NFL controversies

• 1. Introduction

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  NFL controversies stretch back to 1921, long before the Super Bowl, before television contracts, before Roger Goodell. What began as disputes over who deserved a championship ribbon in the era of leather helmets has grown into a sprawling collection of scandals involving bounty systems, deflated footballs, videotaped signals, criminal charges against dozens of players, and workplace harassment settlements worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The National Football League is the largest sports league in the world by revenue, and that scale means its controversies carry a particular weight. How did a sport become so dominant that its TV deals alone top fifteen billion dollars, yet remain shadowed at every turn by questions about fair play, player safety, and the conduct of the men who run it? The story behind those questions runs from a small Pennsylvania coal town in 1925 all the way through a courthouse settlement announced in November 2021.

• 2. The 1925 Championship Dispute

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  The Pottsville Maroons entered December 1925 with the best record in the league, having just beaten the Chicago Cardinals on the 6th of that month. Under the rules in place at the time, the NFL title went to whichever team finished the season with the superior record, and Pottsville appeared to have it locked up. Then NFL commissioner Joseph Carr suspended the Maroons and removed them from the league entirely. The reason was an unauthorized exhibition game they had played in Philadelphia, which Carr ruled a violation of the territorial rights belonging to the Frankford Yellow Jackets.

  With Pottsville sidelined, the Cardinals scheduled two additional games against weak opponents, won them both, and emerged with a better record. The league awarded Chicago the championship. Pottsville supporters have argued ever since that the suspension was illegitimate and that the Maroons would have held the superior record had they never been barred. The NFL has investigated the case twice, both times upholding the Cardinals' claim to the title. The Maroons were reinstated the following year, but they never received their championship back.

• 3. Cities, Owners, and Relocation

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  Robert Irsay moved the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in 1984 using a detail that became infamous: he enlisted the moving company Mayflower Transit to carry out the relocation at night, specifically to avoid interference from Maryland State Police and the team's own fans. The city had spent years lobbying for a renovated or replaced Memorial Stadium, and Indianapolis had sweetened the offer by building the Hoosier Dome in 1982. None of that goodwill mattered once the trucks rolled in the dark.

  Twelve years later, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell moved his team to Baltimore, the very city the Colts had abandoned. The compromise that followed became a template for future relocations: Modell could take his franchise to Baltimore, where it became the Ravens, but the Browns name, colors, and history stayed in Cleveland. The Browns returned as an expansion team in 1999. A similar arrangement was later used when the Seattle SuperSonics moved to become the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA, and when the San Jose Earthquakes relocated to become the Houston Dynamo in MLS.

  The St. Louis Rams relocation produced the lengthiest and most acrimonious dispute of the three. Stan Kroenke helped move the Los Angeles Rams from Anaheim to St. Louis in 1995 by purchasing a 30 percent share of the team. By April 2010, as majority stockholder, he said publicly that he would do everything possible to keep the team in St. Louis. In August of that year he bought the Rams outright by exercising a right of first refusal clause in the final minute of bidding, edging out a bid from Shahid Khan. In February 2013, an arbitrator sided with the Rams on a lease clause requiring the team's stadium to rank among the top tier in the league, giving the Rams the ability to shift to a year-to-year arrangement.

  On the 5th of January 2015, Kroenke's group announced plans to build a 70,000-seat stadium in Inglewood, California. In the 2014 season the St. Louis Rams had drawn 86 percent attendance despite a 6-10 record and ten consecutive non-winning seasons. St. Louis countered with a proposed open-air stadium on the north riverfront downtown. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell declared that St. Louis had fallen short by roughly $100 million in its funding plan. On the 12th of January 2016, the NFL approved the relocation by a 30-2 vote. The day after the vote, officials debated removing Kroenke from the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. At a St. Louis Blues game on January 14, Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt III and Blues owner Tom Stillman dropped a puck together as the crowd chanted against Kroenke.

  On the 12th of April 2017, the City of St. Louis, St. Louis County, and the Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority filed a lawsuit against the NFL and all 32 clubs and their owners. After four years of litigation, the parties settled on the 24th of November 2021, for $790 million.

• 4. Bounties, Signals, and Deflategate

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  Buddy Ryan's tenure as Eagles head coach produced one of the earliest documented bounty allegations. In 1989, Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson claimed after a Thanksgiving Day game that Ryan had placed a bounty worth as much as $500 on quarterback Troy Aikman, alongside one on former Eagles kicker Luis Zendejas, who left that game with a concussion from a hit by linebacker Jessie Small. Ryan dismissed the claim as "high school Charlie stuff." The Eagles won both meetings that season, the first 27-0 and the second 20-10, with NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue watching the second game from the stands as fans pelted Cowboys coach Johnson with snowballs, ice, and beer.

  The most consequential bounty scandal came in 2012, when it emerged that the New Orleans Saints had run a slush fund under defensive coordinator Gregg Williams that paid out bonuses for injuring opposing players. The system had operated during Williams's earlier stints in Buffalo and Washington. During the 2011 NFC Divisional Playoff Game against the San Francisco 49ers, filmmaker Sean Pamphilon released audio of Williams telling his players to target running back Kendall Hunter, to go after Kyle Williams because of his history of concussions, to injure Vernon Davis's ankles, and to tear receiver Michael Crabtree's ACL. Commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Williams indefinitely and head coach Sean Payton for the entire 2012 season, while general manager Mickey Loomis received an eight-game suspension and interim head coach Joe Vitt missed the first six games. Linebacker Jonathan Vilma was also suspended for the season. The players' suspensions were later overturned on appeal.

  In 2007, Goodell fined Patriots head coach Bill Belichick a league-record $500,000 and fined the team $250,000 after the Patriots were caught videotaping Jets coaching signals from an unauthorized camera position. New England also lost a first-round draft pick, an episode dubbed Spygate. The league drew additional criticism for destroying the tapes. The Boston Herald published a claim that Belichick had taped a Rams practice before Super Bowl XXXVI, but later printed a retraction saying the paper had been given bad information. Former Rams offensive coordinator Mike Martz later said Goodell had asked him to write a statement saying he was satisfied the Patriots had not cheated, and that Goodell had told him a congressional inquiry under oath would be "terrible for the league."

  Deflategate arrived in January 2015, when the Indianapolis Colts accused the Patriots of underinflating the footballs used during a 45-7 AFC Championship loss. After a five-month investigation, the NFL announced on the 11th of May 2015, that quarterback Tom Brady would be suspended without pay for four games. The Patriots were fined $1 million and forfeited their first-round selection in the 2016 draft and their fourth-round pick in 2017. Judge Richard M. Berman vacated the suspension on the 3rd of September 2015, citing the absence of fairness and due process; the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned that ruling on the 25th of April 2016, by a 2-1 majority. Brady ultimately served the suspension.

• 5. Player Safety and CTE

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  In 2005, pathologist Bennet Omalu found evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brain of former Pittsburgh Steelers player Mike Webster. The NFL initially pressured Omalu to withdraw his findings. The league had created the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee back in 1994, under commissioner Paul Tagliabue, but its response to Omalu's discovery was resistance rather than acknowledgment.

  The consequences of that resistance accumulated over the years that followed. By 2023, the Boston University CTE Center reported finding CTE in 345 out of 376 former NFL players' brains that were examined. A 2018 BU study of the general population found only a single CTE case in 164 autopsies, and that individual had played college football. The suicide of linebacker Junior Seau in 2012 sharpened public concern about the link between player deaths and football-related brain damage. On the 9th of April 2013, a federal court consolidated 222 lawsuits involving 4,100 plaintiffs against the NFL. The league has also received criticism for a 64 percent rise in ACL tears and other serious knee injuries between 2011 and 2013, and for the fines and suspensions it has handed out to players like Lions lineman Ndamukong Suh and Steelers linebacker James Harrison for plays deemed too violent, while simultaneously being accused of failing to protect players from the cumulative damage of ordinary contact.

• 6. Domestic Violence and Workplace Misconduct

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  A database compiled by USA Today in 2014 counted 85 domestic violence arrests among 713 total arrests of NFL players since 2000. On the 8th of September 2014, video released by TMZ Sports showed Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice punching his fiancee and dragging her unconscious from an elevator. The NFL had initially issued a two-game suspension. The backlash from that footage pushed the league to adopt six-game bans as the standard penalty for domestic violence violations.

  In July 2020, The Washington Post published a series of articles reporting that more than 40 former Washington Redskins employees, including office workers and cheerleaders, had been sexually harassed and discriminated against by team owner Dan Snyder and other male executives since at least 2006. That December, reporting revealed that Snyder had settled a separate harassment claim for $1.6 million with a former employee, an incident alleged to have occurred on his private plane while returning from the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2009. An independent investigation led by lawyer Beth Wilkinson concluded in July 2021 that sexual harassment, bullying, and intimidation were commonplace under Snyder's ownership. The NFL fined the team $10 million. On the 28th of July 2022, Snyder testified before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform. A report released that December found that Snyder had given misleading testimony and had paid former employees to keep silent about abuse the report described as commonplace. The report also concluded that the NFL had not protected workers from harassment and abuse.

• 7. Officiating and Rulebook Fallout

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  The Immaculate Reception on the 23rd of December 1972 raised a question that never received a definitive answer: did the ball touch Raiders safety Jack Tatum, Steelers receiver John Fuqua, or both, when they collided with 22 seconds left in an AFC divisional game? Under the rules at the time, if the ball had touched only Fuqua before Franco Harris caught it, the pass would have been illegal. The play stood, the Steelers won, and the debate has continued for decades.

  In 1978, a deliberate fumble by Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler with the Oakland Raiders trailing the San Diego Chargers 20-14 in the final seconds produced what became known as the Holy Roller. Running back Pete Banaszak and tight end Dave Casper successively advanced the loose ball toward and eventually into the end zone, where Casper recovered for a touchdown. The Raiders kicked the extra point to win 21-20. The league responded in the following offseason with the Ken Stabler Rule, which stated that on fourth down or in the final two minutes of a half, only the fumbling player may advance a fumble; a teammate who recovers it takes possession at the spot of the fumble.

  The 2012 Packers-Seahawks game on the 24th of September 2012, brought replacement officials, brought in during a labor dispute, to their lowest moment. Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson threw a Hail Mary with eight seconds left and the Packers leading 12-7. The pass was simultaneously caught or contested by Seahawks receiver Golden Tate and Packers defensive back M.D. Jennings. Two officials signaled contradictory rulings. After review, the play was ruled a Seahawks touchdown, giving Seattle a 14-12 win. Replays showed Tate had pushed Packers defender Sam Shields before the catch, a penalty that was not reviewable. The NFL commissioner's office received over 70,000 voicemails in the hours following the game. The regular officials returned at the start of Week 4.

  The 2018 NFC Championship produced what many observers called one of the worst officiating decisions in league history. With the Saints leading the Rams late in the game, Rams defender Nickell Robey-Coleman hit Saints receiver Tommylee Lewis before the ball arrived on a Drew Brees pass. No flag was thrown. Saints head coach Sean Payton later said the league office called him immediately after the game to acknowledge a penalty should have been called. The Saints filed a lawsuit against the NFL. The NFL responded by instituting replay review for pass interference for the 2019 season, a rule that was not retained for 2020 after coaches said it created more confusion.

• 8. Television, Labor, and League Power

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  In 2011, ESPN agreed to a deal with the NFL worth more than $15 billion, a sum that prompted several outlets including Forbes to raise the question of whether that financial relationship compromised ESPN's ability to cover the league independently. ESPN had previously canceled a drama series called Playmakers after the league reportedly threatened to cut the network from future broadcast contracts. In 2013, ESPN withdrew from a partnership with the PBS documentary series "League of Denial," which examined the history of head injuries in the NFL, shortly after a meeting between ESPN executives and Roger Goodell in New York. ESPN said the withdrawal was about editorial control, not league pressure.

  The NFL and its players' union have clashed repeatedly over labor rights dating back decades. The league adopted a one-year contract renewal system in 1947. The Rozelle Rule, created in 1963, required teams signing a free agent to compensate the player's former team, with the commissioner deciding the terms if the teams could not agree. The players won a court action against that system in 1976. From 1989 to 1992 the league used Plan B free agency, which protected 37 players per roster and made the rest unrestricted. Eight players sued over antitrust violations, and a jury ruled the system an illegal trade restraint in 1992. That ruling eventually produced the current salary cap system.

  In 2011, the league and the NFL Players Association failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement, and a lockout began on March 12. The only game officially canceled was the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game. A new CBA was reached on July 21. A separate referee labor dispute in 2012 led the league to lock out its officials in June of that year and use replacement referees, the same replacements whose errors in the Packers-Seahawks game triggered over 70,000 complaint voicemails to the league office. The dispute was resolved in late September, with regular officials returning for a Thursday night game between the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Ravens to open Week 4.