Stephanie Stradley
If I were Commissioner Goodell, my clothes wouldn't fit right, that's for sure.
I think my hypothetical Goodell-Me time machine would have to go back further than the AFC Championship game. To the beginning of the time that Goodell became commissioner. And walking back his desire to make sports leagues into Nancy Gracey justice hammers: very reactive to initial leaks, mob anger, giving lip service to but not really interested in fair process or claims of innocence.
And go back to focusing more on the NFL's core business, which is football.
If you don't think that happened in this situation, check out the tone of this Peter King MMQB article after the initial VERY WRONG leaks happened.
"I am told reliably that...." NOPE!
By then it was already labelled a -Gate.
(King has apologized about that story now, and many others ran with stories that were similar, but millions of dollars later, here we are in federal court over a disputed equipment tampering claim).
The NFL under Roger Goodell has created an expectation of reactive, expensive -Gate investigations of high profile situations. As I predicted, multiple times, this sort of arbitrary, disproportionate response is what all fanbases should fear. Sometimes equipment tampering violations are small team fines, and sometimes they are multimillion-dollar investigations, suspensions, draft pick devastation, I guess.
Me as Goodell would not hand out suspensions like they were Halloween candy. Player careers are relatively short and can be over in a violent second, even when working out or practicing. Goodell's cavalier and overly-combative attitude towards giving suspensions out shows a fundamental disrespect for how difficult it is to become and stay a NFL player. You know, those best players in the world that the fans pay money to see play.
When Goodell hands out massive vengeance punishments, he is begging the player to contest them because they have no real choice.
We know that the NFL punishments are vengeance-based and not deterrent because often the thing punished is something that the NFL never made a big deal about before, and the players, if they knew about it was a big deal, wouldn't do.
The way Roger Goodell handles league discipline is disrespectful to the players and does not them like adults.
Maybe this is too harsh of an assessment but Goodell has only given fans the option to judge him by his actions. The words that come out of his mouth are too often incompatible with what the NFL actually does.