cheerleader at age 39.
Vegas, naturally is in the act.
According to one oddsmaker, Goodell is a 2-5 favorite, Levy is 2-1 and the other three are 10-1. That’s all speculative and presumably based on the fact that Goodell and Levy – who holds the same job Tagliabue had when he was chosen in 1989 – are known to the owners and the others are not. Even that’s not really true – Nance, the only black candidate, is well known around the league for his work with the Browns.
Still, the odds on Goodell are accurate.
“It’s all set up for Roger,” Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson – who does not favor his fellow upstate New Yorker – said several weeks ago.
Other owners, speaking for background only, believe that if there is a decision at this week’s meeting, only Goodell can get the 22 votes needed for selection. If it’s still deadlocked and more meetings are needed, then it could be more open, as it was in 1989, when Tagliabue and the late Jim Finks, the New Orleans general manager, were deadlocked and it took more than three months and several meetings to resolve the issue.
Tagliabue tried very hard to avoid that this time by appointing a far more diverse selection committee than the group of insiders that recommended Finks 17 years ago and met resistance from a group of outsiders and newcomers. It includes high-revenue and low-revenue owners as well as such mavericks as Dallas’ Jerry Jones, one of those who rebelled the last time, and Oakland’s Al Davis.
Still, nothing is guaranteed. Goodell’s biggest problem with discontented owners like Wilson could be his longtime association with the league office. He still considers Rozelle his idol.
A native of Jamestown, N.Y., he wanted from childhood to work in the NFL. As a senior economics major, at Washington and Jefferson, he sent letters to teams and to the league asking for a job. One landed on the desk of Don Weiss, then Rozelle’s No. 2 man, and impressed him enough that he interviewed Goodell and decided to hire him in 1982 for a three-month internship in the public relations department.
He was quickly dispatched to the New York Jets when one of their interns left for a job with the Eagles. He demonstrated there the same quality that he showed when he volunteered to drive Rozelle – a willingness to take on any job, no matter how menial, in order to learn everything there was to learn.
“From the beginning, you knew that this guy had something to bring to the table,” says Frank Ramos, who was the Jets’ public relations director for 39 years.
“He would open envelopes, stuff envelopes, do anything. I always felt that if a guy shows you he can do something, the more things you give him to do. And he would also suggest things that were almost always helpful in dealing with the media and with the players.
“He was very bright, and very dependable.”
The NFL thought so too.
In 1983, he went back to the league office and a few months later was assigned Gil Brandt, then the personnel director of the Dallas Cowboys, to help convince collegians to sign with the established league.
“He was 23 going on 40,” Brandt recalled. “He seemed to have a rapport with players that a lot of young people didn’t. I remember waiting with him for Reggie White to get off a plane so we could convince him to sign with us. He and Reggie hit it off right away.”
White, who is being posthumously inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame this week, signed with the USFL anyway, then became a star with the Eagles and Packers after the spring league folded. But it wasn’t because of Goodell, whose personality seems to appeal to civic leaders, businessmen and players alike.
“I don’t know the other candidates, but I’ve gotten to know Roger,” two-time NFL MVP Peyton Manning of the Colts said this week. “He’s just a good guy. Nothing pretentious or anything like that about him.”
Manning’s opinion, of course, won’t count when the owners sit down to vote.
And it’s not as if the other candidates lack qualifications.
Levy, 53, is a partner in the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, where Tagliabue worked as the NFL’s outside counsel before he was elected commissioner.
He’s won a variety of cases for the NFL, including the one in which an appeals court upheld the NFL rule that prohibited Maurice Clarett from entering the draft only two years out of high school.
Nance, 52, is also a lawyer, the managing partner of the Cleveland office of Squire Sanders & Dempsey. He worked for the city during the period in the mid ’90s when Art Modell moved the Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore and then was instrumental in helping the new Browns settle in 1999. He also does legal work for basketball star Lebron James.
He’s considered legitimate, not just the obligatory minority candidate.
Shattuck, 51, runs a company that is No. 125 on the Forbes 500 list. He likes to think of himself as something of a rebel and his friends say that streak has made him a success in business.
“I was a little bit of a renegade,” he told the Washington Post early this year. “This was back in the early 1970s. I applied early decision to Williams College without telling my father, who at that time was deputy treasurer of Harvard. So that was my one renegade move as a child.”
Reynolds, 54, in the only one of the five finalists who did not attend an elite private school.
He was born in Clarksburg, W.Va., and graduated from West Virginia University in 1974 with a degree in business administration and finance. His first job was as a trust officer at the Wheeling Dollar Bank. He joined Fidelity in 1984 where he ran the company’s 401k program for 11 years as it increased in value from $9 billion to $224 billion and now is vice chairman and chief operating officer.
The final five came from a list of 11 semifinalists but are the only ones whose names officially have become public since Tagliabue announced his retirement in March. But there was a long list of speculated candidates then that included former President Clinton, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, several other NFL office officials and Atlanta general manager Rich McKay.
Even in that company, Goodell’s name was at the top.
It remains there now.