Jerry Jones was a leading voice among 17 owners that would like to delay Roger Goodell's pending contract extension.

The owners had a conference call to discuss the issue on Thursday. Goodell's contract extension was scheduled to be completed in September but remains an unsolved issue going into November.

"You don't get to have this many messes over the years like Roger has had and survive it," said one owner on the call.

The NFL needs 24 owners to approve the replacement of Goodell and owners are skeptical there would be enough support for it.

"Maybe Arthur [Blank, the head of the Compensation Committee] and that committee think they're on track," an owner said about Goodell's proposed extension. "But they have a lot more resistance than they counted on -- and maybe they don't know how the resistance is growing as we speak."

Owners are unhappy with how Goodell has handled the NFL's situation with Los Angeles, as well as domestic violence issues and the ongoing player protests.

"We just don't have enough problem solvers," said another NFL owner. "We gotta get it right or we're just going to let it burn. Last time I felt like this was before the 1993 CBA settlement. That was just depressing, and Paul Tagliabue and Gene [Upshaw] stepped up and saved it in a spectacular way. We don't have that feeling right now."

Executives at some of the NFL's broadcast partners have complained to owners about how the league "lurches from crisis to crisis."

Over the past few years, the NFL has been viewed to poorly handle issues on domestic violence, player safety and player protests.

A recent Morning Consult poll revealed that the NFL's net favorability has dropped to 11 percent from a high of 56 percent in May. 

"There is no question the league is suffering negative effects from these protests," Jerry Jones said last week. "All times, I want to do the right thing by [NFL sponsors] and their customers. I have a great responsibility to the people who support us. ... We all get great benefits from having a lot of us watching our games. All of us do."

Chris Borland has recorded a public service announcement critical of the NFL for not being serious about players' health.

Borland is doing the PSA for Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that is worried that lobbyists for big business, like the NFL, convince lawmakers against passing laws protecting citizens from health concerns.

"I walked away from pro football and a $2.9 million contract with the San Francisco 49ers because I didn't want to develop CTE," Borland says in the video.

In the video, Borland says the NFL attacked the facts about CTE the same way the fossil fuel industry and the agriculture industry used anti-science tactics in their own situations.

Borland has since been invited by the NFL to see their concussion research.

The contract extension of Roger Goodell has been delayed by the debate over players protesting during the national anthem.

Goodell's extension is still expected to be finalized, but the anthem issue has diverted the attention of the NFL.

Goodell's contract might have been completed at last week's owners meeting in New York if not for the issue.

The committee still insists Goodell's deal will be completed, but there is other business that currently is more pressing.

"The anthem issue has overridden everything -- and I do mean everything," one source told ESPN.

Roger Goodell addressed the media on Wednesday following two days of owner's meetings.

One of the main topics of discussion is the NFL's ongoing protests during the national anthems, which has become an even bigger story due to the interjection of Donald Trump.

"We're not looking to get into politics," said Goodell.

The NFL has appeared to alternate between supporting their players and also attempting to prevent them from demonstrating. 

"We have about half a dozen players who are protesting," said Goodell. "We'd like to get that down to zero."

Total viewership of the NFL is down 7.5 percent in 2017 compared with the first six weeks of 2016.

An average of 15 million people watched games for the first six weeks of 2017 compared to 16.2 million through Week 6 last season.

In the past week, Credit Suisse lowered its price targets on both Fox and CBS stock, citing NFL ratings declines.

"If ratings don't improve materially, we see a potential headwind to domestic advertising revenues," the investment bank's analyst Omar Sheikh wrote of Fox on Thursday.

Compared with the 2015 season, NFL ratings are down 18.7 percent. The decline is sharp but smaller when considering the overall fall in television viewership due to cord cutting of cable.

DeAndre Levy testified before a congressional subcommittee on brain injuries that the Detroit Lions tried to silence him from speaking publicly about CTE.

“The moment I said anything about it, I had two calls telling me I shouldn’t talk about it,” Levy told the committee, via Kyle Meinke of mlive.com. “I don’t know if it was because it was CTE, or if it was because it’s just the general NFL rule of, like, only football. Only talk about football, only think about football. I posted simply the research . . . and I was told not to talk about it the first day it was out. And I’m just, like, you know, it could have just been locker room culture. Nobody wants to talk about anything other than football. But it didn’t sit well with me when I’m talking about brain injuries.

“It’s my brain. It’s not my shoulder; it’s my brain. It controls everything I do; it controls everything we think, everything we feel. And if I don’t have the right to speak about that as a player, I think it really speaks about the culture of the NFL, of what those conversations are. I think that’s indicative of the conversations that we don’t hear. The closed-door conversations between owners. They still are trying to find ways to silence us.”

With the Chargers struggling to fill their small stadium in Los Angeles, there has been speculation about the possibility of them moving back to San Diego.

"There is no discussion of returning to San Diego from the league or the club," said Joe Lockhart.

Fans in Los Angeles appeared to strongly prefer the Raiders and Rams over the Chargers before their relocation.

The Chargers are currently scheduled to move into the Rams' new stadium in Inglewood.

Last Tuesday afternoon, approximately 25 NFL owners entered the league's headquarters for routine committee meetings that grew into a conversation about player protests and Donald Trump.

Roger Goodell reached out to union chief DeMaurice Smith to suggest the protests should end.

"My only response was, 'I don't have the power to tell our players what to do.' ... At the end of the day, this is a group of players who are exercising their freedom. There is no room for me to snap my fingers and tell our players, 'It's time for you to give up a freedom.' Just the idea offends me. It's almost as if the players are being asked, 'What's it going to take for you to stop asking to be free or to be treated like an American?'"

Some owners saw the situation as a marketing opportunity. 

One idea had all players wearing a patch on their jerseys that would read, "Team America." An owner briefed on the proposal simply shook his head: "We need to do better than that."