Super Bowl 2023: It's not just in the coaching ranks that NFL has diversity issues. Roger Goodell gave voice to it with a lame answer

Over the course of his 49-minute question-and-answer session this week in Phoenix, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell spoke in detail about a variety of topics.

He touched on the league’s international foray into Germany. How the new Thursday night package on Amazon Prime impacted viewership. How 47 of the 50 most-watched television programs on traditional over-the-air networks in 2022 were NFL games, and two others were NFL events. How the number of player concussions was up, but the number of injuries overall was down.

But when it came to an issue Goodell proclaims to care about — diversity and inclusion at all levels of league power, at the team level and beyond — he suddenly didn’t have answers.

He offered tired platitudes, the same kind that have been offered to Black people for decades.

“There’s progress, and we’re pleased to see progress, but it’s never enough,” he said.

“We believe diversity makes us stronger."

Yawn.

Midway through the event, Jim Trotter, the veteran reporter and NFL Media analyst, asked Goodell a similar question to the one he asked at the same session last year, about the fact that there are zero Black executives in the NFL Media newsroom and zero on the Network’s news desk, meaning the editors who make decisions about coverage.

Trotter’s question was detailed and fair. He noted to Goodell that the commissioner has said the NFL’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion extends beyond coaching staffs and team front offices and that while the league’s own data says 60 to 70% of NFL players are Black, among those who decide how players are covered by the league-owned media arm, there is no one who looks like them at the table to influence content and how their stories are told.

Just so we’re all on the same page, NFL Media is owned and operated by the NFL. The league offices in New York set NFL Media’s budget for the year. Roger Goodell is the commissioner of the NFL, ostensibly responsible for everything that falls under the league’s umbrella.

Goodell’s first words to Trotter were these: “I am not in charge of the newsroom.”

So let me get this straight: When it came time to answer for the woefully inadequate hiring practices of NFL Media, the NFL commissioner — a man who reportedly earned nearly $130 million to be the face of the league over a two-year period (2019-2021) — started by essentially saying “not my job” and then stuttered, stammered, got defensive and tried to passively-aggressively shame one of the finest sports reporters of this or any generation by questioning the veracity of the facts?

The lack of accountability is astonishing, the response utterly embarrassing.

Trotter doesn’t want the applause and isn’t thrilled that he’s receiving so much attention for doing what a journalist should do by holding a powerful person to account, but the fact is he put his livelihood on the line in that moment. In a time when copying and pasting text messages from agents or executives with no pushback and no context — what we usually call public relations — qualifies one as an “NFL insider,” Trotter showed how the job is supposed to be done.

As he wrapped his question, Trotter quoted writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin when he said, “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.”

Goodell was sure to highlight the accelerator program the NFL has instituted, in which aspiring head coaches and general managers get face-to-face time with team owners, and trumpeted the fact that new Tennessee Titans general manager Ran Carthon met team owner Amy Adams Strunk through the program. That is a plus, but Carthon wasn’t exactly an unknown commodity; he’s a former player who spent nearly 15 years working up the ladder before Tennessee hired him.

Beyond that, Goodell mentioned vague ideas such as looking into things, gathering facts and wanting to see change — empty words that aren’t actually actions.

It’s 2023. The NFL’s media arm has gone years without a Black person in upper management, and currently there are no Black people in the day-to-day decision-making about what’s discussed on the league-owned network. Asked when that will change, the man who commissions the league basically shrugged.

Baldwin also once said this: “You always told me it takes time. It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time. My uncle’s time. My brothers’ and my sisters’ time. My nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your progress?”