Getty Images

The battle continues, at least in the media.

Someone (presumably from within the group of owners who support Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in his fight against the Compensation Committee) has told Scott Wapner of CNBC that more than half of all owners want to wait to extend Commissioner Roger Goodell’s contract, “if for no other reason than they think the timing doing it now would be a P.R. disaster.”

This doesn’t mean that they don’t want to execute a new contract with Goodell. It means only that they don’t want to do it right now, since doing it right now would make them seem “tone deaf.”

If accurate, it means that Jones has scored at least a minor victory via his multi-front campaign against moving forward with the contract. From stirring up owners to oppose the contract to speaking against it publicly to instigating Papa John’s to disparage the league to threatening suit to leaking the supposed $50 million-per-year demand from Goodell to ESPN (which supposedly was in writing, but the writing was never produced), Jones has managed to slam the brakes on the overall process.

If, that is, the Compensation Committee bends to the unofficial will of more than half of all owners. Short of 24, their mandate and authority to do the deal within predetermined parameters remains in place.

The best and smartest outcome continues to be to amend the resolution that authorized the execution of the contract to require 24 owners or more to approve the final deal negotiated with Goodell. That should have been the approach in the first place, and it seems that the vague marching orders to the six owners who are handling the job of negotiating with the man who runs the sport have caused Jones and an undetermined number of others to wonder whether the chickens are frying some of their own eggs for the fox.