NFL just giving lip service to domestic violence | Sam Donnellon
Its clearly most costly to your bottom line to take a moral stand than not to.
WELL, THE NFL draft has come and gone and, by golly, isn't that a good thing? No more talk about these fine young men punching women in their faces or kicking their pregnant bellies or even mistreating puppies or stealing stuff.
They cost themselves money with all that, didn't they?
Well, then, doesn't that mean that justice is served?
If all that made you a little unnerved, well, you'll get over it. You'll calm down in a few months, maybe even forget about it completely. I know that, you know that, and most important, the teams that drafted what appeared to be a record number of athletes who have been charged with domestic violence know that, too.
Victory trumps virtue in sports. Or at least it does in this era of billion-dollar television contracts; an era when it is more costly to your bottom line to take a moral stand than not to.
The NFL has a problem here? What problem? There's no problem. These weren't NFL players when they did such things.
They were in college. Out of our jurisdiction then.
So there's no problem. We're not a court of law. That's the stand. Our fans understand the bind we are in. At least they will once the fantasy drafts come along. Most Chiefs fans were cheering receiver/return specialist Tyreek Hill by midseason last year. Some of the same ones all bent out of shape when Andy Reid used a fifth-round pick to select the first-round talent in last year's draft, two years after he pleaded guilty to punching his pregnant girlfriend in the face and stomach before choking her.
Reid said after drafting Hill that everyone deserves a second chance. That's the standard-issue line, the one also used by Jacksonville Jaguars general manager Dave Caldwell after using a fourth-round pick on Oklahoma wide receiver Dede Westbrook. Westbrook, according to the Tulsa World, was accused of throwing the mother of two of his children to the ground in 2012 and of "biting the same woman's arm and punching her in the face with a closed fist" the following year. He was arrested in both cases but never convicted.
He is 23.
"I think we all have been accused of things, not all of us, but many of us have been accused of things," Caldwell said. "We don't take it lightly."
Nor do we.
Nod, nod, wink, wink.
So have a press conference, say you're sorry and that it's all in your past, run for a couple hundred yards and a couple touchdowns in your first few professional games next season and all will be forgotten.
Provided, God forbid, someone doesn't unearth a video of you hitting, kicking or strangling a wife, a girlfriend, a future mother of your child - or simply someone you met at the local watering hole who managed to resist your irresistible charm.
That's what separates Westbrook's college teammate, running Joe Mixon, from the others, and made his drop in the draft the most severe. When he broke a woman's jaw with a punch at a restaurant in 2014, surveillance video caught it, and Mixon was suspended by the Sooners for the season. When the video was released last December, it went viral. The Bengals picked him in the second round, citing the well-worn second-chance clause.
"He gets an opportunity to move forward and write his script from there on," Bengals coach Marvin Lewis said.
To his credit, Mixon's regret seems real and better thought out than that of others who have seemed to regret the consequences of their crime disproportionately to the act itself. "It's never OK to hit a woman," he has said. "Never. I will preach to anybody. It's never OK."
But the question remains: Does he "deserve" a second chance? Or should he and others with domestic-violence rap sheets be required to earn their way onto the field, or even into the NFL?
A thought: Why not create a policy that allows for any player who has been arrested, convicted or under investigation to be drafted (at the club's risk), but not allowed to play until either their innocence is established or their court-mandated punishment served. Perhaps use a percentage scale to determine the length of those given probationary sentences - i.e., three years' probation equals one full season out of the NFL, preferably involved in an off-field activity that begs for that "deserved" second chance.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has made it perfectly clear he can enact any disciplinary measure he wants. Tom Brady served a four-game suspension for deflated footballs - two more than the NFL's purported baseline suspension for players involved in domestic violence.
Doesn't that make everyone a little unnerved? Because it should. But until it does, the league's moral compass will remain in the same vault where the money is kept.
And until we force them to use it, ours aren't doing much good, either.
@samdonnellon
Columns: ph.ly/Donnellon