Being held “responsible” for its players’ sins is the price the NFL (and other American leagues) is willing to pay to maintain a certain amount of leverage over the players. By allocating responsibility for player discipline to Goodell’s office, the league avoids the uncomfortable (for the owners) system inherent in the Premier League, for example. There, disciplinary matters are left largely to the teams (at least for off-field transgressions) and the leverage of power leans distinctly more towards the players.
Contracts are more player-friendly in PL because they have to be. Any attempt to impose an NFL-like disciplinary structure in contract negotiations would be met with incredulity and immediate flight to another top league which doesn’t.
Accordingly, a club’s fans probably wouldn’t hold a player’s off-field transgressions against the club unless it detracted from his ability to help the team on the field. And if a club’s opponents objected to a transgressor’s continued presence, they would cheerfully be told to fuck off.
If you want to make a comparison you have to give the complete story. The one year suspension was after multiple repeat offenses and a DUI.
It’s Opra’s fault. The Open Public Records Act. Anyone can make an OPRA request. Some items made be exempt from release due to the criminal investigatory records exemption. I am certainly not an expert on the matter. But from what I know a government entity including the police must have a good reason to say an item is exempt from being released.
Hollywood used to be held to this dubious standard too. Now there really isn’t a single entity that can be targeted when an Actor or Actress does something outrageous or criminal. The public vents their fury on the person and not their employer. There seems to be an informal blacklist. A actor in trouble won’t get offered movie roles until they straighten up and at least pretend to have changed.
The NFL is a nice juicy target for anyone with a grudge to yell about and spew their venom. Same with the other sports leagues. Anything the athletes do gets blamed on the league. As if they had any direct control of these grown men’s private lives.
The NFL has been taking great care to widen their audience (women, Hispanics) so this comes at a bad time. Now, Jerry Jones being accused of sexual assault! Between this and the whole concussion problem, the league is in PR trouble.
Of course the NFL doesn’t have control over the private lives of the players. What it (actually the teams themselves) have control over is whether they continue to employ them. Have you even read this thread?
And do you consider someone bothered by this player’s actions simply someone with a “grudge”? That’s an interesting idea.
By grudge I meant people who dislike organized athletics. A athlete scandal confirms their bias and they tear into the NFL or whatever league it it. Fans of sports get angry too. If a athlete does something criminal it gets everybody upset with them. But, I see a lot of posts like “I hate football and this jerk should be fired …blah blah blah”. I don’t even waste time reading the rest. I’m more impressed when a fan says, “this guy went over the line and should be punished”.
Keep in mind that football players (and actors and other celebrities for that matter) are more than just “employees”. They are also the “product”. Sort of like a circus animal that escaped and went crazy. The zoo bears some responsibility.
NFL players are represented by a union & a collective bargaining agreement. Given their salaries, they ain’t Joe Sixpack down at the factory; they can afford the best & brightest representing them at negotiations time. While I’m in no way defending the guy, if I’m fired from my job I could still get a job in the same industry, as could most/all of you. Charlie Sheen had a major public meltdown & was fired, for cause, but he’s again working in the same industry. Ray Rice can’t because he’s been ‘suspended indefinitely’ by the league. To use the upthread examples, if I’m in a position of prominence in the auto industry & do something stupid/illegal away from work, I might lose my job but I still have the potential to be employed elsewhere in the auto industry. Not so with this WBA.
How the Hell did the NFLPA allow this to get into the CBA; that an off-the-field incident bans you from the league (industry)?
If I was fired from my job after a domestic violence incident, I would have a very difficult time getting another job as an engineer somewhere. More to your point, if a union autoworker was fired for cause and the union agreed with it, could he really get another job in a union shop?
One of the issues here, from what I’ve read, is that Roger Goodell appointed himself as disciplinary adjudicator, so he put himself into the issue while remaining the head muckety muck of the NFL.
Lots and lots of pressure from the guys who were paying these steroid junkies* millions and millions of dollars?
They don’t like bad PR either - hard to pick up the chicks when you just paid a rapist/murderer another 10 Million - and his activity is all over the web? Not just the before and after (remember? at first there was just the video of them entering and leaving the elevator)?
Yeah, they might just want some absolute leverage over these people.
yep - all those muscles are natural - no steroids here. At least they aren’t as obvious as the baseball players.
As big a critic as I am of the league, I’m almost as big a one of the NFLPA, though I temper my criticism with the knowledge that it is almost hopelessly outgunned whenever it goes up against the 31 multi-billionaires who own the teams.
The NFL will always resist surrendering its centralized control over player discipline because then all hell breaks loose, in its perspective. If teams have control over player discipline (limits could be imposed by collective bargaining), the fear by the teams is that they would then have another avenue of competition – another team could always gain an edge by being slacker on discipline. The NFL is designed to equalize competition, not increase it. By imposing punishment on a league-wide basis, it eliminates the possibility of a player simply signing with another team with different standards of behavior.
It would be fascinating to observe, though, how different cities would pressure their local teams to impose discipline for off-field activities. Fans in one city may want the local franchise owner to jettison a player for the most minor of infractions while fans in another (I’m looking at you, good denizens of Oakland!) may forgive just about anything up to and including murder, as long as the culprit can still sack the QB on Sunday.
Well, that depends on your sense of proportion. In the criminal justice system a multiple drug offender is likely to receive a far harsher sentence than a first-time violent offender (assuming the latter didn’t rape or kill anyone.)
Are you referring specifically to Goodell’s power within the NFL or in general to the relatively new penalties/punishments for N-word usage and domestic violence?
