The top official of the National Football League seems to be quite insulated from scandal in his millionaire palace on the Maine coast.
Amid a married NFL coach caught canoodling with a married reporter and a team owner nabbed on prostitution charges, Roger Goodell is silent.
USA Today’s Jarrett Bell, considered one of the most connected and influential media voices on the NFL beat, is calling on Prouts Neck Roger to come out of hiding.
Not that anyone can necessarily blame the league’s commissioner for being afraid to escape the solitude of the gold coast in Scarborough, Maine.
But Bell says in Thursday’s column that Prouts Neck Roger has to say something – anything.
The sooner the better.
The season opener kicks off in just days. The clock is ticking.
The coarsening culture in the power structure of the National Football League requires a major address, a state of the union, as it were, from Prouts Neck Roger.
Goodell is weighing discipline against 49ers’s billionaire owner Jed York, who was recently arrested for hiring a prostitute in an Ohio trailer park.
“It’s being reviewed under the personal conduct policy,” Goodell told reporters at league meetings Wednesday in Atlanta. “We will do that. When there’s something to be reported, we’ll do so.”
Then he was off to relax on the Maine shore, keeping his own counsel on whether it’s about time to address the league’s man vs. woman culture.
Besides York there’s Pats Coach Mike Vrabel, who still hasn’t addressed head on his scandalous affair with Dianna Russini.
NFL owners earlier this week dealt with a number of league issues at their annual meeting, which wrapped up before lunch was even served.
But not one word was uttered – publicly, at least – about York or Vrabel.
“Now, if Roger Goodell can only operate with such speed in closing the case on Jed York,” Bell wrote Thursday.
Team owners operate under a conduct policy that allegedly holds owners to a “higher standard” than players and others in the NFL.
As for coaches’ misconduct, the league apparently leaves that eventuality up to morality clauses in their contracts.
So far nothing from the Pats’ suits under the guise of holding Vrabel accountable.
It’s all in Prouts Neck Roger’s playbook, needing attention.
When the 2026 season’s first game kicks off September 9, featuring the Patriots playing Seattle, will Roger still be holed up in Prouts Neck?
Or will he have called a news conference by then to put his foot down on a professional sport whose practitioners are supposed to be role models for little boys tossing footballs in their backyards?
