Goodell Holds Court on Vick, Dallas Video Board, Much More

NEW YORK -- NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced his final Michael Vick decision to a group of about 20 reporters in a conference room at the league offices in Manhattan on Thursday afternoon. FanHouse attended the session, which lasted about an hour and a half and covered a wide range of topics that began with Vick and also touched on the Cowboys' video board, the blackout/ticket-sales issues in Jacksonville, the upcoming labor negotiations and several other topics.

But the news of the day was Vick, and Goodell's explanation of his reasoning for reinstating Vick effective Week 3 was interesting. The commissioner said, as he has said before, that he's "looking for a success story" with Vick, and that the goal is to make sure the troubled QB becomes a good and productive member of society off the field moving forward. Keeping Vick out for the first two games of the regular season seemed less like a punitive measure on Goodell's part, rather than one designed to take into account the number of different things Vick has going on in his life right now.

"Part of this was to help him in his transition from what has been a long and difficult experience for him," Goodell said. "I don't want him in a position where he's overwhelmed. He's still relocating his family to Philadelphia. I'm not interested in the football part of it. I'm interested in Michael as a person."

Goodell met with Vick and Eagles coach Andy Reid at the Eagles' team hotel in New Jersey on Thursday morning. (The Eagles were in town for a preseason game against the Jets.) Then, just before the 4 p.m. ET session with writers, Goodell called Vick to inform him of the decision to make him eligible in Week 3. Goodell said Vick wants to play football, but that he understood the decision and considered it a fair one.

But the commissioner, who said he's been in touch with Vick and Vick's advisers for weeks now, emphasized that most of what they've been talking about has been issues related to Vick's life away from the field -- not when and how much he'd be allowed to play football.

"I believe he's recognizing that these are life-management skills we're talking about," Goodell said. "Not just things he needs to do in the next two, three years."

Goodell said Vick plans to marry his longtime girlfriend next offseason, and that he's scheduled to do some Human Society appearances in the Philadelphia area over the next few weeks. He said a recent incident in which Vick was spotted drinking in a Philadelphia airport bar also came up. The drinking is not a violation of Vick's parole or the terms of his arrangement with Goodell, but Goodell said he thought the incident and the attention it generated provided an important lesson.

"He understands he has very little margin for error," Goodell said. "People are watching."

Other topics covered in the session included:

· The NFL blackout policy. Goodell was asked whether the league would consider changing its rules regarding TV blackouts in local markets in which games are not sold out, in light of recent revelations that this could be a serious problem this year in Jacksonville and San Diego.

"That blackout policy has been in place for several decades, and it's been a very good thing for the fans and for the teams," Goodell said.

· The video board at the Cowboys' new stadium. Goodell and Ray Anderson, the league's executive VP of football operations, addressed the issue that arose when a punt struck the massive video board in the first preseason game at the Cowboys' new stadium. Anderson said the incident necessitated a meeting of the competition committee because it pointed up the fact that there was no rule in place for what happens when a ball in play strikes anything like a hanging speaker or video camera. So the decision was made that, if a punt hit the board (or anything else like it in any other park), the play would basically be a do-over with no time having run off the clock.

As for asking Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to move the board, Goodell said aesthetic and safety issues came into play and made it more complicated than simply lifting the board up a few feet. He said Jones was modifying the board to move up the Mitsubishi ad that the punt struck, and he sounded confident that it wouldn't be a major problem during the season.

"I think we've go to be a little bit cautious jumping to conclusion based on one punt in one preseason game where somebody might have been attempting to hit it," Goodell said.

· The union and the collective bargaining negotiations. Goodell was in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday meeting with Redskins players and, while there, he had lunch with NFL players' union head DeMaurice Smith. There have so far been only two negotiating sessions between the league and the players' on a new collective bargaining agreement, and Goodell upset the union by not attending the second one. Smith has said publicly several times that he believes the owners intend to lock out the players in 2011 and that the owners could actually make money by doing so. Goodell, not surprisingly, disputes that notion.

"The idea that the owners would be looking for a lockout and that that would be their objective is foolish," Goodell said.

But he and chief labor negotiator Jeff Pash did say that the March deadline to avoid playing the 2010 season without a salary cap was not a concern to the owners.

"I do think that thee owners have overcome the reluctance they've had in the past to go into an uncapped year," Pash said. "They feel that, from an economic perspective and a financial perspective, it's not likely to be worse than what they're dealing with now."

More on this tomorrow, once we've got the union's side of the story. But Goodell said his message to Smith was that he'd like to stop the rhetoric and sit down at the negotiating table. (Which is weird, because it has seemed that it's the league, not the union, that has been reluctant so far to sit down.)

· Europe. Goodell spoke highly of the league's experience holding regular-season games in London, which it will do for the third time this year. He said it was likely that there would be more than one game in London in 2010, and he said he could imagine putting an NFL team in London sometime in the future.

"The first two years, we saw the interest grow and the enthusiasm grow for the game," Goodell said. "So we're going to continue to follow that and continue to feed that."