Count me amongst the legion of people that wants to see Roger Goodell out as commissioner of the National Football League.
I’m sure most people have seen the video TMZ.com posted of Ray Rice knocking his then-fiancee Janay Palmer out cold in a hotel elevator in Atlantic City. To say the video sickens me is an understatement but mostly because it only shows how laughable a two-game suspension for this crime was.
Naturally the video went viral and public outcry renewed over how light of a sentence Rice had gotten from the league. It was this outcry on social media that finally caused the Baltimore Ravens to terminate Rice’s contract. Goodell followed that action by announcing Rice was suspended indefinitely from the NFL. Too little too late.
I’m well aware that Commissioner Goodell has already admitted he got this wrong from the start but even still he isn’t giving himself the proper credit for how epic of a fail this was. Picking an ugly paint color for a wall is wrong. Dating someone who isn’t the right match for you is wrong. Handing out a two-game suspension for a physical beatdown like this is a crime itself.
Goodell is no stranger to getting it wrong on punishment as he’s never consistent with the discipline he gives out to players. Explain to me how one player, Donte Stallworth, can get a full season suspension for killing someone while driving under the influence, but Josh Brent only gets 10 games for also killing someone while driving under the influence?
Explain how a player, Ben Roethlisberger, can be suspended for six games (later reduced to four) when he was never even charged with a crime while Terrell Suggs can drag his woman half a mile alongside their car during an altercation and never face a single missed paycheck?
He talked of ruling with an “iron fist” when he appointed himself the sole arbiter of justice but it’s more like a limp wrist the way he’s screwed up in this role. Add in the fact he is the person who handles all appeals and the players really have no choice but to abide by what Roger Goodell wants. It’s just a shame he’s wrong on so many fronts.
He preaches about player safety but wants to expand the season an additional two games. The league has expanded its slate of Thursday games under Goodell’s watch, which forces players for at least two teams to possibly play on extreme short rest. Football is a brutal game and these players deserve the chance to rest up as much as they can in between their gladiator exhibitions for our amusement and entertainment. He’s had plenty of other stupid ideas, like wanting to put a franchise in London, but that’s just greed talking there.
It comes back to the reason why he needs to go. He wanted all this power to handle player discipline, so when he gets it horribly wrong he has no one else to blame but himself. His lack of action turned week one of a promising new season into a tabloid docudrama about a player who didn’t even play that week. Rice dominated the talk shows on Monday instead of some of the exciting upsets we saw around the league.
The league had a serious image problem because its most powerful man failed miserably to execute the simplest of justice. It’s not just the discipline and suspension he got wrong, but the entire investigation. You can’t tell me the league didn’t have any way to access this video. You can’t tell me TMZ was able to get their hands on it but not the NFL.
Look at how he handled the way he interviewed Rice and Palmer about the incident. He sat them both down in the room together which goes against all protocol when interviewing a victim of domestic abuse. The Baltimore Ravens had Palmer do a press conference and make her admit she was sorry for her role in all of this.
It’s my opinion that Goodell hoped all of this was going to go away. If this video hadn’t surfaced, he might have gotten his wish. Unlike Spygate, this was one video he couldn’t find and erase in time.
I’m thoroughly convinced that if this video hadn’t been released, Rice would have rejoined his teammates in Week 3 and the whole league would have moved on like nothing happened, but it was only because the rest of us saw this video and protested that he was forced to do anything more.
Assuming this was the first time he had seen the video, which I find extremely hard to believe, he didn’t do the right thing because he finally saw the video. He did it because he knew we had seen it.
It’s time to find a commissioner who will solve problems, not sweep them under the rug. It’s time to find someone else to be the commissioner of the NFL.
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