First lets start with the Ray Rice incident. We all know that the league mishandled this situation right from the start. Nobody really knew how badly the league mishandled it, but you knew somebody had dropped the ball. Now we have a somewhat clearer picture here. According to the reports that have been coming in, four league executives have said that Roger Goodell had seen the video months ago from inside the elevator and still didn't say a word. If that wasn't bad enough, according to various sources, when Goodell met with Ray Rice back in April, regarding this incident, Rice had told Goodell to his face that he had hit his fiance. Goodell has said in interviews that Rice was indifferent about it when they met back in April. So somebody here is lying, its either Goodell or its everybody else. In this case I really think it's Goodell. He's trying to cover his rear end for this whole thing. Now that all these reports regarding the Rice incident are coming around, Goodell is trying to make up for it by making the ruling against Rice he did. But by the time the ruling came down it was already too late, the cat was already out of the bag.
So with all this going on with Goodell, they are now going to have an independent investigation delving into Goodell’s possible involvement in a cover-up of the Rice affair, it adds even more pressure on what the commissioner will do, either being forced to quit or he's going to get fired because of this.
But wait, there's more to it than that.
Now throw into the mix the conviction of Carolina's Greg Hardy. Hardy was convicted in court for assaulting his former girlfriend, Nicole Holder, in an incident that allegedly involved hair-pulling, slamming a toilet seat on her arm, and putting his hands around her neck, according to reports. During week one, Hardy was allowed to play for the Panthers. Once this story became public, Hardy was scrapped from the Panthers lineup in week two in their win over the Detroit Lions. I'll give the Panthers credit in this incident for the way the have handled this story. They pulled him from the lineup, and gone on public record saying that they do not support this kind of incident. Now whether or not he will be back in the lineup next week is still up in the air, the Panthers are going to allow the legal process to take course.
Same thing too with the Vikings. Before Sunday's loss to the Patriots, the Vikings found out that Adrian Peterson turned himself in to Texas authorities for beating his four-year-old son bloody with a tree branch. He faces two years in prison for child abuse if convicted, but for now he will simply remain on the 53-man roster. He didn't play Sunday, but the team said he may be back for week three. The team is going to wait and let the legal system play out before making a decision on what to do. Minnesota has taken the high road and gone on record as to where they stand with this.
Nothing can be done yet to either Hardy or Peterson by the league until the process has gone through the legal system. I'm sure, though, once everything is sorted out, that appropriate actions will taken by both the NFL and the respective teams. What both teams should do is take this week by week as the story unfolds.
From a league point of view, these two stories couldn't come down at a worse time. Things were bad enough with what was happening with Ray Rice. Now add this onto that story, its making a public relations nightmare for the entire league. The NFL has had better weeks, that's for sure. The league is too powerful to ahve this really bring it down, but there has been damage done. It shows that the NFL isn't perfect and really needs to change the way it handles things. If it doesn't, it's going to get a lot worse.
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