1) The league has covered up for many violent men in the past.
2) Minor drug offenses have always been treated more seriously than wife-beating (or even murder).
3) Kraft is the spokesman for the owners and will (& should) always speak out on a controversial issues.
4) Blame Kraft for the decisions. Goodell is NOT incompetent. He does his job of serving the owners and the financial integrity of the game.
5) My BOTTOM LINE, is that the public will look and see a violent player on indefinite suspension for beating his wife. The fact that the initial suspension was only two weeks is worth lots of articles on the sports page.
6) The league is changing its priorities. Wife wearing is now starting to become more serious than minor drug offenses. Player safety is a #2 priority. This are good steps for the NFL. IMHO, Kraft and the public supports the NFL and its product.
I think the Leonard Little saga made it pretty clear that the NFL doesn't care at all about the character of its players. But at least Paul Tagliabue was borderline open about it: at least the league didn't claim to be some supreme arbiter of moral authority back then. The reason why I find Goodell so detestable is that this is what he's been hanging his hat on since the day he became commissioner. He was the new sherriff who was going to ride into town and clean up the league with zero tolerance for misbehavior. Everyone praised that about him when he was dishing out massive overreach, ovearreaction punishments to the Patriots for something as pointless as Spygate.
He was appointed to serve as a direct reaction to Tagliabue, and show that the Tagliabue era was over and that everyone in the league would be accountable now. Somehow, over the course of this Ray Rice fiasco, he's simultaneously proven that:
A) The only gauge by which he metes out punishment is whether or not the public is mad based on what they have or haven't seen. What was previously worth a 2 game suspension is now worth an indefinite one because people are angrier now.
B) He has absolutely no problem with covering up evidence and lying about what it says in order to craft a narrative that will make the public as upset (or not upset) as he wants them to be. In this case, he was covering up evidence to hold back the public anger. In the Bountygate case, he was outright lying about what the evidence said so that he could justify the desired punishment. Spygate was almost certainly another example of the latter, IMO.
C) Now that people have caught on to how arbitrary and deceptive he is, there's nowhere left for him to go. Everytime he's had to handle a perceived crisis in the past, he's held evidence back from the public, told them to trust his judgment, and ruled however he thought would score him and the league the most PR points. But now that nobody trusts his judgment, his pet formula just doesn't work anymore.
He's toast, or at least he damn well should be. If the NFL actually stands by this clown/hypocrite/*******, then good luck selling their pink crap.
): How does Ray Rice not have a legitimate legal complaint against the Ravens and the NFL for how it has handled his employment status? I'm not defending his crime, but he reportedly DID tell them precisely what happened in the elevator, and the league office DID hand down discipline. Nothing has changed except for the new video confirming what Rice supposedly told them.
