The owners, though, have considered other successors. A confidant of one owner reached out to gauge whether Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, would be interested in running the NFL, to which Silver immediately said no. Owners have also considered looking to the International Olympic Committee for someone with global experience to grow the game -- or even installing the 76-year-old Tagliabue for a year while a committee searched for the ideal successor. Jones has told confidants that he has his own candidate in mind, which Jones has publicly denied. Few owners are interested in allowing Jones to essentially handpick the next commissioner. Even so, Jones has vowed, sources say, to make Goodell's life miserable. "Jerry's message to Roger was 'I run this league. You better get with it,'" a senior league executive says. "This is about power and control, not the contract. That's all white noise."
That's why, no matter how often some team executives say not to underestimate Jones, and no matter how frustrated many owners are with the state of the league, the support to remove Goodell doesn't seem to be there. Jones has the Redskins' Dan Snyder and a handful of other owners on his side; there are a dozen or so owners who just want to extend Goodell and get the story out of the headlines; and the rest don't approve of Goodell's performance, not because they agree with Jones but because they believe Goodell has empowered him to a fault, especially given the ugly situation with two relocated franchises drawing small crowds in Los Angeles. "Switching commissioners is like switching from an iPhone to a Samsung," one ownership source says. "Do my pictures transfer? Do my contacts? Does my music? In the end, why take the risk?"