Roger Goodell: USA Football will select Olympic team, not the NFL

The NFL has cleared the way for active players to participate in the 2028 Olympic flag football tournament. Many questions remain, culminating in the determination of the names of the players who will be loaned to the effort.

On that point, Commissioner Roger Goodell made it clear in a session with reporters at this week’s ownership meeting that the picking of the players won’t be an NFL issue.

“That’s actually a function of USA Football that will be making that decision,” Goodell said. “The NFL will not have any involvement in that selection process.”

But the NFL will have indirect involvement, because the NFL has direct involvement in USA Football.

USA Football bylaws require Goodell (with the use of the all-important legal term “shall”) to appoint three members to the board, with at least two of Goodell’s appointees serving on the executive committee.

The current board, based on the USA Football website, includes Packers CEO Mark Murphy and Colts COO Pete Ward. It’s unclear whether Goodell has appointed a third member of the existing board of directors.

It’s unclear in part because, although the bylaws mandate 15 board members, the USA Football website shows only 11 members. Unless there are four other board members who haven’t made it to the website, USA Football isn’t in compliance with its bylaws on the fairly key question of the mandated number of directors.

Also, because the USA Football website shows that two of the board members (Pete Chiarelli and Dr. Gerard Gioia) have terms that expired in 2024, it’s also fair to ask whether the website needs to be updated.

Although the bylaws limit the term for each director to three years, Murphy and Ward show “N/A” as the year when their terms end. This implies that their appointments are open-ended. That also doesn’t mesh with the USA Football bylaws, which specifies three-year terms and limits all directors to two consecutive terms. (There is no limit to the number of non-consecutive terms a board member may serve.)

Moving forward, it makes sense to pay very close attention to the machinations of USA Football. Although Goodell says the NFL will have no involvement in the process of selecting the Olympic team, the board members surely will have significant influence in the overall process.

And those spots on the 15-member USA Football board of directors and five-member USA Football executive committee have suddenly become plum and potentially powerful assignments. Working with Hallenbeck (whom the executive committee has the power to throw overboard, if they want), they’ll be coming up with the procedure for selecting the 2028 men’s flag football team. Goodell, who controls three board seats and 40 percent of the executive committee, absolutely has indirect influence over the formulation of the overall selection process and, in turn, how the 2028 Olympics roster is built.

Regardless of how it plays out, the sudden spike in relevance and responsibility for USA Football requires the group to button up its business, quickly. Based on the information currently on the group’s website, it appears that multiple i’s haven’t been dotted and t’s haven’t been crossed. Now that flag football will be an Olympic event with active NFL players eligible to participate, USA Football will undergo unprecedented scrutiny.

As evidenced by the fact that a fairly cursory comparison of the contents of the bylaws and the information on the website raises multiple questions and reveals multiple potential flaws.

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