Search Results for: goodell
Roger Goodell Has a Jerry Jones Problem, and Nobody Knows How It Will End
Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, elevated both his team and America’s sport to all-time highs, but in this age of athlete protests and declining owner influence, can an individual with Jones’ stature—and arrogance—exist within modern-day football? Inside the growing crisis between Jones, commissioner Roger Goodell, and the NFL.
Roger Goodell’s Unstoppable Football Machine
A look at the football commissioner and the group of billionaire owners making all the decisions behind the N.F.L.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and a ‘Failure of Accountability’

He sometimes barks when asked to bend his principles, the ones he learned from his late father, a U.S. senator. He gets enraged when someone, even an owner, tarnishes the integrity of the game or challenges his judgment. Many players and union leaders talk about his failure of accountability. “Right now the league office and commissioner Goodell have little to no credibility with players,” Saints quarterback Drew Brees said in December. Sixty-one percent of active players said they disapprove of the overall job Goodell is doing, according to a January USA Today poll of 300 players.
–From Don Van Natta Jr.’s 2013 ESPN profile of Roger Goodell.
Photo: west_point, Flickr
Longreads Best of 2017: Sports Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in sports writing.
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Mary Pilon
Contributor to The New Yorker, Esquire, and Vice. Previously on staff at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Author of The Monopolists and The Kevin Show (March 2018)
Is This the NFL’s First Female Player? (Lars Anderson, B/R Mag)
I’m a sucker for high school sports stories, but Anderson’s examination of Becca Longo isn’t just a showcase of a plucky talent, it also challenges long-held assumptions about the league’s recruitment pipeline. Longo is the first woman to earn a football scholarship to a Division I or Division II school, and Anderson offers a fascinating window into the training and psyche required to become be an ace-level kicker. In lesser hands, the story could have been mawkish or puffy, but Anderson’s prose is sharp, layered, and will likely be reread when we see Longo in the Super Bowl one day.
Stories are Everything: A PJ Harvey-Inspired Reading List

I listened to PJ Harvey’s 2011 album Let England Shake obsessively while researching people who were sickened or died as a result of their work building nuclear weapons. The album is both simple folk storytelling, and a timeless work about war in the grand tradition of Goya or Hemingway; like the best writers, she turns discrete stories into a broader lens through which to view the world. The music helped me grapple with what each data point of suffering and sacrifice meant, the contradictions in our national remembrance of the cold war, and the forces still shaping that memory.
Read more…
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Spygate to Deflategate: What Split the NFL and Patriots Apart
An in-depth investigation into the “Spygate” cheating allegations against the New England Patriots, and an alleged cover-up by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to keep many more cheating accusations from going public.
Longreads Best of 2014: Sports Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in sports writing.
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Eva Holland
Freelance writer based in Canada’s Yukon Territory.
Together We Make Football (Louisa Thomas, Grantland)
It’s been a bad year for football: Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, the lingering Jameis Winston saga. And a bad year for football means a big year for think pieces about violence and football—I couldn’t tell you how many of those I read this year. But one of them stood out. In “Together We Make Football,” Louisa Thomas reflects on the uncomfortable relationship between the NFL, masculinity, violence, and women. She takes her time, building a case slowly and methodically, before driving home her point: that violence is inherent to, and integral to, the NFL. That although the vast majority of football players don’t beat their wives, there may be no way to separate the bad violence—the off-field violence—from the on-field violence that we love. Here’s Thomas: Read more…
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Rob Sheffield and company at Rolling Stone Longreads (Taken with Instagram at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe)
such a wonderful discussion tonight! sammie rubes and i were sitting way in the back but still really enjoyed the journalism war stories and advice
Thanks everyone for a fun night with Rolling Stone, Longreads and Housing Works. Packed house and excellent audience questions for Rob Sheffield, Jeff Goodell, Brian Hiatt and Will Dana.
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