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Jerry Jones blocking Goodell extension

Discussion in 'Football: NFL, College, High School' started by pgabriel, Sep 17, 2017.

  1. pgabriel

    pgabriel Educated Negro

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  2. Houstunna

    Houstunna The Most Unbiased Fan
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    "You suspended my player, so F*** your extension."
     
    J.R. likes this.
  3. solid

    solid Contributing Member

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    I would love to see Goodell gone.
     
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  4. Daddy Long Legs

    Daddy Long Legs H- Town Harden

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  5. A_3PO

    A_3PO Member

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  6. Buck Turgidson

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    You only hire David Boies if you want to burn the village down or walk with a settlement. I imagine the NFL prefers the latter. This is interestinger by the minute.
     
  7. ghettocheeze

    ghettocheeze Member

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    I would
    Would love nothing more than to see the drama unfold like this...

    Goodell doesn't get extension --> Elliot suspended indefinitely --> Goodell fired --> Kaepernick wins collusion case --> current collective bargaining agreement nullified.
     
    A_3PO likes this.
  8. zeeshan2

    zeeshan2 Member

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  9. zeeshan2

    zeeshan2 Member

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  10. DonnyMost

    DonnyMost not wrong
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    Jerry is really flying off the rails as he enters the twilight of his ownership.

    I mean yeah, Goodell sucks, but the NFL has a boring product problem too.
     
  11. solid

    solid Contributing Member

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    If Goodell and the other owners try to strip Jones of the Cowboys, we are talking "nuclear" war. Never cared for Jones, but it's the Cowboys. Would be like Godzilla vs. Rodan, battle of the billionaires.
     
  12. Buck Turgidson

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    All Jerrah has to do is sign it over to his son (which was their plan all along), just like McNair and Cal.
     
  13. hvic

    hvic Member

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    His extension is crazy
     
  14. gucci888

    gucci888 Contributing Member

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    Are you saying he doesn't deserve a $20M raise, private jet for life, and lifetime insurance for him and his family? Players only get it for 5 years after retiring and if they've accrued the necessary 3 seasons which is higher than the average playing career.

    Jones is doing this for selfish reasons but can't disagree with trying to block an extension in general, but even more so given the terms of it.
     
  15. HillBoy

    HillBoy Contributing Member

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    Jerry is upset with Goodell because he dropped the hammer on Jerry's "boy" Elliott and refused to look the other way - which is SOP up in Cowsland. What I find enormously funny (and satisfying) that Jones has been signing guys like this for the past 25 and it has gotten them how many playoff victories? NFC championship games? Super Bowl appearances? His "objections" to the specifics of Goodell's contract only came to light when Elliott's suspension was announced. Since then, Jones has done everything he could to sweep this this under the rug - as he has with the other exploits from Elliott. That's what this is all about. Jerral was OK when Goodell dropped the hammer on Tom Brady but now that the shoe is on the other foot, he is not happy with the outcome. Awww... :rolleyes:
     
  16. Air Langhi

    Air Langhi Contributing Member

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    Why is hell Rodger making 50 mil a year? I mean that is more than any players and they are way more irreplaceable than rodger. Rights fees always go up. At least mlb came up with bamtech. That was actually innovative. Rodger has just followed the old strategy of just getting more rights fees.
     
  17. Major

    Major Member

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    Do you know things about Elliott that the rest of the world doesn't? The police didn't find credible evidence of anything either.

    This is ... weird. Why would Jones rail about Brady's suspension? It's not like other owners care about Elliott's either. Kraft blasted the process in the Brady suspension, as you'd expect, and he's been silent here, as you'd also expect. Owners have no reason to protect other team's players and incur the wrath of the NFL. If Goodell suspended Watson without any real evidence, I'd expect Jones and Kraft to stay silent while McNair raised hell.

    http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap30...kraft-blasts-process-in-tom-bradys-suspension
     
  18. J.R.

    J.R. Member

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    http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/...ng-roger-goodell-impending-contract-extension

    Roger Goodell has a Jerry Jones problem and nobody knows how it will end

    ... Finally, according to sources with direct knowledge of the call, Jones broke the silence. He aimed his words not only at Goodell's decision but also at his role as judge, jury and executioner in the case.

    "I'm gonna come after you with everything I have," Jones said. Then he mentioned Deflategate. "If you think Bob Kraft came after you hard, Bob Kraft is a p---y compared to what I'm going to do."

    ...

    When Goodell returned to New York from the Biltmore, he told his deputies that he wanted the Elliott case closed by June to avoid having yet another disciplinary case against one of the NFL's stars hanging over the start of the season. Elliott's accuser and ex-girlfriend was interviewed by Kia Roberts, the NFL's newly hired director of investigations, a total of six times -- twice in person and four more times on the phone. By the spring, Roberts had concluded that the accuser was not a credible witness, an opinion she conveyed to Friel.

    In May, Jones asked Goodell by phone for a status update on the Elliott investigation. Jones later told several people that he came away from their conversation with an assurance that there would be no suspension for Elliott and that Goodell felt the running back should enter counseling and perhaps issue a statement showing contrition for his behavior. Jones replied that Elliott wouldn't be contrite about domestic violence because he hadn't committed it. "[Jones] told me, 'Roger told me there was nothing to worry about -- the evidence just isn't there,'" says a high-level source briefed on the call. "Jerry ... was damn sure that Zeke was free and clear."

    Lockhart, the NFL spokesman, disputes that account: "Absolutely no assurances were given to Jerry by the commissioner that there would be no discipline, at any point in the process."

    Later that month, the owners were set to vote on granting the six-member compensation committee, led by Arthur Blank, authority to begin negotiating Goodell's extension. To get the requisite 21 votes to move forward, Blank felt he needed the powerful Jones behind him. "I want you on the committee," Blank said.

    "I won't go on the committee," Jones replied. "I want to be an ombudsman. I want to literally represent the owners who are not on the committee."

    That position was approved. At the NFL's spring meetings in Chicago, owners -- including Jones -- voted unanimously to extend Goodell's contract, giving Blank, and Goodell, enormous leverage. Jones railed later that he and owners didn't spend a single minute reviewing Goodell's job performance.

    Back at the league office, the Elliott investigation dragged on despite Goodell's directive to have the case wrapped up by June. Friel's 160-page report, listing Roberts as a co-author, was dated June 6. In a highly unusual move, Friel did not include a punishment recommendation for Goodell. The NFL's chief investigator always concludes an investigative report with a recommendation for the commissioner.

    It left some league executives and others close to the case baffled; some agreed with Roberts' conclusion that there were credibility questions around the accuser, while others wondered whether Friel and other league executives sought a makeup call for the mishandled Josh Brown case.

    AFTER THE REPORT was written, Goodell met with Friel, Pash and several other league executives. Roberts, however, did not attend. At Friel's recommendation, Goodell convened a four-person panel of advisers to consider the evidence collected in the Elliott matter, hear from Elliott himself and make recommendations -- proof, a league source says, that Goodell never had assured Jones that Elliott was in the clear. And so, on June 26 in the NFL offices, the advisory group reviewed witness statements, medical records and text messages exchanged by Elliott, his accuser and others. The panel questioned Friel, but again, Roberts was not invited and didn't have a chance to express her opinion. Friel later testified that she did not know whose decision it was not to invite Roberts. "I've never seen a situation when a league office takes an official position in federal court that they are willfully blind to key facts in their own process and owners tolerate it," says Jeffrey Kessler, the attorney for the players. "Everybody now knows that they suppressed the findings of their own investigation -- and kept their chief investigator on the sidelines -- to get the result that they wanted."

    During the session, former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White asked Friel what she had concluded about the credibility of Elliott's accuser. Friel said she found the accuser not credible on one occasion but credible overall; however, Friel did not bring up the credibility concerns raised by her investigator, Roberts. Under questioning by Kessler, Friel described Roberts' concerns about the accuser's credibility.

    For her part, Friel has privately told colleagues that despite the resources at her disposal -- the Elliott case has cost an estimated $2 million and counting -- she was hamstrung without subpoena power. Her worst fears, and Jones', were coming true. Still, Goodell gave considerable weight to the opinions of the panelists, who unanimously concluded that Elliott deserved to be punished.

    Jones didn't know that Goodell was changing his mind. And he didn't know that Goodell was facing pressure, both from a handful of league executives who felt Elliott should be suspended and from owners wanting Jones to be humbled. Kraft had called Goodell in the summer and, referring to the Elliott case, told the commissioner, "My guy got four games for footballs and there's still nothing on this?"

    Just before the Cowboys' training camp opened in Oxnard, California, Jones told reporters on July 23 there was "absolutely nothing" to the domestic violence accusations against Elliott, a refrain he repeated several days later during Hall of Fame activities. And on Aug. 9, Blank's compensation committee convened a dinner meeting in Manhattan to discuss Goodell's contract; Jones attended via phone. During the session, Jones did not raise any concerns about Goodell's contract extension, sources say.

    (...continued...)
     
  19. J.R.

    J.R. Member

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    (...continued...)

    The next day, Blank called Goodell, telling the commissioner that Jones had participated in the meeting. That's when Goodell told Blank, "He's not going to be too happy with me tomorrow," explaining that Elliott's suspension was coming.

    On Aug. 11, Goodell announced the six-game suspension of Elliott. Jones saw it as a "complete betrayal," a source now says. "An overcorrection" by Goodell, Jones later called it publicly. Privately, Jones seethed to confidants that Goodell hadn't studied the case's many details, and he considered suing the NFL to get the suspension overturned. "Roger blew off his own investigator's conclusion -- it's just patently unfair," Jones told a confidant, a charge that a league source denies. Jones had turned on Goodell, perhaps for good. An ESPN report in mid-September detailed that Jones was impeding progress on Goodell's contract extension. And then, at league meetings a month later, Jones took over a meeting about Goodell's contract, irritating his colleagues by calling himself, more than once, the "ranking owner" and adding, "I'm going to be a pain in the ass" to committee members.

    Lockhart has insisted that Roberts' recommendation that she did not believe Elliott should be suspended had been communicated to Goodell. But on Oct. 30, at another hearing over Elliott's suspension before U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla, NFL lawyer Paul Clement suggested that it didn't matter because of the broad authority Goodell has over player discipline. Failla asked, "Would it not have assisted [Goodell] in determining whether punishment were appropriate to hear from the very person that had been tasked with interviewing this very key witness?"

    "I don't know that it would," Clement replied.

    To Jones and to Elliott's lawyers, Clement's position was proof that Goodell had failed to obtain a critical fact before handing down punishment -- permissible under the CBA but fundamentally unfair to Elliott. It didn't matter: On Nov. 9, Elliott's six-game suspension was upheld by a federal appeals court, sending him to the sideline, after more than two months of appeals, and escalating the anger and determination of the league's most powerful owner.

    A LONG-HELD assumption has been that Goodell wants another long-term deal. Those who have discussed the contract situation with him have described him as "furious" and "emboldened" at the notion of accepting a deep pay cut after making the owners a lot of money over the years, watching their teams' valuations skyrocket and taking many bullets for them. ESPN has reported that he asked in August for a compensation package of about $49 million a year, if every incentive is met, plus use of a private jet for life and health care for life for his family. But most owners expect him to land in the range of $40 million a year. If owners decide to squeeze him too hard, he might walk away. He knows that there's no clear successor, which is both a failing on his part and a source of leverage.

    The owners, though, have considered other successors. A confidant of one owner reached out to gauge whether Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, would be interested in running the NFL, to which Silver immediately said no. Owners have also considered looking to the International Olympic Committee for someone with global experience to grow the game -- or even installing the 76-year-old Tagliabue for a year while a committee searched for the ideal successor. Jones has told confidants that he has his own candidate in mind, which Jones has publicly denied. Few owners are interested in allowing Jones to essentially handpick the next commissioner. Even so, Jones has vowed, sources say, to make Goodell's life miserable. "Jerry's message to Roger was 'I run this league. You better get with it,'" a senior league executive says. "This is about power and control, not the contract. That's all white noise."

    That's why, no matter how often some team executives say not to underestimate Jones, and no matter how frustrated many owners are with the state of the league, the support to remove Goodell doesn't seem to be there. Jones has the Redskins' Dan Snyder and a handful of other owners on his side; there are a dozen or so owners who just want to extend Goodell and get the story out of the headlines; and the rest don't approve of Goodell's performance, not because they agree with Jones but because they believe Goodell has empowered him to a fault, especially given the ugly situation with two relocated franchises drawing small crowds in Los Angeles. "Switching commissioners is like switching from an iPhone to a Samsung," one ownership source says. "Do my pictures transfer? Do my contacts? Does my music? In the end, why take the risk?"

    It's Goodell who now seems more willing to take risks, as if he realizes he has less to lose than before. He defied many owners, including Jones, and many league business executives by refusing to back a mandate that all players stand for the national anthem. His relationship with the union and some players has improved this fall; he is not merely serving as the puppet of the owners, as players have long suspected. A day after Outside the Lines reported that, in an owners-only meeting in New York, Texans owner Bob McNair said, "We can't have the inmates running the prison," McNair released a statement insisting that he was referring to league executives as inmates, not the players, drawing skepticism. According to sources, McNair asked Goodell to publicly back him up. Goodell refused.

    If Goodell does re-sign, nobody knows exactly how long he will serve. "There's always a risk that people stay too long, and I don't want to be in that category," he said at a Bloomberg conference in early November. Some of the tension, sources say, has been over a severance package that could approach $100 million -- should either Goodell or the owners choose to end the contract early. Few owners want a new commissioner before the expiration of the CBA in 2021; any replacement would have to repair the damaged relationship with the players' union by giving away concessions that the owners prize. Goodell is already beginning to duplicate his most valuable contribution to the 2011 CBA deal: unifying the owners en masse against the union. Pash has advised the owners in meetings to prepare for a bloody and bitter battle in four years -- a fitting possible capstone to the tumultuous Goodell era. "I'm here for you through that," Goodell has told some owners. "After that, you guys should start having a conversation."

    ON A SUNDAY afternoon in mid-November, three days after Elliott began serving his suspension, Jerry Jones walked onto the field at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta for a game between his Cowboys and Arthur Blank's Falcons. Blank stood about 20 yards from Jones. The anger and suspicion were unmistakable. It had been only a few days since Blank effectively fired Jones as compensation committee ombudsman, after Jones, through an attorney, accused him of misleading owners about the details of Goodell's extension, a charge Blank denied. After he was removed, Jones told Blank, "You're making a big mistake."

    Nothing more needed to be said on game day. It is customary for the owner of the home team to greet the owner of the visiting team, but as this fall has revealed, this is not a season for tradition. The two men never spoke, opting instead in the coming days for power plays on letterhead: Blank's compensation committee accused Jones of "conduct detrimental to the league's best interests"; Jones asked for a special owners-only meeting to discuss Goodell's new deal.

    A few hours after the 27-7 Falcons rout, Jones emerged from the Cowboys' locker room, looking drained but sounding defiant. Even some of his closest advisers aren't on board with the war he is raging. In a black suit and black cowboy boots, Jones found himself in the middle of a mob of cameras and reporters. He spoke quietly, saying that he wanted to "do everything I can" to help the league improve and that "this is one of those times" when "you need to adjust." He was asked, point-blank, whether he thought Goodell should continue as commissioner.

    "I'm not going to discuss that right now," Jones said.

    A few minutes later, he moved down a long hallway at the bottom of the stadium, surrounded by four security guards. He walked with a slight limp. He said nothing. Everyone cleared out of his way, and when he exited the stadium into a cold and stiff wind, a crowd of Cowboys fans lining a fence cheered. Jones stopped, and for a moment he seemed unsure of where to go: right toward the fans or left toward the limo? Jones stood, a man alone in so many ways. He turned left, away from the fans. The cheering ceased. The idling limo pulled away. A gate was raised, opening a route out of the stadium. A police escort flared its siren, and Jones was off, with nobody knowing exactly how far he'll go.​
     

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