With NFL owners due to meet on December 13 and with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones committed to challenging the contract extension that the Compensation Committee has been authorized to give to Commissioner Roger Goodell, Jones has a plan.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, Jones intends to seek a secret ballot of owners for a vote to be conducted in connection with the Goodell contract.
The specific purpose of the secret ballot isn’t yet known, and the precise plan possibly hasn’t been finalized. As one source explained it to PFT, many different approaches and permutations of votes are possible.
A majority of 17 owners is required to trigger the process of secret balloting. A 75-percent majority of 24 votes will be needed to rescind or to revise the resolution that owners adopted with a 32-0 vote in May.
The league’s owner used secret ballots in early 2016, in connection with the voting that resulted in the selection of the Inglewood site over the proposed Carson location for a new NFL stadium in the L.A. area.
It could be that every proposed vote regarding Goodell’s contract would occur via secret ballot, from whether to scrap the May resolution to what it would be replaced with. Eventually, the owners may conclude that the most sensible approach would be to cast whatever votes are needed to get to the point where the Compensation Committee would be required negotiate a contract, and the owners then would vote on whether to approve it.