Roger Goodell’s spineless response to Saints scandal is perfectly on brand

Goodell has failed at his most important job, again

Roger Goodell isn’t going to do anything about the New Orleans Saints. He said as much on Monday night. He took the stage hours after the Associated Press dropped a bombshell report about the lengths to which the Saints went to assist the Archdiocese of New Orleans during a sexual abuse scandal in the church — including helping to craft the church’s media messaging and seemingly ensuring some clergy wouldn’t face charges.

In a time-honored tradition of dodging difficult questions, Goodell somehow found a way during his state of the NFL presentation on Monday night to praise the Saints, while adding he had no interest in looking into the organization.

“Mrs. Benson and the Saints are very involved in this community and they are great corporate citizens,” he said. “Mrs. Benson takes all these matters seriously, particularly for someone with the Catholic Church connections that she does. … This is a matter of the FBI. Local law enforcement — nationally and otherwise — are involved with this. Mrs. Benson first mentioned this back in 2018 in the context of this. She’s made multiple comments about this. Her transparency of the emails are out there. I leave it to them, but I am confident that they are playing nothing more than a supportive role to help be more transparent in circumstances like this.”

To be clear: The “supportive role” was being in constant communication with the archbishop of New Orleans to help him damage control while releasing the names of clergy members with credible allegations of sexual assault, whom the church had intentionally hidden until they were found out. The “support” was media training the archbishop to handle the local media, with one executive saying the Saints and the church were “on the same team,” with the other team being law enforcement and victims of sexual abuse.

Goodell knows that the FBI and law enforcement aren’t investigating the New Orleans Saints, which gives him the perfect justification to act like nothing happened. The only potential criminality that took place with the NFL team is if they colluded with New Orleans prosecutors to remove certain clergy members from the investigation, and that’s a mammoth stretch based on what was released in the emails between Saints brass and the church.

However, the bar for punishment shouldn’t simply be criminality. Especially when it comes to team ownership and management. It’s understandable that as judge, jury, and executioner of the NFL Goodell chooses not to pick these fights when it comes to players, because suspensions before criminal convictions will always be appealed by the NFLPA — and eventually they would be overturned.

When it comes to owners and conduct detrimental to the NFL it’s a different story, and Goodell is knowingly choosing not to enforce the Constitution and Bylaws of the NFL in deciding to leave this alone. The Saints are given money through the NFL’s profit-sharing agreement, and its employees were intimately involved in assisting the church during the sexual abuse scandal. So, by extension, every single fan who bought merchandise, tickets, paid for streaming services — everything, all unwittingly funded the Saints assisting the church in shaping its message.

Furthermore, Goodell is explicitly lying when he says “Her transparency of the emails are out there,” referring to Gail Benson. The Saints have been fighting in court for five years to suppress the release of emails between members of the Saints organization and the Catholic church. The “transparency” only began when courts sided with the Associated Press to release the emails, rather than the Saints who said they were private and not for the public.

If this was such an altruistic pursuit; if all the Saints wanted to do was help another pillar of the community — then why did they go to such lengths to try and stop information going public? Especially after the church itself said it was releasing the names of clergy members to be transparent about the scandal.

This could all be simply part of a plan by Goodell to get through Super Bowl week and then deal with this issue, but seemingly the plan is to ignore it. It’s on every football fan to ensure this doesn’t vanish from view and get swept under the rug, because this is a serious scandal that warrants more attention than the NFL commissioner is giving it.