Northbrook, Ill. ? Twenty years ago, Roger Goodell volunteered to chauffeur Pete Rozelle around at the Super Bowl in New Orleans when the NFL commissioner’s regular driver couldn’t make it.

In a few weeks, Goodell well may be sitting in the back of the limo.

One of Paul Tagliabue’s top aides and advisers, Goodell will be the favorite to succeed him as NFL commissioner when the 32 owners begin meeting today at a suburban hotel to make their choice from a list of five finalists.

In truth, the 47-year-old Goodell, son of a former U.S. senator from New York, has been the favorite for a half-dozen years, or ever since he was designated the NFL’s chief operating officer.

He has been the point man on expansion and stadium construction; he has been deeply involved in labor negotiations; and he knows almost every aspect of the league’s operation – starting as a public-relations intern and (for a week) as a chauffeur.

Still, his election is not a certainty – most of the 32 NFL owners who will vote for the new commissioner are silent about their preferences, and the eight members of the committee who picked the five finalists are saying nothing at all.

The final five were identified last Sunday: Goodell; Gregg Levy, the NFL’s outside counsel; Fred Nance, a Cleveland attorney deeply involved in the Browns’ return to the city; and two top financial executives: Robert L. Reynolds, chief operating officer of Fidelity investments, and Mayo A. Shattuck III, president and CEO of Constellation Energy.

Roger Goodell sits during a news conference in 2005. One of Goodell's early jobs upon joining the NFL a year out of college was to chauffeur Pete Rozelle. Now he's a favorite among five candidates for the commissioner's job that Rozelle held for 29 years.

Vegas, naturally is in the act.

According to one oddsmaker, Goodell is a 2-5 favorite, Levy is 2-1, and the other three are 10-1. That’s all speculative and presumably based on the fact that Goodell and Levy – who holds the same job Tagliabue had when he was chosen in 1989 – are known to the owners and the others are not.

“It’s all set up for Roger,” Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson – who does not favor his fellow upstate New Yorker – said several weeks ago.

Other owners, speaking for background only, believe that if there is a decision at this week’s meeting, only Goodell can get the 22 votes needed for selection. If it’s still deadlocked and more meetings are needed, then it could be more open, as it was in 1989, when Tagliabue and the late Jim Finks, the New Orleans general manager, were deadlocked and it took more than three months and several meetings to resolve the issue.

Tagliabue tried hard to avoid that this time by appointing a far more diverse selection committee than the group of insiders that recommended Finks 17 years ago and met resistance from a group of outsiders and newcomers. It includes high-revenue and low-revenue owners as well as such mavericks as Dallas’ Jerry Jones, one of those who rebelled the last time, and Oakland’s Al Davis.

Still, nothing is guaranteed. Goodell’s biggest problem with discontented owners like Wilson could be his longtime association with the league office. He still considers Rozelle his idol.

“I don’t know the other candidates, but I’ve gotten to know Roger,” two-time NFL MVP Peyton Manning of the Colts said last week. “He’s just a good guy. Nothing pretentious or anything like that about him.”

Manning’s opinion, of course, won’t count when the owners sit down to vote.

The final five came from a list of 11 semifinalists but are the only ones whose names officially have become public since Tagliabue announced his retirement in March. But there was a long list of speculated candidates then that included former President Clinton, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, several other NFL office officials and Atlanta general manager Rich McKay.

Even in that company, Goodell’s name was at the top.

It remains there now.