With all due respect to the Palins and Kardashians, the NFL is America’s main dysfunctional family.

Roger Goodell, currently playing the role of the forlorn father, is the gently lined head sitting atop the league’s monstrously jacked but battered body. With his corporate handsomeness, Goodell seems like any ostensibly decent man in command of something indecent, charged with the burden of making an unconscionable thing look acceptable. He always followed what he was taught was the right path in life, yet he finds himself in the wrong–and it’s too late to unlearn all the lessons. How complicated this world.

The multibillion-dollar league’s PR machine has tangled its limbs so tightly around God and nation and military and sheer Americanness that if you dare to utter the obvious–it’s a brutal, brain-wrecking game that no child should play–you somehow seem an enemy of the state. But the calls have still grown loud, and the commissioner’s response is slow, calculated and cloaked in coached language.

Boxing, once itself the undisputed champion of American athletics, was done in by similar circumstances, but it was a mere collection of banana republics run by dime-store despots. The NFL is American corporatocracy itself, lawyered up and too big to fail. Goodell is its governor of sorts, and the drinking water, he’s been told, is dirty, and can never be clean again. He offers his reassurances.

Mark Leibovich, a wonderful NYT political writer, drops in on another cartoonish party with serious consequences as he takes the measure of the embattled but immensely league, just prior to Super Bowl 50. Many of the power brokers he interviews are, unsurprisingly, caucasian, septuagenarian, politically conservative, driven by greed, desperate for attention and wildly successful. An excerpt:

During my three visits to the N.F.L.’s Park Avenue offices, I was always struck by the thick propaganda of the place. The N.F.L. Network plays at all times on big screens. Every corporate office celebrates itself, to some degree, but the N.F.L.’s is particularly overwhelming, as if it were the sanctum of a highly successful megachurch marrying ESPN and Scientology. I had the strange feeling, as I waited in the lobby, that I was being watched, if not filmed.

On my first visit, Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.’s longtime communications director, took me to the cafeteria, known as the Huddle. We passed photo murals celebrating the various Members in their moments of triumph. He brought me an iced tea, sat me down and told me good stuff about the commissioner, good things about the league, big and heady numbers. He handed me positive fact sheets and articles and then, unprompted, summed things up: ‘‘Roger wins.’’

On another visit to the Huddle, I met Tod Leiweke, the league’s chief operating officer, who was hired last summer. Leiweke, a former Seattle Seahawks president, has brushed-back white hair, a sunny and almost New Agey manner and a beakish nose that makes him somewhat resemble an actual sea hawk. He wore a beige sweater with the Shield embroidered across his chest. Leiweke got to know Goodell on a climb up Mount Rainier with other executives. Over lunch, he hurled mountain metaphors at me. ‘‘There are ­challenges to running the most successful league in the world,’’ he told me. ‘‘It’s like clouds on Rainier. Not everything’s perfect, but you fight through it.’’ He continued: ‘‘The league is trying to climb new mountains of its own.’’

He described Goodell as ‘‘convicted,’’ meaning, it seemed, having strong convictions. ‘‘Roger is hard-working, dedicated, convicted, tenacious,’’ he said. ‘‘He is an amazing, convicted guy.’’ He closed on message. ‘‘And he’s a winner.’’

My impression of Goodell, before I met him, was not favorable.•