Let me make something clear from the outset: What Ray Rice did to his then-fiance in an elevator in a casino in Atlantic City in February was abhorrent. I cannot condemn domestic violence–and particularly Rice’s brand of detached viciousness–any more strongly. However, stark disapproval of domestic violence is fairly uncontroversial, and it’s not what I want to talk about.
The Ray Rice saga has become far more than an issue of crime and punishment, and it has brought to bear backward and backhanded aspects of the NFL’s festering underbelly. Nauseating as Rice’s behavior that night was, the series of events that followed it are mired in confusion, ineptitude, and deceit. Bad as he was, Rice has fallen victim to the will of the masses, and that festering underbelly of the NFL.
I agree with Ray Rice because he’s right–not about hitting his partner, but about the duplicity of the NFL’s response.
When Commissioner Roger Goodell decided to suspend Rice for two games, he mostly just made the number up. The NFL didn’t have a policy for dealing with domestic violence issues, and Goodell is wont to exact arbitrary discipline. Somehow, 2 games was deemed appropriate. Immediately after the suspension was announced, the NFL was met with a public outcry unlike any before it. From the Commissioner’s standpoint, it was strikingly clear–for PR purposes, at least–2 games was far too short, and Goodell wrote a letter to NFL owners admitting he’d made a mistake. Both to mollify the media and to prevent similar mistakes in the future, the NFL instituted a policy mandating 6 game suspensions for first time domestic violence incidents and a lifetime ban for another. Despite all that, Ray Rice’s suspension remained 2 games.
That it took this long for the NFL to create a domestic violence policy (that problem has been around far longer than PEDs) is pathetic, but at least it’s in place now. If the NFL thinks that 6 games is a sufficient amount of time for an abuser to sit out, fine–we might all disagree, but fine.
So that brings us to last week. Supposedly novel footage of Rice’s transgressions surfaced, and the hammer dropped with all the wrath of a vengeful God Goodell. And here’s where things fall apart. If, after updating their policy on the subject, the league decided to change Rice’s suspension from 2 games to 6, that would have been reasonable; underhanded and shifty, but reasonable. Instead, after the tape of the assault came out, the league blew off it’s own domestic violence policy before the ink was dry, suspending Rice indefinitely.
That decision was indefensible. No matter how heinous Rice’s actions–and again, anyone defending his actions after watching that tape is clearly off their meds–nothing Rice did was anything other than a violation of the league’s domestic violence policy, punishable by a 6 game suspension. The only way to interpret the adjustment is as a panicked, reflexive, reactionary, response to bad publicity. Just because there is a tape of the Rice incident doesn’t make it different from any other domestic violence event, and doesn’t justify Rice being punished differently than any other offender.
There is a reason that judges don’t get to make up sentences as they go along. As a society, we have decided that there must be certain guidelines in place to ensure that crimes are punished fairly. It would be cruel and unusual if objectionable thieves went to prison for life while sympathetic murderers received a slap on the wrist. All murderers go to jail for 25 years no matter how much we can empathize with their motives; no thieves go away for life, no matter how angry they make us.
Ray Rice should be suspended from the NFL. But his appeal on the length of that suspension should be upheld. He’s been cut by the Ravens; he’s certainly a distraction (whatever that means), and judging by his actions in and out of that elevator, he has serious issues that need serious and immediate attention. Signing him would probably be a bad football decision given all the character questions, personal baggage, and the media firestorm to which he is intrinsically linked. It’s very possible that Ray Rice never plays pro football again, but if that’s the case, it should be because no one wants to hire him–not because a governing body scrambling to save face saw convenient straw man to distract from its own ineptitude.
-Max Frankel
Author’s Note: I attended the high school next to Rice’s in New York at around the same time Rice was there. I watched him play back then and until recently, I considered myself a fan. I am a fan no longer.
