Tonight's NFL Kickoff Can't Come Soon Enough for Roger Goodell

by Julian Spivey
The NFL season finally kicks off tonight when the Pittsburgh Steelers take on the New England Patriots after what was seemingly the longest offseason in the history of professional football.

The NFL needs football games worse than ever and the fans want to see football games worse than ever. This isn’t because of our addiction to football as a country, which occasionally seems out of control, but because nearly all of the NFL talk during the offseason has been negative and to the point of exhaustion and even nausea.

“Deflategate,” the controversy between the NFL and the defending Super Bowl champion Patriots deflating footballs, became the talk of the NFL offseason and in the process perhaps the most overblown story in the long history of the NFL. The fact that it became a story at all is pretty ridiculous, but the way in which NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell so thoroughly screwed it up as he has become accustomed to doing with nearly every big controversy involving the sport is what truly turned it into the nightmare for everyone involved that it became.

It almost feels or seems like Roger Goodell can’t get out of his own way when it comes to leading the world’s most profitable professional sports league. Goodell has shown to be almost inept at his position, but is still hanging on because it doesn’t seem like there’s anything that can be done to quell the continually booming popularity of the National Football League. Forgive the harshness here, but I once told someone that Goodell could rape and kill children and the league’s popularity wouldn’t even falter. That’s how insatiable the country’s passion for the sport of football has become. Sometimes it seems a little unhealthy when the popularity of the game doesn’t even slightly dwindle when so many of its players are involved in physical assault cases or the leader of the entire system looks like the world’s most inept and clueless dictator.

And, this is why kickoff for tonight’s season opening game in Foxboro, Mass. couldn’t come at a better time. The cluelessness of the NFL was on full display last week when Judge Richard Berman nullified the NFL’s four game suspension of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in the “Deflategate” scandal case because he determined that the NFL really didn’t have enough evidence or cause to suspend Brady for the number of games in which a player testing positive for performance enhancing drugs would receive.

The NFL had no real evidence whatsoever that Brady was involved in the Patriots deflating footballs and still handed down a suspension of a quarter of the season, because Goodell can do whatever the hell he feels like because he’s judge and jury of the league. This is a sign of a broken system and it’s been broken during almost the entirety of Goodell’s reign and still nobody seems to truly care because … football.

That’s why the NFL needs to kickoff right away. Because as soon as that first ball is put in the air tonight everybody will go back to forgetting about Goodell’s inability to run a league in an impartial and fair way just like they forgot last season that he was seemingly OK with players knocking their significant others unconscious.

Goodell is and has been out of control as commissioner of the NFL for quite some time and should be forced to resign his position or be fired, but because the league continues to thrive and the majority of fans don’t care about anything that’s not going on in between those white lines he’ll continue to do things his way – the absolutely wrong way. 

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