The NFL is a cultural colossus. Could its mounting legal woes leave a mark? | Andrew Lawrence

a month before the NFL’s Las Vegas Super Bowl, a different kind of high-stakes football game took place in the Nevada Supreme Court. That’s where the league was called upon to defend itself in a lawsuit from Jon Gruden — the disgraced NFL coach who resigned from the Raiders after being exposed for sending racist, sexist and homophobic emails for nearly a decade while employed by ESPN. The revelation cost Gruden more than half of his $100 million Raiders contract, the highest coaching salary in the league at the time. The coach has long alleged that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell conspired to make him a pariah in the sport.

The Super Bowl is both a celebration of the NFL and a stamp of its hold on the national zeitgeist and growing influence abroad. (On Friday, the league announced it will play its first ever regular-season match in Madrid, at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium.) But a wave of recent lawsuits threatens to shatter the league’s aura of invincibility. For some, the lawsuit is undoubtedly evidence of a successful business (from Microsoft to Trump Inc), an essential part of a larger money game. Additionally, the NFL product has proven effective in distracting fans from perceived violations. Before they realize what hit them, the nuclear division’s legal team has swept the matter under the rug or exhausted the opposition. It is a script that the league has carried for more than 50 years. And yet you wonder if this Goliath isn’t just a stone’s throw from the kink.

At his State of the League news conference on Monday, Goodell was pleased to see four coaches of color hired this offseason, bringing the total to nine — an NFL record. But the challenges to Goodell’s record on diversity remain as present as ever. He has yet to deal with Brian Flores, the former head coach of the Miami Dolphins — who filed a class-action lawsuit against the league in 2022, accusing the NFL of practicing systematic racial discrimination in association with a handful of teams. Steve Wilks, the brains behind San Francisco’s Super Bowl defense, joined the lawsuit in solidarity with Flores — who found work as Minnesota’s defensive coordinator despite his legal action, which the NFL is trying to push back to arbitration.

Goodell also didn’t really have any solutions for the lack of diversity in NFL Media’s own newsroom — a perennial concern of Hall of Fame football writer Jim Trotter, who is suing the league for essentially firing him for continuing to ask the question. Trotter isn’t covering the big game this year, so it fell to Kansas City radio reporter Darren Smith to do the honors. While posting his question, Smith went on to share that longtime league TV producer Larry Campbell had passed away over the weekend, leaving NFL Media without any Black employees in the newsroom. “I will tell you that for the first time, 51% of our employees across the league, across the network and across all of our media platforms, not including players, are people of color or women,” the commissioner said impassively. “First time ever. So progress is being made.”

In response to the exchange, Trotter wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that Goodell “just doesn’t care or doesn’t want to know.”

This month will also mark one year since 10 former players sued the commissioner and the league’s disability plan. The lawsuit accuses the league, which agreed to a historic concussion settlement in 2015, of systematically denying benefits, misinterpreting and falsifying medical exam results and plan guidelines, among other things. According to a recent exposé in the Washington Post, this tactic could save the league more than $700 million in payouts. While the league has paid out more than $1.2 billion in disability claims, it is also suing in hopes of reimbursement from its insurers, who claim that 40% of the 1,663 former players who received payments may have overstated or overstated their symptoms even feigned.

But the lawsuit that could be most damaging to the league is Gruden’s. Since his 2021 filing, the league has been working overtime to have the case dismissed, claiming Gruden’s coaching contract only gave him the right to resolve the matter through arbitration. Gruden countered that he was unaware that his employment contract with the Raiders meant he had to abide by the league’s constitution and its provisions, including arbitration. Linda Marie Bell, one of the three judges who heard those arguments in January, didn’t necessarily buy that, given Gruden’s long and nepotistic professional football history — but she also didn’t buy the idea that Goodell would be impartial enough to hear the charges against him , or find another impartial jury after reproaching himself.

The judges are expected to issue an opinion in the coming months. It’s worth noting that Gruden isn’t just looking to recoup lost wages; he wants all of the league’s internal communications to come out and reveal how the league actually does business. He wants to burn down Goodell’s house.

And yet: You can see how the NFL might be inclined to dismiss this accumulating role as just another round of lawsuits along the path of power. After all, lawsuits are how the league has absorbed its competition and cornered the media and merchandising market on its way to becoming a cultural behemoth. But no winning streak lasts forever. The question isn’t when the NFL will lose a big thing, but how badly.