Ok every week there is a different scandal with at least one player, my team is not immune from all this, and not playing at all well lately. The way the NFL has conducted itself regarding the concussion issues, the domestic violence and childwhipping, the drug issues, etc, has been shameful and wrong at every turn. Only when the public opinion starts to affect their bottom line do they talk about “change” and “doing what’s right”. The role models seem few and far between, and the thugs and abusers seem to be taking over.
I am seriously thinking about just sitting out the rest of this season. I know the loss of one fan doesn’t really matter that much to the NFL, and I don’t really spend that much on merchandise or tickets. But I’m losing my enjoyment of the sport and it’s getting really hard for me to get excited about it at all. It’s at the point where I have more negative than positive feelings about football, and the news from the NFL is just one fiasco after another. Roger and at least some of the other top brass need to resign to save face, but it’ll be a long and drawn out process that will take most of the attention away from football. I just don’t have the energy for it. Even if my team turns things around and goes to the SB my interest is fading. Maybe next year, guys.
Hockey is filled with drunks and violent jerks, too.
There isn’t any form popular entertainment in which everybody can be certified as morally pure. I don’t blame you for being disgusted by Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, but there’s no sport that doesn’t have scummy characters.
Baseball has always had drunks and lowlives- even murderers, like Cesar Cedeno.
Even the WNBA’s biggest star ever, Chamique Holdsclaw, is a violent psychotic.
Mel Gibson. Charlie Sheen. Carmen Electra. Sean Penn. Nick Cage. Steven Segal. Mickey Rourke. Gary Busey. Christian Slater. James Caan.
Tommy Lee. Chris Brown. Ozzy Osbourne. Vince Neal. Axl Rose. Flava Flav. Glen Campbell.
Can’t watch television, movies, or listen to music.
Unfortunately, domestic violence is all to prevalent in society, and it doesn’t just effect sports or entertainment celebrities, but restaurant owners, doctors, politicians, and preachers.
But if you do stop watching the NFL, which is completely up to you, might I suggest you donate the time you would have spent (or the money you could have earned) to a domestic violence shelter near you.
The problem with the Rice situation wasn’t that an NFL player broke the law, as people in any field will do sometimes. It’s that an NFL player got caught breaking the law in a horrifying way and the league didn’t really care. In the distant past people didn’t really expect their sports leagues to care about that, but today they do and the NFL utterly failed to deal with the situation. The league has been trying to market itself to women for years but has never really given a crap about domestic abuse, and this time they failed in a very visible way - and then defended itself awkwardly while some fans said really unpleasant things in the league’s defense. Everything since then - Rice part 2, Hardy, Peterson, etc. - shows that the league is trying to figure out what to do and that it’s not sure what the public wants. I’m not sure exactly what the public wants either, so as far as that goes I don’t blame the league for being confused.
All of that to one side: of course you shouldn’t watch if you’re not enjoying it. Over the last almost-year I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t enjoy this sport and don’t want to support it while the players are giving themselves brain damage at top speed. But the handling of the Rice situation was also abysmal, and in some ways it was consistent with the way the NFL handled the growing evidence of brain damage: it sat on the truth and spent years trying to deceive the public and its players about what was happening, then tried to act surprised by the truth, then tried to act concerned about the players’ health while it continued to do things that show it doesn’t care much about their health, like playing more Thursday night games and pushing toward an 18-game schedule.
Wait, if they were playing well, would that influence your position?
I am not trying to pick on you here, but I suspect there is a contingent of fans who are willing to look the other way when their team is doing well, or when they have already spent money on season tickets, or are somehow invested (emotionally, financially) in their team.
I think the NFL screwed the pooch on the handling of the Ray Rice case, and they should have suspended him for at least 6 games. So none of this is an excuse for their actions. But …
Domestic violence cases are extremely difficult to handle, and doubly so when the victim, who is the one whose feelings we should most be concerned about, doesn’t want to press charges or have any discipline taken. When Janay Palmer is sitting in your office, saying she is, in part, to blame, that the problem has been solved and won’t happen again, and is begging you not to discipline her husband, it’s a very difficult decision. Do you support her and follow her wishes or do you ignore the victim’s wishes and statements and bring the hammer down? It’s not an easy call, and I’m thinking that Goodell, like many people who have never been educated about domestic violence and the issues that surround it, made his mistake by listening to the victim too much, not because he didn’t care about domestic abuse.
Again, I’m not excusing the mistakes the NFL and Goodell made, but having been intimately involved in the progress the criminal justice system went through in the 90’s with the domestic violence issues, I can understand it. I see Goodell making the same mistakes that I saw too many police officers, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and legislatures did while they worked their way through the issue.
Unfortunately Goodell and the NFL didn’t realize until too late the underlying issues in handling domestic abuse cases, but hopefully from here on out, they’ll do much better.
Well, as I stated there are numerous things that seem to be taking away my enjoyment of the game, and what looks like another bad season is not making the decision to give the Futboal season a miss any more difficult. If they were coming off a good season and maybe even SB prospects I don’t know if that would be enough to keep watching. I don’t really like to deal with broad hypotheticals.
Yes I realize that all professional sports are like this at least to some degree. I remember many players from the 60’s and 70’s getting in trouble, but it wasn’t splashed all over the media for weeks or months and given the attention it is now. Thats what’s new, how much media attention this stuff is getting recently. How poorly they’ve handled this latest batch of off field issues is another key issue. Even under heavy public criticism the NFL wouldn’t budge, and it took corporate sponsors pulling out to make them relent and start handing out harsher punishments for players who did horrible things.
Then, once the heavy punishment is finally handed down, the players association challenges it. Because they botched things so badly. It’s like a movie in which a character has a bad day that just keeps getting worse and worse, and every reaction they have to the bad things around them is the wrong one. It’s a horrifying slow motion trainwreck of kids that’s then hit by a plane of wives, then run into by a bus full of nuns, etc.
Since the media is all about the wreck, and there’s not much to get excited about this year I don’t have any desire to tune in. Which feels strange, to declare myself not a part of this yearly ritual. I’ll look at the people in their game clothing, on their way to watch, and feel a distance from them rather than a kinship. It’s a sense of loss and guilt, but oddly liberating at the same time. It feels like I decided to stop going to church or broke up with someone that liked me more than I liked them.
I’ll probably be back next year. It’s just I’m dealing with a lot of things right now, and I don’t want to devote the usual time to this league behaving badly this season or watching the investigations and court battles play out. I kind of feel like we’ve been drifting apart for a while now. No, there aren’t any other sports. I just think I need some space.
In 1973, Cesar Cedeno murdered his girlfriend. Major league baseball welcomed him back. So did his teammates, so did the fans, and nobody seemed to care.
Ray Rice is hardly the first pro athlete to beat his wife. Sports are filled with “domestic violence” cases, and Rice’s 2-game suspension was a harsher “punishment” than most others received.
Warren Moon is a wife beater. So is Jason Kidd. Neither is persona non grata in his former league. ESPN never made a big deal of either case. Roger Goodell’s only crime is not figuring out that the media changed their collective minds about an hour ago.
It would have been easier if the justice system hadn’t also screwed up by giving Rice a sweetheart deal that allowed him to avoid jail. Even so- what you’re describing is still a pretty major screwup by the NFL, particularly since there was video of the whole event. The short suspension and their justification tells you that this was not a major priority for the league.
I know that and I addressed this in the post you quoted. And the trends that bit the NFL on the ass here are a lot older than an hour. The NFL has been consistently slow in dealing with them, though.
It’s NOT just the league. Warren Moon is regularly invited on ESPN to talk about football. How can anyone at ESPN wag fingers at Roger Goodell when they have their own staff wife beater(s)?
When will Anheuser-Busch boycott ESPN for having a wife beater do commentary?
Well, don’t overlook the fact that Goodell set him self up as the guy who wasn’t going to put up bad behaviour off the field. Nor can you overlook the fact that in 2 weeks NFL players will be splotched with pink because of their attempt to win over female fans.
What good would be accomplished by the prosecution pressing the case for jailtime? What would the positives be for Janay Parker? What good would it do to her, the actual victim, to force her to get up on the stand and lie to protect her husband? What are the positives of having her skip town to avoid the trial or possibly locking her up to force her to testify? And if she lies for him? Shall we then prosecute her for perjury? Or if she says that she’s beaten him in the past or even earlier on the tape, or that she spit on him? Is that going to help her in any way?
It is all well and good to advocate jail sentences for domestic violence, hell, I’ve done more than my fair share. But the cost can be pretty heavy, and often born by the victim too.
Personally, I agree with you. Since it was a felony, Ray Rice should not have been allowed to go into pre-trial intervention. He needed a criminal conviction, and then get him into a Batterer’s Education Program. But it also isn’t so cut and dried as it may appear.
Their hypocritical bullshit statements about the NFL’s handling of domestic violence amused the piss out of me, considering Anheuser Busch had kept paying a fucktard like August Busch IV for years after his actions. And I’d be willing to bet that more than one of their workers has a conviction for domestic abuse on their record without being suspended by their managers.
I’m just spitballing here, but putting a violent criminal in jail? Possibly. I don’t know the people involved, but I’m unconvinced that giving a rich and famous wife-beater a sweetheart deal sends the right message. And no, I don’t know what’s best for her either - although the prosecution certainly wouldn’t have needed her to testify (do I have to explain why?), and I think cases like these often go forward without the cooperation of the victim.
I wouldn’t normally argue for a specific punishment in a case like this, so rather than arguing that jailtime was required I’ll say that that might’ve also been appropriate. What actually happened - on the court’s end and the NFL’s end - was not, and it seems like most people agree with that by now.
Yes, that is the obvious upside. For the period of time that Ray Rice is in prison, he is not going to commit domestic abuse.
The real question I was getting at was about the cost of obtaining that upside.
It might have been possible to convict without her testimony (but extraordinarily difficult, especially given his status), but how about if she testifies for him? She’s been pretty clear that she not only doesn’t want him punished, but also that she’s blaming herself for part of it too.
“Most people” weren’t hit by, then married, Ray Rice. “Most people” wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences of his going on pre-trial intervention rather than to jail. Most people aren’t the victim here, Janay Parker is. And she’s been perfectly clear about what she wants to happen. What stake, outside of righteous indignation, does anyone but her have to offer an opinion on what should happen to Ray Rice? She’s the one who has to live with the consequences.
I don’t necessarily agree with that point of view (although there are many advocates for the victims of domestic violence who disagree with me), but it isn’t an easy call to make. And I can see, and disagree with, someone who hasn’t done it before being persuaded by the victim to grant leniency.
It’s simply not as cut and dried as some would make it appear.
I gave it up a couple of years ago. Not for any of these reasons, it just got too tedious with all the normal stoppages plus all the penalties and injuries.
The NFL and TV have done a masterful job of marketing and promoting the game, but I came to the conclusion that the game itself just isn’t that compelling.
Now when the Broncos are on I have the whole golf course to myself - I can play 18 holes in 2 1/2 hours!
Your initial question about was about forcing her to testify against him - which you made sound so terrible (for her) that she have fled to avoid it assuming she didn’t just feel forced to lie to defend him. Now you’re proposing something different, which is that she might have chosen to testify for the defense. That’s a pretty significant difference.
Darn, I wish I hadn’t said Ray Rice hit most people. I have no idea why you’re spinning off on this tangent when I was just restating a position we both agreed with.
Most things aren’t. Then again, it looks like you’re throwing irrelevancies and speculation into the picture to try to prove your point. I don’t think that’s very effective.
Both were included in my initial question, so I’m not sure what your point is.
Those series of questions were to emphasize who has a real, tangible stake in how the Ray Rice case is handled. Hint: It isn’t the vast majority of people who have weighed in on the topic.
Sorry you can’t follow my points. I don’t think that’s on me.