Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches Read Free Page A

credible when he denied knowledge of what was going on in the defensive meeting room.
    Payton had his hand in everything related to his team, and the league found it hard to believe that something that was so blatantly in violation of NFL rules was going on in his building and he had no idea. Paul Hicks, the league’s executive vice president of communications and public affairs, kept a copy of Payton’s book
Home Team: Coaching the Saints and New Orleans Back to Life
, which Payton wrote after the Saints won the Super Bowl. Hicks and one of his staff members went through it and took notes on passages where Payton discusses his attention to detail. Hicks then reported back to Goodell, who had not read the book. The commissioner asked several sources he trusted how likely it was that Payton was in the dark while Williams and the defensive players were setting bounties on some of the biggest names in the league. The conclusion was that Payton had to have known what Williams was doing even if he was trying to distance himselffrom Williams, because nothing happened with his football team without his knowledge.
    Payton had requested this second meeting with Goodell. They had spoken on the phone several times. Payton asked if they could get together while Goodell was in Florida attending committee meetings in advance of the league meetings later that month in Palm Beach. But Goodell was going to be tied up with the committees, so Payton arranged to come back to New York the next week. Saints owner Tom Benson was also in the league offices that day but met separately with Goodell. Payton was casually dressed for the occasion in a sport shirt and a pair of slacks. After returning from the men’s room, he settled back into Goodell’s office for another thirty minutes of trying to explain himself. The commissioner was beyond angry. He is a man of principle, an admirable trait passed down from his father. His mission was to make the game safer for the players, and here was Williams running a system that encouraged players to hurt other players; players accused of committing unforgivable player-on-player crimes when they were supposed to be a fraternity that played hard but clean; and the head coach, a Super Bowl winner, not stopping it. Other than players or coaches betting on games, which would destroy the integrity of the league, it doesn’t get much worse than players trying to hurt one another in a game that is already ultraviolent. It was now clear to the league that the Saints’ strategy was to pin the blame on Williams, who had left after the 2011 season.
    Payton couldn’t have felt good as he looked around Goodell’s corner office, which overlooked Fifty-First Street and Park Avenue. It’s a big office, just about as big as the one he had at 280 Park, and plenty large enough to have a desk on one side and a conference table all the way across the room. There is a big screen television to the right of a desk surrounded by photos and books. There’s a collection of footballs. On one wall is a copy of the
Congressional Record
. Goodell’s father, Charles Goodell, was a congressman from upstate New York when he was appointed by Governor NelsonRockefeller to fill a U.S. Senate seat after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He took office two months after Kennedy’s death. Goodell was a Republican. Kennedy was a Democrat. As Kennedy’s replacement, Goodell angered President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew with his opposition to the Vietnam War. The
Congressional Record
means a lot to Roger Goodell. It contained the original copy of Bill S. 3000, sponsored by Charles Goodell, which proposed an end to the funding for the war.
    The administration targeted him as a turncoat, a Republican turned liberal. Agnew called him the Christine Jorgensen—famous for a sex change operation from male to female—of the Republican Party. “We’re five boys; we’re a pretty tight-knit group,” Roger Goodell said.