Here's what I don't get about the NFL and Ray Rice

Most of the folks that I follow in my Twitter timeline are focused on current affairs, culture or especially politics...and then there's sports. Today those two worlds collided in a nuclear chain reaction, with the shock video showing Ray Rice, (then) of the Baltimore Ravens, striking his then-fiancee, now wife, in the elevator of the then-Revel casino in Atlantic City. Suddenly, no one can talk about anything else.

Within a couple of angst-filled hours, the Ravens cut Rice, the NFL suspended him indefinitely, and it seems like a star running back in the prime of his career may never play another down. And that's clearly the right thing to do; pro football needs to send a clear -- albeit ridiculously belated -- message that was Rice did was way out of bounds and that domestic violence will not be tolerated, period.

Here's what I don't get. The NFL and the Ravens knew this summer that Rice had struck Janay Palmer hard enough to knock her unconscious -- video had already been made public that showed him dragging her from the elevator, knocked out cold. Based on that, the league suspended Rice for a whopping two games. The only new information today was that we saw the film of Rice doing what the world already knew that he'd done -- throwing the punch that knocked her out.

The fact that there had to be a public video of Rice striking the actual blow for the NFL and the Ravens to do the right thing is disgusting. It's quite a metaphor for what so many female victims of abuse everywhere go through every day -- the struggle to get society to simply take their word for it. We didn't really need this video to know that the NFL has been far too tolerant of domestic abuse by its personnel for far too long. And while we in the public may be seeing this for the first time, what about the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell? What did they know and when did they know it? This is a case where the cover-up couldn't be worse than the crime -- but it may turn out to be just as bad.

In an unrelated yet oddly very related matter, the NCAA chose today to announce that it's rolling back some of its penalties against Penn State in the Jerry Sandusky matter.

UPDATE: This dude on Twitter summed up what I was trying to say, and he did it in less than 140 characters: ""Remember, Ray Rice was not cut because they saw that video. He was cut because you saw that video."

God bless football -- our national pastime.