NEW YORK (AP) — Paul Tagliabue, the NFL commissioner who ran the league for 17 years in an era of wealth and expansion, has died at age 84.
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Tagliabue’s family informed the league of his death in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Tagliabue, who had Parkinson’s disease, was commissioner after Pete Rozelle from 1989 to 2006. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame as part of a special centennial class in 2020. He succeeds current commissioner Roger Goodell Tagliabue.
“Paul was the ultimate steward of the game — tall, humble in presence and resolute in his loyalty to the NFL,” Goodell said in a statement. “I am forever grateful and proud to have Paul as my friend and mentor. I have cherished the countless hours we spent together as he helped shape me as a CEO but also as a man, husband and father.”
Tagliabue oversaw countless new stadiums and negotiated television contracts that added billions of dollars to the league’s bank account. During his reign, there was no cessation of work.
During his tenure, Los Angeles lost two teams and Cleveland another, migrating to Baltimore before being replaced by an expansion franchise.
Tagliabue implemented a drug abuse policy that was considered the strongest in all major sports. He also created the “Rooney Rule,” whereby all teams with coaching vacancies must interview minority candidates. It has since been expanded to include executive positions in front offices and the league.
When he took office in 1989, the NFL had just gotten its first black head coach in the modern era. By the time Tagliabue resigned in 2006, there were seven minority coaches in the league.
Tagliabue certainly had his critics, especially when it came to concussions. This problem has plagued the NFL for decades, although team owners have been a major contributor to the lack of progress in addressing head trauma.
In 2017, Tagliabue apologized for statements he made decades ago about concussions in football, admitting that he did not have the correct data at the time in 1994. He called concussions “one of those issues of the press pool” and asserted that the number of concussions is “relatively small; the problem is the journalists’ issue.”
He said on the Talk of Fame Network: “Obviously I regret those statements. Looking back, it was not the sensible language I was using to express my thoughts at the time. My language was extreme, and it led to a serious misunderstanding. I overreacted to the issues we were actually working on. But that doesn’t excuse the overreaction and excessive language.”
“Bottom line, it looked like I was shooting the messenger, and that was the concussion problem. My intention at the time was to make a point that could have been made fairly simply: that better data was needed. There was a need for more reliable information about concussions and standardization in terms of how we define them in terms of their severity.”
Tagliabue is survived by his wife, Chandler, his son, Drew, and his daughter, Emily.