NFL shows its true colors
The NFL doesn’t care about you.
That statement can be directed at anybody really. It can be directed at women, a fact that has been clearly on display the last few months. It can be about players, who the league has proven immanently replaceable over the years. It can be about the intelligent consumer, an aspect of its fanbase it has insulted openly over the past few days.
Either way, the point stands the same.
That’s what the league has proven with its botched handling of the suspension of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice.
If you didn’t know before, all the NFL cares about is making money. Whether you, or your public opinion get in the way, it doesn’t care.
New information surfaced this week regarding Rice, namely a video of him striking his then-fiancee inside a casino elevator earlier this year. It was the accompanying video to the already widely-seen video of Rice dragging his now-wife’s unconscious body from the elevator.
The first video caused an uproar, one that was only strengthened by the league’s seemingly lenient response of a two-game suspension.
This, afterall, was the same league that suspended a player indefinitely only months before for bullying a teammate. The same league that suspended a player five games for violating rules in college.
The same league that had a commissioner unafraid to punish its players for any reason, real or imagined, if it damaged the reputation of the NFL.
“We are all accountable and responsible for player health and safety and the integrity of the game. We will not tolerate conduct or a culture that undermines those priorities. No one is above the game or the rules that govern it,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in 2012 following his suspension of four New Orleans Saints players and two coaches for a bounty scandal.
That same league, hard lined against violence within the sport and anything that could be deemed an embarrassment, ironically was taken down by being too soft on violence outside the game. The NFL’s response in the aftermath has been an embarrassment.
It continues to preach that it never saw the second video, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Goodell, who told the Saints in his 2012 punishment that ignorance wasn’t an excuse for poor behavior, used ignorance as an excuse for not suspending Rice longer despite being told all the gruesome details of the incident. It’s again trying to deflect blame, performing an internal investigation of its handling of the situation to buy itself time.
The league effectively tried to sweep this all under a rug, while it got back to making money pandering to women with pink shoes and gloves on Thursday night football. Your opinions don’t matter as long as you keep watching football.
Rest assured, the league will get better, as long as the public continues to demand a better product and better behavior from that product.
But the NFL will never care about you. Only your money.