





NEW ORLEANS – And on Friday, Roger Goodell emerged from hiding. For a week, the NFL's commissioner has been exiled from his Super Bowl, ducking into dark cars and riding behind a line of wailing police motorcycles. His meetings in the city that hates him have been with safe subjects – team owners, union officials and the people with whom he worked to rebuild the Superdome.

When he emerged for his grand media conference at week's end it was less a celebration of his imperial power and more the appearance of a dictator in the throes of revolution. Outside the Ernest Morial Convention Center, New Orleans rages, still upset over the bounty scandal. His name is no good in the city's restaurants. He's been pinned to dartboards, put in compromising positions on Mardi Gras floats and even ordered to eternal damnation on a banner that has danged from the side of the Superdome he helped save. His players mock him. His suspensions have been overturned. Six and one half years into his regime he is a leader besieged.

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"Do you feel like you are behind enemy lines?" a television reporter asked him on Friday.

Goodell forced a smile. It didn't seem convincing.





The questions came in an all-out assault for him the way they never did for former commissioner Paul Tagliabue. When Tagliabue stood at the lectern with the league's logo, the media conference meandered from queries about stadium financing to replay issues to the NFL's long-held dream of placing teams in European cities. On Friday, Goodell went nearly half an hour before taking a question about anything other than the violent game over which he presides.

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And it's easy to see how little Goodell has ever had a chance. He did this to himself.

His instinct when problems arise is to create a public relations Band-Aid. This might work once, but after a time the Band-Aid on top of another Band-Aid on top of another creates a wad of adhesive that doesn't stick. This has happened with player conduct and player safety, and every other issue that has come along. The response has been an instant policy without clearly planned solutions.

But Goodell, who probably thought he was stepping into the sunny world of Tagliabue, never saw the firestorm racing over the hills. None of them did around the NFL. By the time it hit, they were powerless to do anything. Now football's very existence dangles on the brink.





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You can't blame Goodell for missing the signs. They grew in tiny tao protein deposits in the brains of players. Maybe they never would have been found if not for a curious medical examiner from Nigeria who was on duty in Pittsburgh when the body of former Steelers center Mike Webster appeared in his office. The doctor sliced open Webster's brain, found the telltale signs of head trauma that would come to paralyze the league.

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