According to a report, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is preparing to demand $2 million from Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones. Apparently, Jones will be forced to pay $2 million because Jones’ fellow NFL franchise owners are upset with the way Jones has acted over the past eight months. Not to mention, Goodell and Jones have a longstanding feud.
In 2017, Goodell’s contract as NFL Commissioner was set to expire. When the NFL Compensation Committee began the process of renewing Goodell’s contract, Jones attempted to halt the negotiations. In October 2017, Jones “took over” a conference call with his fellow owners and asked them to stop the extension even though the NFL had already voted to begin negotiations with Goodell in May 2017. By November 2017, Jones threatened to sue the NFL and the Compensation Committee if Goodell was extended. In the process, the NFL had to pay lawyers to assess the legal threats. Also in November, Jones sent a letter to every NFL owner requesting their attendance at a “special league meeting” where Jones, allegedly, was going to talk the owners out of Goodell’s extension. At one point, things got so bad that the NFL owners considered a “nuclear option,” which involved taking the Dallas Cowboys away from Jones. Instead, the NFL sent a formal letter to Jones informing him that his conduct was “detrimental to the league’s best interests.” Despite Jones’ protesting, Goodell’s five-year contract extension was approved in December 2017.
Also in 2017, Jones forced the NFL to incur costs in the legal proceedings surrounding the suspension of the Dallas Cowboy’s star running back, Ezekiel Elliott. As we have previously covered, the legal dispute over Elliott’s suspension began in July 2016, when Elliott’s ex-girlfriend accused him of domestic violence. After a yearlong investigation, Goodell called Jones, on August 9, 2017, to inform him that Elliott would be suspended for six games. According to a report, Jones was less than pleased. Jones said to Goodell, “I’m gonna come after you with everything I have . . . If you think Bob Kraft came after you hard, Bob Kraft is a [explicit] compared to what I’m going to do.” Elliott’s suspension was officially announced August 11, 2017. Jones and Elliott then fought the suspension through three different courts and got three reprieves that kept Elliott on the field for the first half of the 2017 season. However, in November 2017, Elliot accepted the six-game suspension and withdrew his final appeal. According to the report, Jones will be asked to pay for the fees that the NFL incurred during legal proceedings surrounding Elliott’s suspension and appeal.
If the $2 million fine is imposed, it will be the highest amount of money that an NFL owner has ever paid to the NFL. The closest was a $1 million fine, imposed twice: once on former San Francisco 49ers owner, Eddie DeBartolo, for the part he played in a Louisiana gambling scandal in the late 1990s, and the second was imposed on the New England Patriots, after the “Deflategate” investigation in May 2015.