For Goodell, Challenges Already Loom

For an executive taking over the most successful sports league in the United States -- one with labor peace, wildly lucrative TV deals, and unrivaled popularity -- new NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has a daunting to-do list.

Goodell, five days into the job, faces the same issues that challenged his predecessor Paul Tagliabue. They include: finding a middle ground on revenue-sharing between the richest and neediest teams; potentially strengthening the league’s drug-testing program; keeping stride with ever-evolving technological advances; and returning to the Los Angeles market, which today officially begins its 12th season without an NFL team.

“The good news and the bad news is we’ve got multiple challenges,” said Goodell on Wednesday at Giants Stadium in his first news conference as commissioner. “We’ve got a number of issues we’ve got to deal with.”

In the coming months, Goodell said he would make visits to each of the league’s 32 teams. He plans to attend tonight’s opener in Pittsburgh between the Steelers and the Miami Dolphins; Sunday’s showdown between the New York Giants and Indianapolis Colts, a game that pits quarterbacking brothers Peyton and Eli Manning; and the first half of the Monday night doubleheader, when Minnesota plays at Washington.

Goodell has yet to move into his new office at the league’s Park Avenue headquarters, and said he has had little time to relish the notion that he’s only the fourth NFL commissioner since World War II.

“It does change your perspective when people call you commissioner after being in the league for that long,” said Goodell, 47, who worked as an intern in the New York Jets media-relations department before serving under NFLcommissioners Pete Rozelle and Tagliabue. “When they presented me the first football that had your name on it, it sets you back a little bit.”

Goodell confirmed the league and the players’ union are discussing strengthening the testing program for performance-enhancing drugs, a development first reported Wednesday by the New York Times.

Among the subjects he discussed with Gene Upshaw, executive director of the NFL Players Assn., were increasing the frequency of testing and possibly adding to the list of substances tested.

The NFL administers about 10,000 tests annually for performance-enhancing drugs to about 1,800 players. Each player is tested at least once a year. Each week during the season, the league randomly selects about seven players a team to test. Also, each player may be tested up to six times during the off-season.

There is no urine test for human growth hormone, however, and blood tests for HGH are not reliable. Regardless, Upshaw has vehemently opposed the notion of mandatory blood tests.

“We have no indication that we have a significant issue in HGH, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t approach it as aggressively as possible to say, what is it we can do to stay ahead of that,” said Goodell, who suggested the league might seek federal funding to help develop a reliable urine test for the substance.

Last month, the Charlotte Observer reported that Dr. James Shortt, then a practicing physician in Columbia, S.C., wrote multiple refillable prescriptions for banned performance-enhancing drugs for six Carolina Panthers. The story was based on medical reports in court documents. The newspaper also reported that two Panthers got prescriptions for five banned substances less than a week before their team left Charlotte for the 2004 Super Bowl in Houston.

Asked if he was concerned about the drug problem being more widespread, Goodell said: “The Carolina issue was a Dr. Shortt issue. That was an issue where we had a doctor who has now since been convicted and serving time for violating the law prescribing drugs to players, and I’ll point out, a number of people that weren’t players.”

Goodell also addressed the L.A. situation. Filling that vacancy is important, but it isn’t the dominant issue on his early agenda.

“We know the hundreds of thousands, millions of fans out in Southern California who want to see football back in Los Angeles, but they want to see it done properly and they want to see it done successfully and that’s our challenge,” he said.

Among the other topics Goodell discussed:

* To help visiting teams better cope with crowd noise, the league is looking into the possibility of putting communication devices in helmets of more players than simply the quarterback.

Discussions have included wiring receivers, offensive linemen, even defensive players.

“Not that we’re going Star Wars,” he said. “But these are very simple ways we’ve used technology in the past very successfully.”

* Bryant Gumbel will keep his play-by-play job with the NFL Network despite rankling the league by saying that Tagliabue should show his successor as commissioner “where he keeps Gene Upshaw’s leash.”

Goodell decided to retain Gumbel after meeting with him last week. “I expressed my concerns to Bryant about the comments, and I think we have a very good understanding and respect for one another and what we expect,” he said. “I expect he will be a terrific announcer for us.”

sam.farmer@latimes.com

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Season opener

Who: Miami at Pittsburgh.

* TV: Channel 4, 5:30 p.m.

* What you need to know: Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger will sit out after an emergency appendectomy Sunday, forcing Charlie Batch into a starting role for the defending Super Bowl champions. The Dolphins missed the playoffs last season despite winning their last six games, and they’ve upgraded to Daunte Culpepper at quarterback.

* Peter Yoon’s pick: It doesn’t matter who is playing quarterback, because the Steelers win with defense and nine of 11 starters return from a squad that gave up 16.1 points and an AFC-leading 284 yards a game last season.