The man in the
Journal profile is purposeful, but also seemingly a bit dim and definitely implausibly, laughably cosseted. The paper follows him from one important lunch— always with powerful men, always in private clubs—to another; a brief moment spent listening to a call on a domestic violence hotline leaves Goodell in need of "a stiff drink." The impression left, throughout, is that of some chromosomally atypical late-Hapsburg Princeling very suddenly confronted with the need to assume a difficult military command. Goodell delegates everything, and understands shockingly little; he is assertive and confident, but almost poignantly ignorant. He's in charge, and nothing else.
Over and over again, Goodell seems unprepared for and startled by not just his own league's startling upreparedness to confront complicated problems, but by
everything; the entire non-NFL world is somehow a troubling surprise. We might as well assume that Goodell wants to do good work in making the NFL, as he put it in October, "
a leader in the domestic-violence space." But as he appears only to have noticed that domestic violence exists sometime during the preseason, this may take a while.
