Roger Goodell held a press conference on a Friday afternoon. Friday is known in the journalism trade as "take out the trash day," as Andrea Mitchell once observed. Since Goodell hadn’t been heard from in ten days, I expected him to announce that he was resigning.

goodellInstead, he used the presser to announce that the NFL was developing a new master policy of personal conduct that would be fair, transparent, open and consistent in administering NFL justice.

What took him so long? Those are hardly new concepts, and he didn’t lay out many specifics of the new policy, but rather paperhung the audience with such aimless statements as, “there will be changes to the Personal Conduct Policy. I know this because we will make it happen.”

Like Eliot’s Prufrock, the commish was "full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse," especially when it came to answering questions from the ravenous media wolves ranged around him. He was like a man dancing on an ice floe that has entered the Gulf Stream, with the water warming and the dance floor shrinking.

It must be difficult work the NFL is undertaking, because Goodell doesn’t expect to be finished until at least the Super Bowl, which means next year, not this season, and presumably not applying to anyone playing in Week Four.

Goodell can be likened to the captain of a large container ship that is on fire. He has jettisoned cargo; brought new crew members aboard; and announced that the situation is under control, with a thorough investigation underway and new operating procedures coming.

But steering the ship has become difficult. The rudder doesn’t respond to the wheel, the vessel pitches and rolls constantly, and the crew seems demoralized, confused, waiting for instructions. Moreover, the big boat has 32 owners, each of whom is in regular contact with the captain.

Despite all the highly visible problems Captain Goodell faces, there is another problem smoldering in the hold of the NFL ship that is much more fundamental. The league has seen it develop and even encouraged it for years. Now it is threatening to overwhelm the game and tarnish the brand beyond repair.

It has to do with the way the NFL recruits and develops players, using college programs as farm clubs feeding the NFL combine. In my own home town coaches have stated publicly that they consider it part of their job to prepare players for the NFL combine, and they have succeeded at it quite impressively, with 18 underclassmen entering the draft over the past two years. Since its title run began in 2007, the Southeastern Conference has had 109 early departures from teachers, books, and dirty looks.

Of those, only a relative handful graduated before they went into the college draft. Most stayed a couple of years, touched as lightly by higher education as a running back cutting and spinning through a gap in the line.

As one wag put it, a bowling ball rolled through the campus at some schools has a better chance of picking up a college degree than does a scholarship football player.

So it goes this way: Coach/recruiter visits the home of a high-school phenom. Coach pitches the program to the kid as the most robust showcase and the best way to get to the NFL. Kid’s parents want to know about the kind of education he will receive, and there is no shortage of empty promises about that.

Kid signs letter of intent, enters the university, and is swept up into a world of tutors, minders, handlers and counselors who shepherd him over the modest academic hurdles while the coaching staff hones his athletic abilities.

There are plenty of perks, people with favors; perhaps a little walking-around money on the side. It is the first taste of the sweet life to come, with college bowl weeks as the threshold drug.

Two years go by, hopefully winning ones without injuries or felony charges, and the NFL draft beckons. Big money awaits. Kid goes to a show in New York like he has never seen, and is picked up in the fourth or fourteenth round. Ta Da! He’s twenty and he’s rich. If he stays healthy and plays for a ten or more years, he’s rich beyond his wildest dreams.

He makes the team, and wins a job as a starter. He buys a giant house, and one for his parents. He acquires several cars, maybe an entourage of hangers-on. The world is his oyster, and the pearls just keep coming. Women, trips, parties, junkets to Vegas, endorsement deals, more cars. And then, all too often—guns, drugs, alcohol, altercations, run-ins with the law, domestic abuse, rape, and even murder. Hardly the stuff of a wholesome image.

It is a pattern that has repeated itself enough to serve as reliable empirical evidence, yet the league continues to ignore it because the entire system is an easy and cheap way to acquire talent. Colleges love it, because either because it gives them a taste of the big time or they don’t have the sense to realize how much they are being exploited. Possibly they just don’t care, as I suspect in the case of my hometown athletic complex and those who feed off of it.

Former New England Patriots standout Tedy Bruschi may have inadvertently alluded to this fundamental problem when he said on ESPN that the NFL needs to push a giant “Reset” button. It's the truth, and the sooner the better.

The NFL is one of the most valuable brands in the world, but it is stumbling and bogged down trying to codify disciplinary policies and procedures best left to a tribunal consisting of an owner, a league official, and a representative of the player’s union. Instead, the league needs to reform its entire way of doing business, from how it recruits and develops players to how it deals with safety issues and personnel. I don’t know that an NFL lifer like Goodell is the person for that job.

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Bill Huey is president of Strategic Communications in Baton Rouge, LA, a corporate communications and marketing consultancy, and author of "Carbon Man," a novel about greed. He can be reached at [email protected].