Reusse: Goodell, Zygi Wilf, NFL all can make you sick

The action appeared to be winding down around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday on the construction site for the Vikings stadium. There were a couple of gentlemen with hard hats staring upward at the eastern sections of seats that have taken shape.

The new dome, now priced at $1.024 billion, is rising with amazing haste on the eastern edge of downtown Minneapolis.

The NFL's lobbying for this started in earnest when Commissioner Roger Goodell dropped a few veiled threats in a meeting with politicians in May 2011, and then turned up the heat substantially during a trip here on April 20, 2012.

Less than three weeks later, the Legislature passed a stadium bill, and put the taxpayers on the hook for $498 million, the largest public contribution ever for an NFL stadium.

Gov. Mark Dayton, legislators and Minneapolis city leaders were so overwhelmed by Goodell's suggestion that a new stadium was needed to guarantee the Vikings' future in Minnesota that they not only tapped mysterious funds for the stadium deal, but they did this:

Dayton and then-Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak appointed a Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority that has turned out to be glorified lap dogs for the Vikings.

Certainly, we all can feel better about the full-blown capitulation to Goodell, as evidence continues to build of the honorable behavior of the NFL and the commissioner in the Ray Rice case.

Two-game suspension.

What! OK, said the Commish, maybe I miscalculated the level of indignation that two-gamer would bring, so in the future we'll have much-harsher penalties when a player beats up a woman.

The NFL spin was that the new policy was going to make the league a leader in the campaign against domestic abuse. It might have worked, too, if it wasn't for those snoops from TMZ.

There was Ray on tape with a fierce punch to his fiancee's head, and she was out cold, and Rice was treating her with contemptuous indifference as he lugged her from the elevator, and now what, Commish?

One, Ray Rice is suspended from the NFL indefinitely; and two, I, Roger Goodell, never saw that videotape, nor did anyone in the league office.

Except, now we know someone in the NFL office accepted a transmission of the tape five months ago. We know this because it was reported by the Associated Press, not Barney's Blog from Bumpkinville, and the AP demands reliability from sources.

We can speculate that Goodell's most trusted security people are now scouring that prime Manhattan office space, trying to find a scapegoat willing to say: "I received the tape, but I never told anyone in authority. And I'm so ashamed I'm now retiring to my new, fully paid vacation home in Barbados."

Or maybe Goodell and the NFL, in the 40th anniversary year of Richard Nixon's resignation, can trot out the old Rose Mary Woods' defense: "The elevator tape did arrive in the office but was accidentally erased."

These are our colleagues in the new dome, folks:

A Commish who told Dayton and others, "Build it or the Vikings will probably leave," and an owner in Mr. Zygmunt Wilf who is not satisfied with what's basically a free billion-dollar edifice to make hundreds of millions, but who also wants to backstab developers near the stadium to gain even more.

We found out the full parasitic quality of Goodell's NFL soon after the glorious triumph of landing the 2018 Super Bowl. For roughly 48 hours the story was how much the NFL liked the Twin Cities; then, it started to become evident that we had bought the game with more giveaways — $40 million or more — than the other bidders were willing to provide.

If these football guys don't make you queasy, you have a cast-iron stomach.