On the opening night of the NBA season, the league commissioner and the executive director of the players association sat together on national TV and talked to the studio hosts, to the public and to each other.
In doing so, they put their NFL counterparts to shame.
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There had to be a sizable portion of the sports-watching population — especially the increasingly-mutinous NFL fan base — that asked itself, “Do Roger Goodell and DeMaurice Smith even talk to each other off-camera, behind the scenes, one-on-one?’’
They sure don’t talk to the public very much. And if there ever was a time that their faces need to be seen and their voices heard — in the middle of twin crises that cloak the sport in shame — it’s now.
Showing their faces separately would be a milestone, all things considered. Together, it looks like it’s too much to ask. How often has it happened since the 2011 lockout ended? When was the last time between then and now? None comes to mind. A brief search comes up with nothing.
They’re adversaries, and understandably so. Smith certainly has made justifiable appearances in the last couple of years to contest Goodell’s actions.
But NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and Michele Roberts are adversaries, too. They talked about it together on the TNT set Tuesday night in Cleveland. They have a new labor agreement to hash out. Both have separately spoken out about what they want, and it isn’t necessarily the same things.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver (Getty)
Yet on camera that night, the two scrunched in next to the "Inside the NBA" crew, and answered their questions for more than 10 minutes. About the labor contract. About dividing up all that money fairly while staying in the fans’ good graces. About pulling the All-Star Game out of Charlotte. About player activism and the national anthem. Even about capitalizing on the NFL’s falling ratings.
They were accountable in front of a wide audience. The questions they took were not softballs. And appearances count. A lot.
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Lack of appearances count a lot, too. Right now, they’re counting against the leadership of the NFL and, to a less-publicized but just as crucial extent, of the players union.
Goodell caught the break of his life last Wednesday, when his press conference at the end of the owners’ meeting took place before the Josh Brown documents detailing his domestic violence history went public later that day.
The one time Goodell has spoken on the record about it since then was to a British reporter, in the middle of a spot intended to promote the latest London game, involving Brown’s team.
This is yet another nightmare for the NFL — and even qualifying it as “yet another” one diminishes the disgrace this is, since they went through the exact same one two years ago and put on a massive pretense that they were going to get it right next time. (“I will get it right,’’ Goodell said in that infamous 2014 press conference.)
At the same time, Smith has not uttered a public word about the “60 Minutes” report on financial advisors who have ripped off NFL players for tens of millions of dollars, even though those advisors were, and are, registered with and certified by, the union.
No one from the union spoke on camera to CBS for that report. No one has spoken for the record since it aired Sunday.
So sure, if Goodell and Smith are struggling that badly to be accountable individually, what are the odds of getting them in the same place, on camera and in front of microphones, for the good of their sport, their clientele and the public?
It can be done. It now has been done … in a league and a sport that isn’t hemorrhaging credibility and trust, the way the NFL is.