Who’s minding this mess? Leibovich starts at the top. An effective N.F.L. commissioner must be adept at two things, he contends. First, manage the needs of the billionaire team owners, which the current commissioner, Roger Goodell, does quite nicely. Second, protect the league from serious scandals and lesser embarrassments, which he seems unable to master. The gaffe-prone Goodell calls to mind the words supposedly uttered by Winston Churchill about Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: “A bull who carries his china shop along with him.” Two years ago, with the concussion issue now a national story, Goodell, the father of twin girls, was asked whether he would allow a son to play football. Yes, he replied, “because of the values” one gets from the game. A fine answer, until he added: “There is risk in life. There is risk in sitting on the couch.”

These words don’t quite rise to the musings of the Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, who compared the concussion flap to “a pimple on a baby’s ass,” but they did arouse considerable suspicion about the league’s intentions. Moreover, Leibovich says, they speak to a problem that continues to dog the unscripted Goodell, as when he credited the players for getting arrested less frequently in 2015 than in previous years. Who would even think to touch the subject, much less praise those lucky enough to avoid jail?

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Blunders aside, Goodell has been good for the owners, who pay him about $40 million a year. He’s won them multibillion-dollar television contracts while cheerleading their coldhearted “relocation” of teams — the Rams, Raiders and Chargers, most recently — to larger-market cities. But Goodell’s greatest gift has been to turn a seasonal game into a year-round bonanza. Fans now spend months anticipating the once mundane N.F.L. draft. If a Sunday triple-header, a Monday night game and an occasional Saturday contest don’t suffice, one can turn on “Thursday Night Football.” Still not enough? Join a fantasy league on NFL.com. There are no days off anymore.

The owners, for the most part, are Republican, conservative and warily pro-Trump. Only a few are women — usually the wife or daughter of a deceased male owner. Neither age nor infirmity is a disqualifier to these popes of football, whose tenure generally ends at death. Among Leibovich’s favorites is the New York Jets owner, Woody Johnson, heir to the J & J fortune and a Trump megadonor currently serving as our ambassador to Britain. A mere pup at 71, the Woodman strikes Leibovich, if not long-suffering Jets fans, as the cheerfully inept custodian of treasures he didn’t quite earn — “like an overgrown third grader who collects toy trains and rotten quarterbacks.” Another is Johnson’s polar opposite, Jerry Jones, 75, a self-made oilman with a cartoon-size ego. Jones is a journalist’s dream. He has no filter, he’ll talk to anybody, and he favors down-home “Jerryisms” too crude to be quoted here.