At his annual Super Bowl-week press conference Friday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters that he is “available to the media almost every day of my job, professionally.” Super Bowl Sunday apparently was not one of those days, because according to NBC, which aired the game, Goodell declined requests for a sit-down interview about recent NFL controversies, including its handling of domestic violence issues.
“In the midst of all this, we requested an interview with commissioner Roger Goodell to talk about Deflate Gate, domestic violence, player safety, and the many other pressing issues facing the league,” NBC anchor Bob Costas said during the network’s pre-game show. “The commissioner declined.”
Goodell spoke at length about Deflate Gate, the quasi-scandal over air pressure in the balls the New England Patriots used in the AFC Championship game, during his Super Bowl press conference, and he briefly addressed the other two issues Costas referenced. Goodell announced that the league plans to hire a chief medical officer to oversee and improve player safety, and, while talking about the “tough year” he had personally, insisted that he understands the issue of domestic violence better than he did a year ago.
The NFL has done controlled messaging on these subjects too. The league last week released numbers showing that concussions were down 25 percent in the 2014 season, and it has spent big on domestic violence messaging, partnering with the No More campaign to run public service announcements throughout the end of the season and during the Super Bowl.
Important questions remain on both of those subjects. It’s easy to question those concussion statistics, for instance, when players like Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson and Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger return to playoff games without undergoing concussion tests after brutal hits (an issue that popped up again during the Super Bowl). And there are major questions about what the league is really doing on domestic violence, whether its efforts on the subject will have true effects instead of becoming a public relations campaign, how it plans to expand beyond the ad campaign, or how it will address challenges from the player’s union.
Goodell faced some tough questions at Friday’s press conference (though those can be easier to control than one-on-one interviews, given that it is harder to ask direct follow-up questions). And it’s certainly possible that an NBC interview with Goodell wouldn’t have elicited anything new. This is the network on which Al Michaels sped through a favorable segment about the league’s “independent” report into the Ray Rice domestic violence case during a playoff game, even though there were major questions about it. Even without the commissioner, NBC could have filled some of its Super Bowl programming with segments that explored the league’s issues with domestic violence or player safety.
The NFL did send executive vice president and general counsel Jeff Pash on NBC’s Meet The Press Sunday morning. But by declining the request to do an interview during the network’s Super Bowl coverage, Goodell, who has in some previous years sat down for interviews with the network broadcasting the Super Bowl, avoided the possibility of even facing those questions and possibly clouding his league’s biggest stage with more criticism of it instead. And unlike players, there is no one to levy fines against the commissioner when he decides to avoid the media’s questions.