And yet, when it came time for the NFL’s Personal Conduct Policy to kick in, commissioner Roger Goodell did not have enough information to enforce the policy which was created after he previously was proven to not consider domestic violence to be a particularly serious issue.
Now,
speaking with the New York Daily News’ Gary Myers, Goodell has patted himself on the back for the strides he and the league have made in the issue of addressing domestic violence.
“I think we’ve made tremendous progress,” Goodell stated. “Can we make more and will we make more? Of course.”
On the topic of cutting the mandatory six-game suspension down to just one game without any explanation, Goodell still had no answer. He spoke of how complex the situations can be, which is certainly true, and he spoke of how he and the league care deeply about preventing such situations from ever happening, which historically has proven to be false. But he still has yet to explain how a mandatory punishment arbitrarily was reduced by 83 percent.
......
For starters, Goodell said that the NFL “didn’t get a lot of information” on Brown, leaving out the inconvenient detail that his investigator’s “methods” of obtaining information were
amateur at best, and that numerous reporters were able to easily gather information with a simple request.
But Goodell compounded this deceitful claim by doubling down on the league’s willful ignorance of the situation.
“Here’s the issue: the discipline that occurred on the one game [suspension] was for the event on May of 2015,” Goodell said of Brown’s arrest. “That was the only one that we were able to get of all the different things that we’ve heard. The decision was made by our team after we had the evidence to be able to support the one game. We knew we would get challenged [by the NFL Players Association] and we were able to uphold it.”
The method of the commissioner there was clear: distort reality, then present the situation as a victory for the NFL.
