"We Have Work to Do, and We're Doing It:" An Analysis of Roger Goodell's Rhetoric During the NFL's Ongoing Concussion Crisis

Abstract

Throughout Roger Goodell's term as commissioner, the National Football League (NFL) had to address the long-term health issues caused by head injury, which damaged their organizational image and caused an ongoing crisis. Using Coombs’ research on organizational crises (2015) and Benoit’s image repair theory (1995, 1997), I argue Goodell and the NFL used multiple strategies to attempt to repair the League’s image for their audiences. Indeed, a closer look at texts used by Goodell and the NFL during his first decade as commissioner revealed three distinct stages of crisis repair between 2007 and 2016, all of which were unsuccessful because of a failure to address one primary audience—former NFL players. Using rhetorical criticism of the NFL”s crisis discourse, I argue that Goodell’s repeated missteps led to an evolving organizational dilemma that can best be understood as a compounding crisis.