In one of the emails in Deadspin's Funbag this week, someone brought up a wacky teacher who'd give students 95s on multiple choice tests if they got every answer wrong. Get one or two right, though, and you'd get your real grade. Obviously, the implied rationale is that if you're able to intentionally get every answer wrong, you have a mastery of the material, and deserve a good grade.
Roger Goodell will make more money doing his job this year than you will make in your entire lifetime. (And by "you" I mean "everyone reading this, myself included.") He is also worse at his job. I say this with complete certainty, despite the fact that I have absolutely no idea how well any of you perform your jobs. Because if you were as bad at your job as Roger Goodell is at his job, you would not have a job. Your place of business would not be able to afford to keep an employee who wrote "Still, tho" on all the annual reports. Or fried the fried chicken with cat urine instead of Crisco.
Which makes me believe his bosses — the NFL owners — are that wacky teacher. And all of Goodell's progressively and impressively shitty statements and decisions — on Tom Brady, on domestic violence, on concussions, on Ray Rice, on Adrian Peterson, on literally anything else he's done in the last three years — are proof to them that he actually knows what he's doing. Because it's so statistically improbable to get everything wrong that it must be intentional. A long con. Maybe, they believe, he's Danny Ocean allowing himself to get made and caught on the casino floor while his crew takes the vault. And, maybe, they're right.
Despite the league and its commissioner having worse p.r. than Jared Fogle, they continue to print money at record rates. Which probably isn't Goodell's doing. A nutless monkey with mouth gout could probably run the NFL at this point. But, they're not 100% certain that it's not his doing, so he keeps his job, and keeps discovering and inventing new layers of shitty.