Moral Relativism and The NFL, Roger Goodell-Style

Do you feel a little dirty today?  I do.  Despite everything I knew and felt about the Ray Rice situation, despite everything I wrote about it previously, I still sat and watched Monday night football.  I watched it because I’m a fan of the New York Giants.  I watched it because I enjoy NFL football. 

That’s the essence of the conflict here.  The NFL has a product that I enjoy as a consumer to the point that I end up looking the other way at its moral relativism no matter how offended I otherwise might be.  That makes me complicit in the dirty business of a league that, first, only suspended Rice for two games and, now, keeps Roger Goodell employed.

That has to change and if it doesn’t, if we as users of their product don’t take a stand by not supporting the league, its games, its sponsors until the NFL decides to fundamentally change and stand for something other than its brand, then we too are as big a part of the problem as is Goodell.

Goodell should resign as commissioner and if he doesn’t he should be fired.  Goodell already said he won’t resign and the decrepit ownership of the league, many of whom have their own sordid problems, are so out of touch with what takes place on the streets of day to day life that they probably will award Goodell a bonus.

Goodell’s job is supposed to be about, above all else, the protection of the game.  The NFL is at its cultural nadir at the moment, even if its games remain popular, because Goodell failed at the most important job he had. It’s amazing, really, that he can’t or won’t see it.

As usual, Goodell took to a controlled setting to explain away how incredibly unfeeling he and the league are to victims of domestic abuse who suffer at the hands of the men the league employs.  He looked sincere even as he presented a strong face for the his and hence the league’s indifference to societal norms when he said, echoing the talking points that the Ravens clearly had been given a few days earlier, that seeing the video made all the difference.  I think Goodell is lying about not seeing the video previously mainly because it’s almost impossible to believe otherwise.  And while he gets no benefit of the doubt any more, let’s just assume he didn’t.  So what?  He knew what happened and it matters little that he felt misled by Rice and his attorney who suggested that Rice’s fiancée essentially had it coming to her because she was the aggressor that led Rice to half the further discussion with a well-placed punch.

What Goodell suggests, what John Harbaugh and Ravens owner Steve Biscotti suggest, as they were shamed into facing the almost incomprehensible wrongness of their prior actions is that they never really knew how horrific domestic violence was until they actually witnessed it.  More to the point, they expect the public to buy that explanation.  That’s how far out of touch the league really is and why Goodell has to go, now.

Goodell’s crimes go even deeper.  Foremost, he’s lost any hope of gaining the high ground on this issue.  He can announce a hundred new initiatives and it won’t matter because he’s doing it because it was forced on him and not because he wanted to. 

He could have taken a much more aggressive approach toward ridding the league of abusers in his CBS News interview and did not.  Indeed, right now and despite his letter to league owners about a change to its domestic violence policies, two players, Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald continue to play.  Hardy has actually been convicted by a judge of assault on a female.  He’s appealed so the league dithers as if it has no choice.  McDonald has been arrested and despite his head coach, Jim Harbaugh, proclaiming zero tolerance for domestic violence, McDonald continues to play.

Let’s not lose sight of that fact that no one understands the power of the NFL’s brand better than Goodell as he wields it constantly in order to leverage any and everything he can from anyone.  He doles out limited access to select journalists who will further the league’s narrative in order.  He puts players at risk constantly, first by participating in the cover up of the impact concussions were having on former and current players and still by allowing Thursday night games despite all the medical evidence against such quick turnaround.  Goodell uses his bully pulpit for one thing only, to further maximize the league’s financial windfall while ignoring the cultural slide it contributes to in that pursuit.

Goodell’s abject incompetence at recognizing the broader implications of his decisions isn’t without precedence.  The real reason situations like this continue to come up, particularly in football, has everything to do with the culture of the sport that has been set by the NFL for decades, a culture that values winning and the spoils that come from it far above anything else, a culture that has found its way to the bottom of the feeding pools.

It’s coincidental at least, perhaps ironic, that on the same day that the NFL was finally shaken to its foundations by its own hypocrisy, the NCAA shed the vestiges of its high minded pretension by publicly removing the remaining sanctions from Penn State’s program, sanctions levied because of that school’s institutional coddling of a pedophile because of its desire not to derail its lucrative football program.  I guess because there’s no evidence of new pedophilia among the Penn State coaching staff that it’s time to simply burnish the previous penalties and act as if the entire matter never happened.

There is a common thread. 

Players don’t enter the NFL and then abuse women.  It’s a learned behavior over the many years in which their status is exalted because of their ability to run faster, throw better and tackle harder than someone else.  It starts in high school, continues through college and by the time these players reach the NFL their perceptions of societal norms is so skewed that they end up rallying around a player like Rice as the Ravens players did when all that was known then was that Rice dragged his unconscious girlfriend out of an elevator and left her like a discarded cigarette butt after he had snuffed her out in a fit of pique.

There isn’t a high school or college program in America that hasn’t found a way around punishing its better players in order to avoid potentially disastrous results on the field in the next game.  Florida head coach Will Muschamp suspended 3 players for the team’s opening game against Idaho but that game lasted one play because of the weather and was cancelled.  Florida was scheduled to take on a slightly gamer team in Eastern Michigan the following week so Muschamp lifted the suspensions and lashed out at critics who questioned his hypocrisy.

Muschamp can make all the excuses he wants but he did it because he felt he needed the players on the field for a game against Eastern Michigan.  That says something about how far Florida has fallen, certainly, but it says more about how a situation like Rice’s happened in the first place.

Players are coddled and ultimately made to feel like the rules of proper society are bendable in extenuating circumstances, like a big game on Saturday or Sunday.  Rice had no real fear that losing his temper and knocking out his fiancée and the mother of his child would cause him to lose his job.  He had no such fear because it’s never happened in the NFL.

Last week Sports Illustrated had a profile of Louisville coach Bobby Petrino.  I suspect that it didn’t make Petrino happy nor his fans for it laid out in subtle but definitive ways the institutional hypocrisy that creates the cesspool that ultimately lets scum like Rice float to the top.

Petrino is a complicated figure with an incredibly ethically challenged record both personally and professionally.  One thing he does, though, is win and for that he’s been rewarded again with a top college job.  Indeed Louisville’s athletic director Tom Jurich did a clever slight of hand by turning the question outward as to why he’d bring back Petrino after all the damage he’d done previously to at least 3 different football programs, including Louisville’s.  He couched it in near religious terms by responding, rhetorically with his own question, “who am I to not forgive?”  In other words, we’re all servants of God and if God forgives, how can we not model that behavior?

It’s all bullshit and Jurich must know it and if he doesn’t he shouldn’t be in his position.  It isn’t a question of forgiveness it’s a question of winning and losing.  He calculated that Petrino gave the school the best shot at keeping its program at a high level and he took it figuring he could just shower the grime off later.

That’s why players don’t fear consequences.  There’s always someone else to pick up the pieces for a guy who can help a team win.  Whatever publicly the coaches or owners say, what they do speaks more loudly.  Think about the McDonald and Hardy cases. Both continue to play because their absence would hurt the team.  The tired yarn of letting the legal process play out is ridiculous, particularly in domestic violence cases.  It puts the onus on the victim to recant or refuse to testify in order to save her abuser’s job.  That’s what the Ravens did to Janey Palmer and it’s what the 49ers and the Panthers are doing to the victims in their cases.

But of course there are other options to letting the process play out as they say, they just don’t include letting Hardy and McDonald play in the games.  Their teams could have simply deactivated the players from the active roster on game days.  Sure they’d still get paid but it would leave no doubt about how team management felt about their actions.  But that apparently would clash with the Panthers’ and the 49ers’ nascent playoff hopes and thus clearly wasn’t considered.

More to the point, let’s not act like anyone in the NFL actually cares about a due diligence process or is even bound by one.  They just pull it out when it’s convenient to them as cover for far more nefarious motives.  The NFL, despite having the power and money of a medium sized country, isn’t subject to the Constitutional protections of due process.  Goodell has told us many times that he can take action at any time for the good of the game.  Yet he and the Panthers and the 49ers in concert saw no reason to take any action yet on Hardy or McDonald and still don’t even as the league burns around them for the inept handling of the Rice situation.

Look at the shameful way that everyone associated with the Ravens handled the Rice situation.  The owner left it in the hands of the football people who calculated that the team’s playoff chances were less without Rice.  So the team president Dick Cass, the team general manager Ozzie Newsome and the team head coach John Harbaugh wrapped their swaddling arms around Rice, furthered his despicable implication that it was Palmer’s fault all along, and treated him as if he had accidentally run the car into the neighbor’s hedges.  Grounding him for two games stung about as much as a paddling does to a 6 year old with about the same impact long term.

What all of these demonstrate is that apologists exist at the highest levels to excuse player behavior because what they do isn’t about building men or character but about winning games and bringing money into the school, the city, the franchise, the league.

As should Goodell, the Ravens should be made to purge the franchise of its owner, its president and its general manager and its head coach.  The franchise’s culture can’t be fixed as long as any of them remain.  The same goes for the Panthers and the 49ers and any other team coddling the miscreants on their teams.

It seems like the only people that don’t know that the league is at a major crossroads is the league itself and all those apologists.  Just keep on the same road and they won’t need anyone calling for their heads.  They’ll have made themselves so irrelevant that they’ll fade away of their own accord.  If that’s the way this goes, then good riddance.  Finding another diversion from pro football won’t be nearly as hard as they think.

Welcome to the Dark Side, Wolverines

There is a Chinese proverb that says in desperation, a dog will leap over a wall. Over the many decades of its existence, the University of Michigan has attempted to build a certain wall of elitism around its school, effectively telling everyone in the world that it is a different and better place, academically and otherwise, than say the Ohio States of the world.

Well, that wall not only just got jumped it got torn down and all it took was Michigan selling its soul with the hiring of a coach who couldn’t close the deal in a game he needed to win in order to gain a berth in the National Championship game on the line. Rich Rodriguez meet Lloyd Carr.

It’s hard to know, of course, how the Michigan’s hiring of the former West Virginia Moutaineers coach ultimately will play out, though its fun to speculate, given Rodriguez’s continued inability to actually win really big games. What isn’t so hard to know, of course, is that Michigan fans better get used to two things: their school is no longer an above-it-all institution of higher learning and their football program is now being led by a coach with one eye always firmly trained on the next opportunity of a lifetime.

Former Louisville and Atlanta Falcons coach Bobby Petrino has been getting a tremendous amount of abuse from conveniently high-minded types like former players and ESPN talking heads for supposedly running out on a hapless Atlanta Falcons team and franchise but Rodriguez’s similar move in West Virginia has been met with mostly a shrug. Hard to figure, particularly as the facts continue to trickle out about Rodriguez.

Make no mistake about it, Rodriguez is running out on his team in much the same way Petrino ran out on Atlanta. Keep in mind first that the ink on the contract Rodriguez had signed just this past August with West Virginia is barely dry. Second, West Virginia’s season isn’t over. They have a little matter of a Fiesta Bowl game on January 2nd against Oklahoma before the season is over. Arguably, that game is far more meaningful to West Virginia and its program than the three remaining games that were on the Atlanta Falcons schedule when Petrino abruptly quit.

Maybe Petrino should have stuck around the hopelessness that is Atlanta these days, but no one has yet come up with a plausible reason why Rodriguez shouldn’t be similarly criticized or chastised. If Michigan truly wanted Rodriguez, which is somewhat questionable since he was, after all, their third choice, why couldn’t they wait until after the Fiesta Bowl?

Actually, there is an answer to that question. It’s tied up in the engine that really drives the college football machine these days: recruiting. Rodriguez met with Michigan representatives last Friday in Toledo. By Saturday morning, according to published reports, Rodriguez had made his decision. How do we know that? Well, it appears that one of the first persons told about the decision was not his team, maybe not even his wife. It was Pittsburgh Jeanette high school player, Terrelle Pryor, who just happens to be one of the most highly sought recruits in the nation.

According to a story in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Rodriguez called Pryor Saturday morning, just hours actually after the Toledo meeting, to tell Pryor he was headed to Michigan. Pryor’s immediate reaction was to take West Virginia off his list of schools under consideration and to add Michigan to it instead.

Pryor is so highly sought, including by Ohio State, because he runs the spread offense, which just happens to be Rodriguez’s specialty and is the current rage in offensive schemes. In fact, while Ohio State is one of Pryor’s top choices, along with Oregon, Penn State and Florida, Pryor has openly mused that Ohio State’s offensive philosophy may not be the right fit for him.

But now that Rodriguez has taken his act to Michigan, Pryor now has three Big Ten schools on his list. Given how quickly Rodriguez called Pryor with the news, it is fair to ask (though no one seemingly has) what role the potential to land Pryor in Michigan played in Michigan’s decision to offer Rodriguez the job. In fact, if Pryor does end up at Michigan, those questions shouldn’t just be asked on the internet, the NCAA should actually investigate.

It’s doubtful that anyone officially associated with Michigan would actually admit that the chance to lure Pryor to the Wolverines in order to resurrect a program in sore need of resurrection played any role whatsoever. But if anyone officially associated with Michigan denies that Pryor’s name ever came up, then the last piece of Michigan’s so-called mystique—credibility—will have been forever compromised. Welcome, Wolverines, to the dark side.

Another aspect about Rodriguez’s hiring, which not only reflects poorly on Michigan but also tells you a great deal about Rodriguez’s ethics, is the little matter of the pesky $4 million buyout in that flimsy contract he signed last August. According to a story in the Charleston Daily Mail, it sure seems like Rodriguez is trying to avoid paying the penalty he voluntarily accepted without so much as a gun to his head just eight months ago if he ever quit and went to another school.

No one actually expected Rodriguez to pay the penalty personally. These things are usually handled by a combination of the school and its boosters that lured him away. But $4 million is actually one of the bigger penalty clauses that you’ll see in a contract and neither the University of Michigan nor its boosters seem all that keen on paying an extra $4 million just to buy their third choice.

Attempting to escape the obligation, Rodriguez has done a couple of things, on the advice undoubtedly of his attorneys. First, he’s actually intimated that he’s not leaving because of the great opportunity that Michigan supposedly presents but more so because West Virginia wasn’t meeting its contractual commitments to him regarding the completion of an academic center and an upgrade to the locker room. In this battle, he’s enlisted some alums to spread the word while remaining oh so distant from it personally. Coward.

Apparently, the Mountaineers academic center was completed, just a little later than planned. The locker room upgrade is supposedly on schedule. If this all seems more than a little trivial, just remember the two great adages of most major college coaches these days: Greed know no bounds and no amount of money is too small to quibble over when it’s mine. Remember, too, that all this is really just an attempt to insert leverage into a discussion on how to reduce the $4 million to, perhaps a more manageable number. In that regard, it’s also instructive to remember that this is the same tactic that Michigan and John Beilein used just last year when Beilein, too, bolted the Mountaineers for the sunny shores of Ann Arbor and sought to reduce his $2.5 million buyout penalty. It worked. He paid only $1.5 million. Cheapskate.

Second, the effective date of Rodriguez’s resignation letter is January 3rd. The point here is to try and encourage West Virginia to actually fire Rodriguez before that date, which, too, would avoid Rodriguez having to pay the penalty.

If all this seems just a little underhanded or a little sordid, remember that Michigan could make this all go away by simply paying the penalty in the first place. Of course, they didn’t do that in the case of Beilein when the stakes were less, so why would anyone expect anything different here? You may rightly surmise that this is the least that this supposedly stand-up institution could do, but you’d be wrong. Doing the right thing always has its price and, in this case, we now know that at Michigan, it’s less than $4 million.

Eventually, you do reap what you sow and all this will someday come back to revisit Rodriguez and Michigan, and probably at the least opportune time. In the short-term, though, Michigan and its fans can go off and celebrate this hiring and all that it will supposedly bring to the program. But as they’re drinking themselves giddy, no amount of alcohol can hide the fact that as of now, the only differences between themselves and Arkansas are geography and conference affiliation. And when their heads eventually clear, maybe then they’ll awake to the reality of the permanent damage they’ve done to the school and its reputation.

Lingering Items--Bills Edition

One of the great things about playing a football game in adverse conditions is that it tends to expose whatever flaws your team may have. Indeed, in some ways, adverse conditions can be the best way for a general manager to judge the relative strengths and weaknesses of his team.

Thus, equally as important as the Browns victory Sunday was against the Bills was the fact that it highlighted where both teams need work if they have hopes of becoming among the elite in the NFL. But since this isn’t a site dedicated to the Bills, we’ll let that team and its fans figure out its shortcomings, but here’s a hint: defensive line. Here’s another hint: offensive line.

As for the Browns, Sunday’s game revealed the same litany of strengths and holes that, frankly, have been present all season. On the plus side, as good of a season that quarterback Derek Anderson has had, his passing success owes a debt of gratitude to the continued threat of a strong running attack, led by Jamal Lewis. Dumping Reuben Droughns, who is now mostly an afterthought with the New York Giants, has turned out to be a brilliant move.

Droughns certainly isn’t a bad running back, but he simply never seemed to possess the combination of speed, strength and toughness that made opposing teams respect the Browns running attack week in and week out. I suppose, too, that it’s a fair point that Droughns ran behind an inferior offensive line while in Cleveland. But there’s no question that neither Denver, which did have a good offensive line and from whom the Browns acquired Droughns, nor general manager Phil Savage felt that Droughns had that “it” factor, even if running behind the kind of line Lewis now has.

But Lewis is a much different story. Even before coming to the Browns, he had compiled enough credentials to qualify him as an elite back. But the way he was seemingly cast aside by a Baltimore Ravens team desperate for offense fed the common perception that Lewis was an “old” 28 years of age whose better days had passed. In fact, the whispers were that Lewis had basically turned into a back like Larry Brown, the former Washington Redskin from the early 1970s who was a Pro Bowler three of his first four seasons. At that time, Brown seemed well on his way to a Hall of Fame career, but just as suddenly fell off the map as the result of all the hits he had taken during those early seasons. He had been prematurely beaten up and rendered ineffective.

What the Bills game proved in particular and the season has proven in general is that Lewis is far from being done as a running back and is, indeed, with the season he’s put together this year is unquestionably a legitimate Hall of Famer when his playing days do end. The conditions on Sunday begged for exactly the style of running that Lewis has perfected. The fact that he delivered so impressively leaves no doubt that teams cannot simply key on one aspect of Rob Chudzinski’s offense. In other words, the Browns already clearly have a playoff-quality offense.

The defense, though, is a much bigger story. The fact that Marshawn Lynch had 82 yards rushing wasn’t much of a surprise for two reasons. First, the Bills mostly ran until the last drive. Second, it’s not as if the Browns defensive line has been able to really stop anybody all year anyway. On the year, they are giving up over 128 yards rushing per game. Saying, again, that the defensive line needs to get fixed is as obvious as noting that there are some parental issues that need to be addressed in the Spears family.

But a disturbing trend of the last few weeks most certainly was how the defense, collectively, seemed to nearly fall apart with the game on the line against beaten teams with inferior offenses. Both were remarkably similar. Two teams that hadn’t been able to do much over the course of 55 minutes suddenly turned into the New England Patriots in the last 5. Passes suddenly got completed, running lanes opened and the defense seemed helpless, missing tackles and blowing coverage.

It’s too easy to simply conclude that a lack of talent is responsible and time to focus at least some attention on defensive coordinator Todd Grantham. The schemes he’s calling late in the game, which feature three down linemen rushing and maximum protection back in order to stop big plays, aren’t working. By getting absolutely no pressure on the quarterbacks, even the likes of Kellen Clemens can eventually find someone breaking open. And when you get to the playoffs, the quarterbacks won’t be stiffs.

But if this trend continues, the only real hope that the Browns have of advancing in the playoffs is if they are clicking on offense and doing just enough on defense to keep the game from getting out of control. Unfortunately, of the potential teams they might meet in the playoffs, all have defenses that are in the top half of the conference, which makes that a difficult task. Further complicating it is the fact that the converse is true as well; of the potential teams they might meet in the playoffs, all have offenses that are in the top half of the conference. In other words, this is the time of year when the biggest flaws get revealed. The Browns lack of balance between offense and defense is the threat to whatever comes next.

***

In case anyone was looking for additional reasons why at least one if not more of the Browns offensive linemen should have been in the Pro Bowl, consider how little Anderson has been sacked. He’s started 14 games and played half of another and has been sacked only 12 times. That ties him with Drew Brees for the least sacked starter, just ahead of Brett Favre.

Plenty of credit for this goes to Anderson because of his quick release. The ability to make a decision quickly is the key to avoiding sacks. Quarterbacks looking to always make the perfect throw tend to find themselves picking themselves up off the turf more often than not. For proof, look no further than Charlie Frye. In one half of one game, he was sacked five times, with the same offensive line that has basically kept Anderson’s uniform clean all season.

But as much and probably more credit for the lack of sacks goes to the offensive line. If not for Frye’s five sacks in the first game of the season, they would be tied with New Orleans. Yet, no offensive lineman from the Browns made the Pro Bowl while Alan Faneca will start at guard and Jonathan Ogden will start at tackle. Clearly, those are reputation picks because the performance this year is clearly lacking. Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger has been sacked an astounding 43 times, second most only to Jon Kitna in Detroit, while Ravens quarterbacks have been sacked 35 times. It’s always difficult, of course, to really know how well an offensive lineman is performing. But this certainly looks like a good place to start looking.

***

While were measuring the effectiveness of the Browns offensive line, take note of the story in Wednesday’s USA Today where Sean Leahy writes that 60 different players have started at quarterback in NFL games this year, the most in the 32-team era. The Browns contributed to that statistic when they sent Frye off to Seattle to carry a clipboard, but that’s misleading.

Most of the changes that have come across the league relate to injuries, naturally. The rest relate to ineffectiveness. Ultimately, though, it all traces back to the offensive line. When your quarterback isn’t constantly being harassed, he’s less likely to get injured. And if he’s not getting harassed, he has a decent chance to be effective. It’s really a pretty simple, tried and true concept, which has taken the Browns only about two decades to learn.

***

Proving that players can learn from other players, the kneel down by the Eagles Brian Westbrook at the one yard line late in the fourth quarter Sunday against the Dallas Cowboys demonstrates clearly that sometimes scoring isn’t always the right play. Indeed, it almost cost the Browns against the Jets.

As I noted last week in the Jets edition, the chaos near the end of that game was due, oddly, by Jamal Lewis’ terrific 31-yard touchdown run. Had he not scored but rather been tackled after gaining the first down, the Browns could have run out the clock since the Jets were out of time outs.

The exact same scenario developed in Dallas. Westbrook, like Lewis, broke through and was headed for a touchdown. But instead of scoring, he dropped to the ground at the one, allowing the Eagles to run out the clock because the Cowboys likewise had no time outs.

It was a heady play by Westbrook, no doubt, but that doesn’t mean that Lewis made a bonehead play either. Given how the defenses were playing in both those games, a touchdown at that point, with just over a minute left, should have closed out the game anyway. The fact that the Browns defense fell apart, while predictable in theory, didn’t seem possible in context. Live and learn.

***
Proving that coaches don’t learn from other coaches, in that same game Eagles coach Andy Reid called a time out to determine whether or not he wanted to challenge a play. He did and lost. Two time outs blown. Fortunately, it didn’t cost his team like it did Browns head coach Romeo Crennel. Live and don’t learn, I suppose.

***
Questions to ponder: Why is Rich Rodriguez, who ran out on his team, his alma mater, with a BCS bowl game to play, not being raked over the coals in the same way as Bobby Petrino?
The New York Yankees on Tuesday fired traveling secretary David Szen. Does that mean that George Costanza will finally get the promotion he’s so richly deserved?