The NFL's Owners Think Roger Goodell Makes Them Richer. He Doesn't.

Roger Goodell still has a job because the NFL makes a lot of money. This was more or less explicitly stated in ESPN's in-depth report on the NFL's extraordinary efforts to bury Spygate. "The NFL's annual revenue, racing toward $15 billion, is the most important metric that Goodell's bosses use to judge his performance, several owners and executives say," wrote Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham.

It's hardly a surprise that team owners only care about money. But the owners seem to assign Goodell a great deal of credit for this financial boom, despite the fact that Goodell has little to do with it. He has simply been an opportunist coasting behind the jetstream of a global sports boom.

Goodell, appointed commissioner in 2006, has received the lion's share of credit for league revenues increasing 60 percent, from $6.5 billion in 2007 to $10.5 billion in 2014. But during the same time period, other professional league revenues have increased drastically as well, thanks to the same influx of TV revenue the NFL has received. In that time, Major League Baseball's revenue rose from $6.1 billion to $9 billion, a 48 percent increase. The NHL's revenue saw an even greater percentage rise than the NFL's, with a 2014 haul of $3.7 billion, up 68 percent since 2007. It's hard to say, based on league revenue alone, that Goodell harnessed revenue streams on which other commissioners failed to capitalize.

Looking outside North America sheds additional light onto Goodell's relative success. According to Coventry University's Centre for the International Business of Sport, the total revenue generated by EPL clubs doubled over that same time frame, from £1.5 billion to £3 billion. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who credits EPL Chief Executive Richard Scudamore for this drastic increase in revenue.

The story holds for UK rugby, Aussie Rules Football, Formula One, FIFA, the IOC, and basically any other sport you can imagine. The story, from country to country, sport to sport, is the same: record revenues. Obviously, this has nothing to do with Roger Goodell and everything to do with the changing television landscape, in which live sports remain the only consistent audience for networks to sell to advertisers, who in turn invest unprecedented money in corporate partnerships and advertisements. It's a global shift, one to which Roger Goodell has as much claim as Al Gore does the internet.

To be fair, Goodell did lead an ownership group that absolutely clobbered the players in the 2011 CBA negotiations, winning more than half of league revenues for owners to pocket and leveling the salary cap. The NFL is the best league in the world when it comes to controlling costs, but how much credit of this goes to Goodell? Much of the framework had already been established by the 2006 CBA, which had already been negotiated when he took the reins.

One would think an ownership group comprised of dozens of billionaires could sift through the financial noise and see Goodell hasn't accomplished any of this on his own, but they apparently haven't. Meanwhile, they continue to give the commissioner credit for things he can't control.