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Roger Goodell is Forced to Admit Under Oath His Own Network's Game Broadcasts Sucked

Icon Sportswire. Getty Images.

One of the most overlooked aspects of living in a litigious society such as ours, where everyone seems to be threatening to sue everybody else everyday over everything, is that with lawsuits comes honesty. A kind of total honesty that's compelled by the law. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 

Granted, that's a double-edged sword. There's a lot of satisfaction in seeing someone who did you dirty have to raise their hand and swear an oath under pains and penalties of perjury. It's one of the great equalizers in our unequal world. But oftentimes what people don't take into account is that, as much fun as it is to make the other party unzip and whip it out, they then get to do the same thing to you. So you'd better be willing to expose all your own secrets.

Still, it can be really good for the wronged party. And the people who hate the wrongdoers to hear them have to have to spill their miserable guts on the record. 

Take, for example, the people who are suing the NFL for ripping them off with the Sunday Ticket package. I honestly can't claim to understand even the most rudimentary legal argument they're making. It seems to me that suing the NFL for making obscene profits is like suing the sun for burning your skin. You have a certain obligation to realize whom you're doing business with. Lie down with dogs and you're going to get fleas, and all that. 

That said, if the suit accomplishes nothing else, it's already done the impossible by forcing the truth out of the dry, thin-lipped mouth of notorious serial liar Roger Goodell:

Source - Roger Goodell took the stand in federal court this week … explained that one of the reasons the NFL sold Thursday night games was due to the broadcast quality. 

NFL Network had the exclusive rights to Thursday night football from 2006 to 2013. The games were then split between CBS and NBC until 2017, when Fox took over the rights. Thursday night football has been on Amazon Prime Video since 2022. 

'I had my own opinion that our production was below standards that the networks had set,' he said Monday, referring to CBS and Fox. 'We had not met that standard.' 

During those early years, the NFL Network crew consisted of Bryant Gumbel, Cris Collinsworth, and Dick Vermeil.

Gumbel lasted only two years after coming in for heavy criticism as a play-by-play caller. …

NFL Network could soon be taken out of the league's hands. Earlier this year, it was claimed the ESPN could take it over in exchange for the NFL investing a minority stake in the network.

Last things first, I can't believe that in the middle of an antitrust lawsuit, the NFL is talking about partnering with ESPN. Any more than they already are, I mean. As it is, Bristol is essentially Goodell's State-Run Media, parroting any narrative Ginger Satan wants them to. I know four guys who picked up criminal charges protesting ESPN's lies:

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(I of course would be the Silver Fox sitting with three of the Brady 4. The only reason it wasn't the Brady 5 is I was working at WEEI at the time. Otherwise my only regret would've been that I had but one clean rap sheet to give for my quarterback. Moving on.) 

Yet here again, we see the beauty of our justice system. A malicious despot who's spent his corrupt professional life peddling lies, from the air pressure in footballs to CTE to Ray Rice to Bountygate and half dozen other -Gates, was dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging what an amateurish, cable access-quality clown show his own network's Thursday Night games were. As it is, Thursday night games are a mess. The players aren't ready, the coaches aren't ready, the officials aren't ready. If the oligarchy he is the head of was merely content with making billions and billions of dollars instead of tens of billions of billions, these games would never be played. But getting them off NFLN has been a significant upgrade nevertheless. Even with a clearly bored, checked out Al Michaels calling the shots, it's better than a sleepy, Low-T Bryant Gumbel - who's spent the last two decades doing documentary interviews - softly mumbling his way through the games like he was presiding over a School Committee meeting. With Cris Collinsworth desperately trying to gin up some tiny level of excitement for the Jets at Jacksonville or whatever.

This is the kind of total honesty you only get in a proceeding like this. If there wasn't a legal obligation to tell the truth, Der Kommissar would've gushed about how his Ministry of Propaganda revolutionized the broadcasting game. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure he did say that the whole time they were doing MNF. It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for the Spanish Inquistion or the KGB or any other organization that had to go through the demanding, time-consuming business of torturing the truth out of someone. Though with this witness, I would've preffered it. 

So congrats are in order to the plaintiffs for this. I have doubts the lawsuit has any merit. But extracting an embarrassing truth out of this lying, fabulist robot is quite an accomplishment in and of itself.