DeflateGate: Roger Goodell’s shrewd PR Hail Mary
DeflateGate is, unequivocally, the most bogus, farcical and trumped up scandal in NFL history – and most likely in all of sports. The fact that a story about under-inflated footballs has maintained legs for over seven months is a testament to both the league’s popularity and control of the media. It is also, perhaps, the shrewdest public relations move that league commissioner Roger Goodell could have ever drawn up.
This isn’t to say that Goodell comes out of this whole saga cleanly. He, and the league as a whole, look like fools. However, his willingness to dig in and fight tooth and nail – to be a Sheriff protecting The Shield – falls right in line with just about every other hard-nosed line of punishment the enforcer has governed during his tenure. Pac-Man Jones, Michael Vick, BountyGate, SpyGate – The Sheriff tends to rule with an iron fist. DeflateGate, on the whole, is a giant smokescreen meant to obfuscate actual problems surrounding the league.
Think back to the last half decade of offseason NFL narratives: a lockout in 2011, a referees strike, the CTE lawsuit, the Washington Redskins’ saga, and Ray Rice caught on camera punching his fiancee in the face and then dragging her out of an elevator like a rolled up carpet. Toss in Adrian Peterson’s child abuse scandal, Ray McDonald, and the yearly handful of drug, alcohol and abuse arrests (of players, personnel and owners) and it’s a growing blacklist. The NFL is a well-fortified billion dollar industry, but each story is a chink in the armor.
And yet, of all these pockmarks, an investigation revolving around (literal) hot air has dominated the headlines for the better part of a year.
Imagine that you are a kindergarten teacher. In class you choose to teach the following lessons for the week: how teachers, students and workers are properly rewarded for the work they perform; what happens when you take too many bumps on the head; why it’s not okay to hit people; and how playing on the playground with flat balls is unethical. The first four lessons combined take one day. The final unit stretches across the remaining four days. It makes no sense.
In the real world (see: a land far, far away from the NFL, and boisterous sports and social media) the amount of air in a football does not matter. It’s less important than labor relations. Less important than brain damage. And well down the priority totem from domestic violence.
However, the NFL has constructed its own reality, and it is in the fantasy realm that Roger Goodell thrives. After several years of minor missteps (at least in the way of media coverage), Goodell finally made a colossal error when he suspended Rice for only two games before later reneging. He was backed into a corner, all but caught in a lie over whether the league saw the Rice footage before TMZ, and was losing credibility at an expedited rate.
Enter DeflateGate and the savviness of Goodell’s team.
By drawing a bead on New England, Goodell immediately split his critics. Given their successes, past indiscretions and general unwillingness to play ball with the media the Patriots have become bad boys of the NFL. They’re easy to hate. And while he flubbed the Rice ruling (everyone can agree that domestic violence has no place in society), digging in on New England muddied the waters. Who’s the a-hole? Is it Goodell? Is it this team of accused cheaters? We live in a polarized world and must choose a side; no middle ground is acceptable.
Furthermore, Goodell went after the league’s most marketable star, and a player who will likely end up being the face of this NFL generation (it’s either Brady or Manning). For the naysayers, it was the perfect target: the man with the four rings, supermodel wife and perfect jawline wasn’t so squeaky clean. The accusations fueled this societal (and sociopathic social media) desire to topple whoever sits atop their respective field. Build up only to bring down.
On the other side, there are the proud, boisterous Pats fans. They hate us, ’cause they ain’t us. A collective group that is so strong in the media, and is so used to winning that it has enough influence to keep fighting the good fight and attacking Goodell. They keep the ball rolling and, depending on your side, sound either like bunch of witch hunters or a logical group of myth busters.
It was a calculated gamble, and it has played out well. If integrity was the central focus for Goodell and his league, then the Atlanta Falcons would have received more national publicity for siphoning artificial crowd noise into the Georgia Dome. Or there would’ve been more of a stink over Ray Farmer texting the sidelines during games. Alas, Cleveland and Atlanta don’t quite move the needle like the defending Super Bowl champions.
After watering down his detractors, Goodell’s next great move was to string DeflateGate along and eventually tie it up in litigation. What started out as a case about under-inflated footballs soon transitioned into broken phones, paid-off fall guys, intentionally leaked misinformation and an examination of labor laws. DeflateGate has more twists and cover-ups than Watergate.
And with those twists come the fact that the case is near impossible to follow. Football PSI is one thing – everyone has pumped up bike tires or filled up a football with air. But reading an “independent” investigator’s report, monitoring dialogue between the NFL and NFLPA, and digesting the legalese that spews from both parties has graduated DeflateGate well beyond the comprehension of the casual fan. It’s now less about a playoff game, and more about legal posturing.
This whole saga is, essentially, now a pissing match between Brady and Goodell. And that’s just where Goodell wants it.
He’s no longer the guy who screwed up the Rice hearing, but rather a hard-nosed enforcer fighting for integrity of the sport. His league no longer has domestic and child abuse charges as its main narratives. CTE and the Redskins take backseats to under-inflated footballs. All the issues that truly matter in a world away from sports – the ones that the NFL has bungled so badly – have receded to 24-hour coverage of whether one man will sit on a bench for one month due to his alleged part in playing with soft balls.
Goodell might come out of DeflateGate with egg on his face – he surely won’t leave unscathed – but it’ll be the face of a guy who tried to go too hard in the paint with his iron, dictatorial fist. Not a guy who, when actual societal issues arise, has shown a penchant for dropping the ball.
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