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.
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