Roger Goodell's tenure as league commissioner, which hits the 10-year mark Monday, can be summed up like this: Nothing he did hindered the robust business that the NFL was before he took the job.
Consider where we are:
The Dallas Cowboys, the league's most valuable team, are said to be worth $4 billion. The league's least valuable team is likely the Buffalo Bills, and they were bought for $1.4 billion in 2014.
NBC and ESPN are paying at least $1 billion to broadcast a season's worth of games for Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football.
Thursday Night Football went from an experiment of eight games on the NFL Network to a full slate split by two networks.
Somehow, the Red Zone channel, which could be argued cannibalizes CBS and FOX Sunday games, still exists in all its glory and has revolutionized how so many fans watch the sport.
Of the top 50 most-watched shows on TV, at least 44 each year are NFL games.
Any questions about the quality of the games we see on TV, along with the negativity surrounding the handling of Ray Rice, domestic violence, the concussion controversy and even Deflategate, haven't stopped the masses from attending games.
The highest price face value of a Super Bowl ticket over the last 10 years, if you could get them, has gone from $700 to $1,800. And the price of a 30-second Super Bowl ad more than doubled under Goodell's tenure from $2.4 million to $5 million.
The question: Would any of this not exist with someone else in Goodell's role?
While owners seem to affirm him as a good leader, what is his Commish VORP? "Value Over Replacement Player" is a baseball stat that attempts to determine how much a player is worth over a perfectly average alternative. How many executives could have done the same thing Goodell did, or better? It's really hard to answer that question, but we can say how much the owners paid for him and at least look at what they got in return.
In his first 10 years as commissioner, Goodell was paid a total compensation of $212.5 million, according to filings that became public as a result of the league's non-profit status. What did they get?
Teams, of course, are not public, so it presents a challenge. We know that when Goodell took the job in 2006, league revenues were around $6 billion. Ten years later, revenues are projected to be at $13 billion.
It's a nice increase, but is it better than the last decade, when predecessor Paul Tagliabue had the job?
It's not a perfect metric, but estimated franchise value is one way to look at the comparison. Franchise value projections take into account estimated revenue as well as trophy value and is the true focus from a return on investment perspective versus annual cash flow. Over the last two decades, Forbes and Financial World magazine published valuations of sports teams.
Taking Forbes valuations and adjusting for inflation, we find that projected franchise values grew 85 percent over Goodell's tenure.
Is that good? Who knows what the baseline should have been. All we know is that it's not close to the value gain that occurred under Tagliabue in the previous decade. A combination of values from Financial World and Forbes, and again adjusting for inflation, give us a 266 percent increase in NFL franchise value from 1995 to 2005.
If we continue to focus on franchise values, we should probably compare the past decade in every other sport and how those franchise values grew compared to what happened under Goodell's reign with the NFL.
This time the NFL finishes fourth out of four.
Inflation-adjusted Forbes valuations show that Major League Baseball team values rose 189 percent from 2006 to 2016, NBA team values rose 181 percent and NHL team values jumped 135 percent.
In Goodell's defense, every massive organization is at a disadvantage when comparing growth rates to smaller companies. It's obviously much harder to continue on the same growth path as the business matures, and it's also difficult to maintain unprecedented growth.
That's why it's fair to make the call that Goodell certainly didn't hurt the business, it's just hard to say he has done more than any other smart NFL executive could have done.
The last two commissioners among the big four sports who stepped down each had a financial legacy. Bud Selig deserves credit for putting the right people in the right places, particularly Bob Bowman of MLB Advanced Media, which grew into a multibillion juggernaut during his tenure. David Stern became the most media savvy commissioner and pushed to grow the NBA all over the globe, which it certainly has
What did Goodell add after the first decade? At best, it's that his actions didn't slow down the financial juggernaut that the league has become.