Roger Goodell's Red-Headed Reign to Continue Through 2019

Roger Goodell will be fining James Harrison for at least another seven seasons.

The NFL's only commissioner since 2006 saw his contract extended through March 2019 by the league's 32 owners Wednesday. While terms of the new deal were not disclosed, Goodell's compensation could exceed the estimated $11 million per year he was earning before the lockout. It's nice work if you can get it.

And I do mean that Goodell has earned it. He managed to get the league through a tenuous labor deal without missing games, something the NBA and David Stern were not able to do last year, even after the NFL set the example. He has presided over a sport that has seen its revenues grow and the value of its 32 teams continually climb, all during a period of American economic strife. And NFL games seem to be breaking their own television ratings records with each passing week.

In an economic and political climate where executive pay remains a hot-button topic, one would be hard-pressed to argue that Goodell hasn't earned it. While his decision to reduce his salary to a single dollar before the 2011 lockout was, in my opinion, more of a PR stunt than legitimate belt-tightening, it did display that his priorities in check, and it may also have taken some of the steam out of the "millionaires vs. billionaires" storyline so often perpetrated by fans and media during periods of labor strife in professional sports. 

Even in his earliest days in the big chair, Goodell assumed a mandate and pursued player accountability with broad strokes of enforcement. The league's controversial Player Conduct Policy might be the centerpiece of the Goodell regime, as he has used it to levy out fines and suspensions to players like Adam "Pacman" Jones, Donte' Stallworth and the late Chris Henry.

And he didn't stop with players; Goodell levied fines against and took away draft picks from the New England Patriots in the wake of the team's "SpyGate" scandal in 2007. While the sufficiency of those penalties was under debate, the severity of six-figure fines and forfeiture of a first-round draft pick was not. Goodell later told NBC that he had destroyed the SpyGate tapes, sending a Nixon-esque message of "Roger knows best" unilateralism that has come to define his leadership.

His latest invention of a "defenseless player" met the league's need to address scrutiny regarding how its teams handle head trauma. While the concept of a world-class athlete as "defenseless" might garner jeers from old-school football fans, the crackdown on certain helmet-to-helmet contact was a positive step in the inevitable direction of making the game safer, if only fractionally so. However, it's fair to say that consistently enforcing those defenseless player penalties is still a work in progress.

While some other leaders would have expended significant political capital on policies like these, Goodell seems to have gained some, or at least recouped it with the acquisition of labor peace on his watch. And while other commissioners have seen their personae come under fire in the eyes of fans and the media, Goodell has managed to maintain a sort of dignified white-collar charisma, even while floating such a dud as the idea of an 18-game regular season to the public.

The truth is that such an expansion could very well happen within the commissioner's tenure, with a slew of other notable edicts to be determined. Goodell is by far the youngest of the four major professional team sports (He'll turn 53 in less than a month; NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, the second-youngest, will turn 60 in June.). Even after this new deal ends, we could be seeing that wispy red hair occupying the league's New York office for a long time, fining and suspending anyone that stands in his way.