(As part of my ongoing analysis of the 2018 NFL Season, I will be periodically adding in a series called The Unreconciled Gap. As its name suggests, I’ll use this space to both chronicle and reconcile my ongoing and deep disagreements with how the NFL is run with my love for the sport.)
Part One: The Uninvited Sheriff
It’s been a while since I’ve regularly and reliably blogged about the NFL. What little success I had with the football blog made me the “football guy” among my friends and peers. The Ray Rice incident changed that for me. No longer did I want to be “the football guy” when this was football. Throw in Greg Hardy. Throw in Colin Kaepernick. Throw in CTE. Poof.
It’s a sport that I know, love, and understand more than ever, but a league I’ve had an increasingly difficult time publicly sharing a room with. The question, with each year that I consider getting back into it on a week to week basis in long-form (not just line picks, anyone can do those) is “am I going to keep this up for four months without at some point appearing as if I endorse this league’s stances and behavior?” versus “Do I publicly take my stands within the sport risking that appearance to make the statements I want to make?”.
Well here’s the first statement: Football has sins, and rather than learn from being tagged with the League of Denial moniker from the CTE scandal, they have doubled down on denial exclusively in the name of TV revenue. As a result, there is a reckoning coming very soon for this commissioner and this league office. An executive entity once viewed as iron-clad as the FBI or CIA has openly deteriorated into one that can’t even navigate a rudimentary press conference, and it took fewer than ten years. I backed Roger Goodell initially, under the now-naive presumption that he had the capacity to learn from the Ray Rice mistake, and that with a multi-billion dollar machine at his disposal he could accurately gauge evolving public perception and tolerance in the Twitter age and not do anything remotely this tone-deaf again. Like many times I didn’t account for public taste and white male judgment in the past few years, I was dead wrong. So let’s start with Ray.
Anyone who criticizes the Ray Rice suspension has to first acknowledge internal hypocrisy in having initially supported the policy that produced it. I stood 30 feet from Roger Goodell as he strided the sidelines in his first year as commissioner before the Giants-Pats Week 17 affair (The 16–0 game). Contrary to his current reception, he was cheered by everyone in our section. Tall, handsome, impeccably groomed, All-American son of a senator, carrying a narrative of having ascended to the top of the league office from the mail room, he was a can’t-miss hire. Goodell genuinely appeared to be, and believed himself to be, built for this job. He loved this league, and it loved him back. The league appeared to be in stable and phenomenal shape for decades to come. His popularity, in addition to a requisite honeymoon, stemmed from his sheriff-like mentality in attacking his first hurdle of addressing a league whose most notorious players were building up bad rap sheets.
Like many a crack-down policy before it (The War on Drugs, Three Strikes, Broken Windows), it was stimulated by an American audience revolting with each passing summer at the number of young black men in their favorite sport being arrested for violent crimes in the off-season, and EVERYONE participated. Sports radio stations were flooded with white male callers incredulous at how their “spoiled” black athletes could do whatever they were charged with. The now-liberally slanted ProFootballTalk carried a “police blotter” as recently as 2017 chronicling each player arrest and making light of how long we would collectively have to wait until the next one. TV stations and many former players built proverbial rocking chairs for themselves to lob their salvos about how today’s league had no discipline. The public outcry was damn universal, and a freshly minted commissioner had a PR hors d’oeuvre walked right up to him with a napkin and toothpick. Our collective outcry in 2007, perhaps a harbinger of outcries to come, was that for these young black men due process wasn’t good enough or fast enough. We wanted these people off our television screens, and Roger delivered.
The revised player conduct policy, whose grand opening in 2007 featured a year long suspension of Adam “Pacman” Jones and an 8 game suspension of the late Chris Henry, fashioned itself a hammer to every nail it could find. The policy was designed around a well-received ESPN chyron more than it was around sensible justice. First timers were met with a slap on the wrist, and repeat offenders saw their punishments exponentially ramp up. The nature of each offense was largely ignored, meaning the bigger punishments only found their way to players whose reputations preceded them. Nothing had to be sorted out; by the time an 8 to 16 game suspension was levied, it was little more than Roger calling a player bad news when he had already created a bunch of bad news, seemingly reducing the chances of Goodell getting one of these large punishments wrong to almost nil. In the 11 years this policy has been in action, only 10 players have been suspended for 8 games or more. The Sheriff had officially rode into town.
While the PR victories piled up in year one, Goodell had ignored several eventual consequences of carrying his shiny new publicly applauded self-appointed badge. First, and most egregious in hindsight, is the amount of power Goodell awarded himself in meting out our newfound televised justice. He was judge, jury, and executioner. Others were heard on most cases, but Roger always made the call, and he made sure you knew about it. A league with unionized players had no say in the result. The first major injustice or flop in determining a player suspension would leave Goodell alone to take all the hits. Second was, as with any crackdown policy, the inherent context of institutional racism in which it resides. In the name of acting tough, the NFL decided to rely on the output of a national policing system that has long been shown to disproportionately target blacks. Thus, you wind up suspending way more black players than white players based on the results. All ten of the aforementioned large suspensions, 8 games or more, were on black players. Third, and the one that would do Goodell’s image in, is his wedging the policy between public perception and due process. In essence, when due process didn’t quench the public’s thirst fast enough, Sheriff Roger rode in on his horse and suspended them. Not only did Goodell hitch his horse to a system that by every statistical measure disproportionately targets black men, but he also jumped in front of the bullet when that system failed. Enter Ray Rice.
The Ray Rice incident is nothing out of the ordinary as a case of domestic violence, far from the first or last one by an NFL player, and one of thousands of such unfortunate events in this country annually. What makes his case stand out as a player conduct issue is that perhaps we have never seen someone seemingly so squeaky clean have something so heinous as their first brush with the law. Rice was the backbone of his college team at Rutgers, and is arguably the man who put the program on the map, leading to its eventual incorporation into the Big Ten it has now. By his second pro season, he was just as much the backbone of the Baltimore Ravens. Three Pro-Bowls, two All-Pro selections, and one championship ring later, Rice had been well on a trajectory to the Hall of Fame. Like many running backs, however, he lost it quickly. 2013 was an unkind, injury-plagued reality check to Rice’s career, and it was more than feasible that even without the domestic violence incident that Ray Rice had seen his last of the NFL after that season. Upon learning of the incident, Sheriff Roger did what his policy baby told him to do, a first time offense in an otherwise sterling career well-representing of the game got Ray Rice a paltry two game suspension. Twitter saw it, the video was released, an entire gender was instantly alienated from a sport that for decades had the highest percentage of female fans, you know the rest.
Which brings me to my central point regarding the player conduct policy, a clear and obvious product of the 2007 zeitgeist, when systemic racism was more peripherally considered and a public hunger for justice reached broadband speeds: Is Roger Goodell more tone deaf for not punishing Ray Rice enough, or for wedging himself between public perception and a justice system that routinely fails women and minorities to begin with? Ray and Janay Rice remain wedded to this day, the charges against him were dismissed the following year, and the only lasting pieces of this incident for public consumption are the jarring video and a gender-alienating suspension of a player that likely was never going to play another down in the NFL anyway. Goodell should have recognized immediately the mess this policy was getting him into (he was told so through an independent investigation of the incident by Robert Mueller, speaking of harbingers) and completely scrapped it, either for one where the players had input or one that placed the onus squarely on our justice system to face the consequences of not getting it right. The law is slow, and it was never Roger Goodell’s job to speed it up to appease an all-white owners group and the mostly white paying public. It was a clear abuse of power that we all permitted in a time where we wanted quick and dirty change to make us feel better about watching football, and perhaps nothing confirms its abusive nature better than how much Roger has doubled down on these tactics when their flaws have been exposed.
3rd and 13 