Lupica: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is right — he is sorry

This is what we saw on Friday afternoon from Roger Goodell when he talked about how he had gotten so much wrong in the last month and how he was going to make things right in the National Football League:

We saw just another guy in sports trying to talk his way out of trouble.

This doesn’t mean Goodell was lying when he talked about how wrong he was with Ray Rice especially, how little he did to find out what really happened in that elevator in Atlantic City, an original suspension for Rice that was small enough to fit inside a shot glass. It does not mean Goodell isn’t sincerely looking to make things right in his league on domestic violence, and child abuse, and guns, and all the rest of it going forward.

 

Goodell clearly felt bad about everything that had brought him to this moment. Everybody feels bad when they get caught. What became more clear, crystal clear, the longer he talked on Friday afternoon was that he had gotten caught being the weakest commissioner in professional sports, that he is through being called the most powerful man in sports in this country.

Maybe Goodell was so busy suggesting he was some kind of victim of the NFL’s policy about personal conduct — one he helped write — that he neglected to mention the victims that brought him to that podium on Friday.

So the man who was once more than happy to pose on the cover of Time magazine as “The Enforcer” now talks about initiatives and the women he has hired and the committees he now needs to deal with domestic violence and all the rest of it in the National Football League. He says that a conduct committee will be in place by the Super Bowl, and acted as if we should give him the game ball for that.

“Our standards . . . must be clear, consistent and current,” Goodell said at one point, and you wondered why in the hell they already weren’t in the most powerful and profitable league in this country, why it took some grainy elevator video to slap Goodell and his owners upside their own thick heads.

You watched Goodell on Friday, watched him be as contrite as all the players he’s taken to the woodshed without impunity over his years as the NFL commissioner, and wondered why Adam Silver, the new NBA commissioner, a rookie commissioner, didn’t need to form committees when he kicked Donald Sterling, one of his owners, right out of his sport.

When Major League Baseball’s Bud Selig and Rob Manfred wanted to suspend a dozen guys last year, and drop a richly deserved hammer on a drug cheat like Alex Rodriguez, they didn’t talk about a conduct committee or wait around for law enforcement to throw the first punch against Anthony Bosch, drug pusher to the stars. They went right after Bosch with a lawsuit for interference and you know what happened in that moment? They became real enforcers, not people simply posing that way.