Football is Scandalous

 

I’m a big sports fan, especially football but the huge noise that was made a few months back and is now being renewed over the off field and on field behavior of professional football players has gotten so blown out of proportion that it has become ludicrous. Is this part or any part of sports as newsworthy as wars and starving kids? If you really think so then you are definitely part of the problem. The media obviously thinks so and they continually make it the hot topic of the week. They did that back when the players all seemed to be beating their wives or kids. They do it when some player is dumb enough to get caught using drugs and now they are doing it about how much air is in a football. I expect the next big bruhaha is going to be about whether the grass has been trained to grow leaning north or south at the Meadowlands.

 

The media viciously attacked Roger Goodell, president of the NFL for his mishandling of Ray Rice and other wife beaters and criminals in that sport, but why was he dealing with that stuff at all? Is Jamie Dimon supposed to deal with his Chief accountant when he beats the crap out of his wife and throws her down an airshaft at The Plaza? Is the President of General Motors supposed to discipline his head of design when he paddles his kid’s ass for smoking? Of course not; the important offenses are criminal acts and though many of you don’t believe this, we have law enforcement agencies whose job it is to handle crimes in this country.

 

With all the noise that was made about Ray Rice, it was hardly mentioned by the media that he was actually indicted, long before Roger Goodell even got involved. And that’s as it should be. It isn’t the NFL’s place to deal with crime, tge have a hard enough time dealing with football; crime is the District Attorney’s and the police’s job.

 

It turns out that Rice was arrested and has already been tried and let off with a slap on the wrist by Atlantic County, NJ prosecutor Jim McClain who approved an application for admitting Rice to the state’s pre-trial Intervention program where he will undergo counseling but will not be incarcerated unless he does something else wrong. This sentence, if you can call it that, was adjudicated by Judge Michael Donio, who, along with McClain, is obviously a big Rutgers fan.

 

So why aren’t the media and the women’s organizations going after McClain and Donio instead of Goodell? Mainly because Goodell and the NFL make better Twitter feed and sell more soap. But before we go after the media and the women’s groups for going after the wrong party, we have to deal with one not so small problem. The NFL set themselves up to take this hit when they decided that they had to discipline their players from the top instead of letting each individual club do it to its own players. This was obviously done to take the owners off the hook, which is how the league is run.

 

We all know why they decided to do it this way. There are clubs that will discipline their players for some things and not for others, just as there are colleges that stick to the rules and there are those that don’t, and the NFL wanted one set of rules for all. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately that put them in the exact position they were in just before this whole thing blew up, where they are more interested in a guy getting caught with an once of grass then they are in one who beats the shit out of his wife or kid, or one who rapes some young girl.

 

We are speaking here, about an organization who’s credo is, winning isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing, and whose motto is, just win baby. An organization that thinks like this cannot be expected to make moral decisions and this is as much a moral question as it is a criminal one, especially since law enforcement seems to want little to do with it.

 

Has congress ever thrown a member of that disgraceful body out, because he clocked his wife? Do major corporations drop their tech geniuses or their financial gurus for doing dope? Not bloody likely. So why are we getting pissed off at the NFL instead of the Atlantic County, NJ criminal justice system?

 

At least in Minnesota they have indicted Peterson. Look, the NFL is made up of many kinds of people but a serious percentage of them are brutes, whose only success in life has come from their ability to dominate another human being. This is true to a lesser degree of soccer players and to a greater degree with rugby players. These are people, to whom, might makes right, and to expect them to always react in a seriously civilized manner, is foolish. To expect an organization that is ruled, to a great extent by former players and owners looking to the bottom line is just as foolish. That’s why we have a legal system. But sometimes the legal system fails even more than the others.

 

Interestingly enough, as a side light, both McClain and Donio are involved in case that relates to one Shaneen Allen a young mother of two who was caught at a traffic stop where it was discovered that she had a gun in the car for which she had a Pennsylvania, but no New Jersey, carry permit. For this heinous crime, obviously rated by McClain as much more threatening to the public good than beating the shit out of your girlfriend, Allen is now facing 3 to 10 years. Maybe it’s time that McClain and Donio get their heads out of their asses and get a grasp on what really constitutes a crime.

 

Goodell seems to be the media’s scapegoat. The media seems to have gone off half cocked, not reporting that the criminal authorities have already been involved, not speaking to any of the people who know Rice and finding out what an exemplary person he has been outside of this incident. (Not an excuse) Media talking heads sit around blathering about how the NFL screwed up by not processing the second video, but never mentioning how they, themselves, didn’t report anything about the criminal investigation. They’re the ones who really screwed up.

 

So the media made Goodell the bad guy for not crucifying Rice or Peterson or any of the guys who got caught with drugs.

 

So why did you just read all that stuff? Maybe because sports fans are nuts or maybe because the big media doesn’t have any idea what’s important, but this week a story that was worth nothing when it was hyped by the media, proved that nothing is too small not to be made into a front page story, if the media decides that they want to make it significant.

 

You may remember that after the League Championship game there was a huge noise about how much air was in the ball and all the media went crazy about this completely insignificant situation. How can you say it’s insignificant you may ask? Well, here’s how. Brady preferred the soft ball, which was according to the rules, too soft to be legal, but with it, he only scored a few points in the first half. In the second half with the ball he supposedly didn’t like, he blew the doors off the barn. So it’s all bullshit and so is the story that has pushed real news off the tube and the front pages.

 

So despite this Inflate gate thing being much ado about nothing, the media amped up a new campaign against Roger Goodell. This, of course gave Roger a chance to make a comeback. It didn’t matter that the whole thing was bullshit or that every other quarterback who has ever thrown a pass wants the ball this weight or that, and gets it. Roger figured that this was his chance to look like a tough guy instead of the nerd he had projected in the Rice & Peterson matters.

 

So he stepped up and threw the book at Brady and the Patriots, thereby showing the world that he did have balls, even if they are little tiny ones. Of course everyone is going to appeal their sentence, but that’s not what matters. What matters is that Goodell can now look like a true leader. In the cause of full disclosure, I should confess that I almost always root against the Patriots and I think their coach is a jerk, but to penalize them for something so insignificant is ridiculous and proves that neither Roger Goodell nor anyone else in that league should be sticking their nose in anything that happens off the field because none of them have any common sense, and the media shouldn’t be writing about stuff like this because they don’t have any sense at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One thought on “Football is Scandalous

  1. Nobody asked me but … move over, Jimmy Cannon. Move over , Red Smith. Another great article and I wish you could be a regular or even a guest on MSNBC or ESPN. You are THE voice in the wilderness.

    And hey move over Murray Kempton!

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