By now the name of Ray Rice has been linked more with the name TMZ than the Baltimore Ravens, the team for which he used to play. His name has been lopped in with those of men like Michael Vick and OJ Simpson. The fact that his boss just happens to be Rodger Goodell only makes the both of them seem that much more evil.
By now the sudden explosion of media regarding the arrest of Adrian Peterson for the abuse of his son has further tarnished the name of the NFL, drawing more attention to the huge mistakes made by players, officials and league executives when fans are most focused on them.
By now, the NFL, which is valued at upwards of 10 billion dollars and viewed by billions of people all week long has seen its regal reputation blackened by the brutal allegations made against its employees. These problems have always been a part of the NFL but up until recently, its publicity level was not enough to raise most of these stories above the level of whispers.
For example, in the 1990’s an NFL player going to jail was a huge news story, a first for that matter. In the 90’s, OJ Simpson and Rae Carruth were devilish humans sequestered from the masses of football and successfully portrayed by the NFL as no longer part of the league. Now, that is no longer the case.
Since Rodger Goodell became the NFL’s new head honcho back in 2006, the league has seen countless terrible people grace its rosters. Many of these players, it has failed to isolate from the masses of its 32 team’s worth of players. The league has seen guys like Michael Vick go to jail for dogfighting, Aaron Hernandez get charged with brutal gang activities, Jovan Belcher involve himself in a murder/suicide and now Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson get caught committing terrible acts of domestic violence. All of this and more has taken place since 2006.
In the 8 years, since that day in August when Rodger Goodell became the new commissioner of the NFL, he has failed to punish so many players.
In doing so, Goodell has committed transgressions that have in some cases been nearly as terrible as the initial acts. When Goodell let Michael Vick back into the league after his prison sentence, he forgave Vick for brutally murdering countless dogs. When it took Goodell over 6 months to suspend Mike Prefreir for his part in the homophobic firing of punter Chris Kluwe, he made the gay football community out to be an afterthought whose wellbeing was not worth urgent action.
And now, as the NFL’s domestic violence problem tears the leagues reputation down in front of our very eyes we see that it only punctuated by the awful arrest of Peterson. The fact that two players were charged with domestic forms of violence so close to each other is not a rarity in football and that is disgusting to think about. Crimes within the home are a huge problem in football and in not punishing the perpetrators of these crimes, regardless of their place in sport’s hierarchy, Roger Goodell has turned his back on a subgroup of NFL fans as well as all who stand with them.
Our culture, though evolving past most legal barriers against women (ie. suffrage, working rights), is still a vastly sexist one. Women consistently earn up to 30 cents less per dollar than men and are objectified throughout our pop culture. Furthermore, terribly offensive words used in a derogatory way against anyone not bearing the most “masculine” of qualities have long ago become deeply ingrained within the American vocabulary.
As CBS’s James Brown so eloquently said during Thursday Night Football this week, words like “sissy”, and phrases like “[insert action here] like a girl” make females seem weak and generally less than their male counterparts.
It is this belief that men are superior that manifests in these situations of domestic violence. It is that belief that manifests far too often.
According to the program Safe Horizons, 4 million women are subjected to domestic violence each year with well over 1,000 women killed in the same time period due such violence.
This is a huge problem and the NFL, as America's biggest cultural institution needs to set a precedent that it is not okay. But they do not. Since Roger Goodell took office in 2006, 44 cases of domestic violence have been brought to court involving NFL players. Of those 44 cases, (though only 14 of them resulted with some sort of actual guilty verdict being handed to the defendant), only 4 saw players cut from a team while Goodell himself made only 3 suspensions.
No matter what the teams did, the most powerful man in the most powerful league refused to acknowledge 41 of those women whose partners hit them while playing football. Also worth noting is the fact that none of those assaults were punished with a suspension longer than 1 game.
Another thing also worth noting is that those 44 cases I mentioned did not include the case against Ray Rice.
Rice was first accused of beating his wife back in February when TMZ published a video of the then Baltimore Raven dragging his fiancé’s unconscious body out of an elevator. Following that black mark, Rodger Goodell slapped a rather trivial two game ban on Rice that stood until last week when TMZ snagged yet another video actually showing Rice brutally knocking out his now wife in the elevator. Goodell, by then caught in a terrible position, made a string of some of his worst mistakes in the span of just a few days. He uttered a terrible sequence of lies that proved his guilt as an incomprehensibly inept deliverer of justice.
First he claimed that there was ambiguity when the video first surfaced and when Rice was questioned by the NFL.
Then Rice revealed that he had disclosed everything about what had happened. He said he apologized for what he had done but held nothing back.
Defensively backtracking, Goodell said that at least he had not seen the video before TMZ published it.
Then a federal investigator who had been appointed to dig deeper into the case revealed that that was wrong. Back in April, the video of the punch had been sent to an NFL executive. No response had been given.
So what does this mean?
Well, the defense can be made that the league has changed since Goodell became commissioner nearly a decade ago. It has signed huge multi-billion dollar deals with television providers, launched into full time broadcasting across the NFL Network and become subject to second by second social media analysis. Anything that happens in the NFL gets Tweeted and Facebooked while also being subjected to the widely broadcasted opinions of anybody with Wi-Fi. Yes it is true that such a sudden responsibility might not be what Roger Goodell specifically signed up for but is that not included in the greater job description that he promised to fulfil?
This unpredicted spike in popularity has definitely breached the banks of what the NFL was like in 2006. This unprecedented spike in popularity has only made the commissioner's job that much more important. Football is part of American culture now with its players serving as role models who represent what plenty of kids want to be when they grow up. Yet when these players, these role models beat their wives and the league does not punish them, they show that it is okay to hurt one another.
When only 3 of the 14 players convicted of domestic violence since 2006 actually get suspended, there is no excuse. In letting these batterers off scot free, even after the justice system decides that they are guilty, Goodell is saying that violence to another human being is okay.
And as fans watching this entire saga unfold, as we watch Roger Goodell tear his reputation apart as he tries to preserve it, we need to see that he is saying it is okay to hurt people. He is saying it is okay to beat your kids, to drive drunk, to beat you wife! It is not okay to hurt people.
Roger Goodell has violated a general code of conduct among people in control of companies; to keep the peace and enforce a higher behavioral standard in the workforce. Though football does not involve the typical workforce, it is after all possessing of one, meaning that as his employees assault and discriminate against people they deem lesser and Goodell fails to punish them, he is failing at his job.
What has been happening all along but has only been exposed in the last few weeks is a terrible example of a weak standing commissioner who has shown himself incapable of managing the NFL. The fact that Goodell must be fired is not a “someone has to go” kind of deal. No, Goodell has to go because he is a terrible commissioner who has alienated his sport’s fan base right from the get go.
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