Domestic Violence. It’s bad. There something a country so torn apart by politics and hot button issues can all agree on. Domestic violence is bad. Well maybe everyone except Washington Redskins owner, Dan Snyder. Ok also maybe not the NFL, cough cough Greg Hardy there for a while. Today I want to talk about that. Domestic Violence and how the NFL’s per view of the matter has changed over the past five years.
Ray Rice, I started watching football a year before the Rice incident. So I will never really view him as a talented football player but more as the face of domestic violence in the NFL. It’s shocking as a 14 year old kid to see an athlete deck a woman and then drag her into an elevator but believe it or not those videos were my first real exposure to what domestic violence was. A dictionary definition though: violent or aggressive behavior within the home, typically involving the violent abuse of a spouse or partner. Now was Ray Rice in the home? No, but it was his partner that he thwacked before dragging her into an elevator like a war casualty. Look to former Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt though, his actions were neither toward a partner, nor in his home so I want to broaden this article a bit. This is not an article necessarily about domestic violence, but more so how the NFL deals with players violence towards women and children.
Back to Ray Rice, the shock and awe of the entire Rice situation was that the first punishment to come down from the NFL was a two-game suspension. That’s right, two. So at least we have made some progress when dealing with violence towards women and children in our league. Of course, then came the public outcry and suddenly for the first time in American History, domestic violence became a hot button issue. In my opinion the Ray Rice situation changed the way the public and the media talked about domestic abuse.
What if the Ray Rice, and Kareem Hunt situations played out more privately though? What if there were no TMZ tapes? The answers are Reuben Foster, currently with the Washington Redskins and Greg Hardy, now out of the league. Both Foster and Hardy’s situations played out a lot more privately than Rice and Hunt’s situations. Both were let back into the league and had careers while being investigated.
The sad truth is if you’re a talented athlete you have a longer leash. That doesn’t make sense for Foster though who took a step back this last year and was benched by the niners in September. The point of this article is as follows, people will point at the Chiefs and say the NFL did the right thing when it came to a pro athlete committing a violent act against a woman. Is that really true though? I don’t think so, I think the Chiefs were forced into the move for PR purposes, to be honest, they didn’t do anything when the victim first made the claims against Hunt, how do we know they wouldn’t have kept him on if this video didn’t come out? The point is this, the NFL is not perfect, it is getting better, but it is not perfect and to say they have done the right thing is to completely forget. That the Washington Redskins have a guy who has been charged with domestic violence, not once but twice and possibly with a third time coming. The NFL still has a long way to go.