The NFL is a cultural colossus. Could its mounting legal woes leave a mark?
A month before the NFL’s Las Vegas Super Bowl, a different sort of high-stakes football contest unfolded in the Supreme Court of Nevada. That’s where the league was called to defend itself in a lawsuit from Jon Gruden – the disgraced NFL coach who stepped down from the Raiders after being exposed for sending racist, sexist and homophobic emails for nearly a decade while in the employ of ESPN. The revelation cost Gruden more than half the balance of his $100m Raiders contract, the league’s highest coaching salary at the time, and it’s long been the coach’s contention that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell conspired to make him a pariah in the sport.
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The Super Bowl is as much a celebration of the NFL as it is a stamp of its hold on the national zeitgeist and expanding influence abroad. (On Friday the league announced it will play its first ever regular-season game in Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium.) But a flurry of recent lawsuits threaten to pierce the league’s aura of invincibility. Doubtless for some, the litigation is evidence of a successful enterprise (from Microsoft to Trump Inc), part and parcel of a larger money game. On top of that, the NFL product has proven effective in distracting fans from alleged transgressions. Before they realize what hit them, the league’s nuclear-grade legal team has either swept the matter under the rug or worn down the opposition. It’s a playbook that’s carried the league for more than 50 years. And yet one can’t help but wonder if this Goliath isn’t a stone’s throw away from buckling.
At his invitation-only state of the league news conference on Monday, Goodell took satisfaction in seeing four coaches of color hired this offseason, raising the overall total to nine – an NFL record. But challenges to Goodell’s diversity record remain as present as ever. He has yet to deal with Brian Flores, the former Miami Dolphins head coach – who filed a class-action suit against the league in 2022 accusing the NFL of practicing systemic racial discrimination in collusion with a handful of teams. Steve Wilks, the mastermind behind San Francisco’s Super Bowl defense, joined the lawsuit in solidarity with Flores – who found work as Minnesota’s defensive coordinator despite his legal action, which the NFL is trying to force back into arbitration.
Goodell didn’t really have any solutions for the lack of diversity in NFL Media’s own newsroom either – a perennial concern of Hall of Fame football writer Jim Trotter, who is suing the league for essentially firing him for continuing to raise this question. Trotter isn’t covering the big game this year, so it fell to Kansas City radio reporter Darren Smith to do the honors. While posting his question, Smith further shared that Larry Campbell, a longtime league TV producer, had died over the weekend, leaving NFL Media without any full-time Black employees in its newsroom. “I will tell you that for the first time, 51% of our employees across the league, across the network, across all of our media platforms, not including players, are either people of color or women,” said the commissioner, unmoved. “First time ever. So progress is being made.”
Responding to the exchange in a post on X (formerly Twitter), Trotter wrote that Goodell “simply doesn’t care or doesn’t want to know”.
This month will also mark a year since 10 former players sued the commissioner and the league’s disability plan. Among other things, the lawsuit accuses the league, which agreed to a landmark concussion settlement in 2015, of systematically denying benefits, misinterpreting and falsifying the results of medical examinations and of the plan’s guidelines. According to a recent Washington Post expose, the tactics may well save the league more than $700m in payouts. While the league has paid out more than $1.2bn in disability claims, it’s also suing in hopes of a refund from its insurers, who contend that 40% of the 1,663 former players who have received payments may have overstated or even feigned their symptoms.
But the lawsuit that could prove most damaging to the league is Gruden’s. Ever since his 2021 filing, the league has worked overtime to have the case thrown out, asserting that Gruden’s coaching contract only entitled him to resolve this matter through arbitration. Gruden countered that he didn’t know his employment agreement with the Raiders meant that he had to comply with the league’s constitution and its provisions, which include arbitration. Linda Marie Bell, one of three justices who heard these arguments in January, didn’t necessarily buy that given Gruden’s long and nepotistic pro football pedigree – but she also didn’t buy the idea of Goodell being impartial enough to preside over the allegations against him, or find another unbiased adjudicator upon recusing himself.
The justices are expected to issue an opinion in the coming months. It’s worth noting that Gruden isn’t just out to recoup lost wages; he wants all of the league’s internal communication to come out in discovery and reveal how the league really does business. He wants to burn down Goodell’s house.
And yet: you can see how the NFL might be inclined to shrug this heaping docket off as just another series of court battles along the pathway of power. After all, lawsuits are how the league absorbed its competition and cornered the media and merchandising market on the way to becoming a cultural colossus. But no winning streak lasts forever. The question isn’t when the NFL will lose a big case, but how badly.
