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The New York Times first reported the development on Wednesday.

The sources told Outside the Lines that Jones has been exploring the lawsuit option through Boies, if Goodell’s contract is extended after the 2018 season as is being considered. Boies represents DraftKings, the daily fantasy company in which Jones was an early investor.

Jones has not identified the grounds of such a lawsuit, but one source said Jones is exploring whether a requirement that two-thirds of owners must approve a commissioner’s contract could be increased to three-fourths of owners. Another source said that Boies also might be asked by Jones to produce a report showing the negative economic impact that Goodell’s major decisions, including player discipline, have had on clubs.

A lawyer who has close ties to the NFL praised Boies’ skill as a lawyer to OTL but said that his hiring was likely a “scare tactic” because there doesn’t appear to be an obvious legal challenge to Goodell’s contract negotiations, a process that Jones voted in support of earlier in the year. Jones “probably knows he doesn’t have a strong claim,” the lawyer said.

Neither Jones nor Boies could be immediately reached for comment. NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart declined comment.

The Times reported that Jones, in a conference call last week with the six owners on the compensation committee, told them that legal papers were drawn up and would be served Friday if the committee did not scrap its plans to extend Goodell’s contract. The Times also reported that after Jones spoke to the committee, the owners revoked Jones’ status as an ad hoc member of the compensation committee and then spoke to the other 25 owners who are not on the committee to notify them of what Jones had said.

Sources told Outside the Lines that Jones is one of “four or five owners” who believe Goodell should not continue as commissioner. Another half-dozen owners were called “fence-sitters” by one source — the exact group that Jones wants Boies to target.

“If he amasses 12 or 15 people, how does Roger survive something like that?” an executive asked. “I don’t know how he’d be able to continue if that many owners express a lack of confidence in him.”

A person who spoke recently with Goodell said the commissioner is “furious” about Jones’ and other owners’ insistence that his next contract’s compensation should be more performance-based, including incentives that would allow him to be paid at roughly the same level of his current deal. “He feels as if the owners have made a lot of money and he should be compensated accordingly,” the source said. “The incentives thing really angers him.”

Goodell has earned a total of more than $200 million since he was elected commissioner in August 2006, including $44 million in 2014 and $34 million in 2015. At the owners’ meetings in New York last month, Jones told his fellow owners that Goodell’s proposed next contract “is the most one-sided deal ever.”

Through this season, Jones has expressed growing dissatisfaction with Goodell’s job performance and has said in recent weeks that the league needs to hire a new commissioner, sources said. The reasons include Goodell’s handling of the player protests staged during the national anthem; the league’s pending six-game suspension of Cowboys star running back Ezekiel Elliott for violation of the league’s domestic violence policy; and the league’s handling of the relocation of two teams to Los Angeles, which Jones helped engineer. Many owners are also angry with Goodell because they believe that he has given Jones too much power.

“Most owners would admit that Roger has done a terrible job handling the anthem controversy and a terrible job explaining the [TV] ratings declines, a terrible job on any number of other issues,” a long-time team executive said.

Several sources told Outside the Lines that owners believe the NFL league office suffers from “dysfunction,” and at least two owners have said they wouldn’t replace Goodell because they don’t know who they’d replace him with.

A silent majority of owners believe Goodell’s performance has been poor but still support him because they prefer to have Goodell lead the owners’ side in labor negotiations with the players’ union. The current collective bargaining agreement expires in 2021.

“Roger is seen as having done a great job in the labor negotiations last time — that fact alone saves him with some owners,” an executive said.

Jones is not a member of the NFL’s six-member compensation committee, led by Arthur Blank of the Falcons. Jones has called himself the “ombudsman” of the committee and has become a de facto seventh unofficial member who attended a recent conference call of the committee.

If Jones decided to follow through with his threat, it would be the second time he has sued the NFL. In the mid-1990s, Jones filed a $750 million antitrust lawsuit against the NFL over its insistence that teams do not enter into separate sponsorship agreements; Jones and the league later settled that claim.

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At the end of the text message, Vincent extended the invitation for Kaepernick to meet with Goodell, according to Lockhart, who said the league has not heard back from the former San Francisco 49ers star.

Lockhart said earlier Tuesday during a conference call that the NFL would welcome Kaepernick’s participation in its larger meetings involving league executives, players and owners.

A league source told ESPN’s Adam Schefter last week that Goodell, Vincent and NFL senior vice president of player engagement Arthur McAfee will be deposed and asked to turn over all cellphone records and emails in relation to Kaepernick’s collusion case against the NFL.

Kaepernick’s attorney said in October that the free-agent quarterback had filed a grievance under the collective bargaining agreement, alleging collusion against signing him to an NFL contract.

The filing, which demands an arbitration hearing on the matter, says the NFL and its owners “have colluded to deprive Mr. Kaepernick of employment rights in retaliation for Mr. Kaepernick’s leadership and advocacy for equality and social justice and his bringing awareness to peculiar institutions still undermining racial equality in the United States.”

After filing the grievance, Kaepernick tweeted that he did so “only after pursuing every possible avenue with all NFL teams and their executives.”

Kaepernick drew national attention last season when he knelt during the national anthem before games to protest social injustice. His kneeling led to a movement that has spread throughout the league while also being vilified by others, including President Donald Trump.

Kaepernick has not been with an NFL team since severing his contract with the 49ers in March. Sources told ESPN at the time that Kaepernick would stand during the anthem in 2017.