After ‘new’ video surfaced Monday morning of Ray Rice doing his best War Machine impression thanks to TMZ, the Baltimore Ravens decided they couldn’t continue to post tributes on their website about him and subsequently released their starting running back.
Ravens head coach John Harbaugh addressed the Rice situation this afternoon (via CBS Sports):
“After seeing something this morning, seeing the video this morning, we had a chance to get together with Steve, Dick, Ozzie and myself and we had a meeting. It was not a long meeting. We came to the decision we came to to release Ray and that’s what we did,” Harbaugh said. “So you know that. I had a chance to talk with Ray along with Ozzie this afternoon after we did it.”
But it wasn’t just the Ravens who continued to be more reactive than proactive, the NFL based on the video evidence (supposedly) suspended Rice indefinitely.
Roger Goodell has announced that based on new video evidence that became available today he has
indefinitely suspended Ray Rice.— Greg Aiello (@gregaiello) September 8, 2014
Both the Ravens and Roger Goodell also claim this is the first time they’ve seen the video of Ray Rice knocking out his then fiancee. Of course though that probably means they’ve seen the said video many times prior and were hoping it wouldn’t go public.
Anyways, the NFL continues to be a giant dumpster fire when it comes to disciplinary action towards it’s players. I mean don’t get me wrong, Ray Rice certainly deserves a very long suspension and probably should have been thrown in jail instead of the laughable pretrial intervention program that will prevent him from any type of prosecution. However with the NFL’s lack of any adequate suspension to begin with, the League and especially Roger Goodell look even more foolish this time around.
First Goodell and the NFL still have zero sense of permissible penalty for a players actions. If they would’ve suspended Rice for the entire season initially then whatever, things probably aren’t as nonsensical as they are now. However it was Goodell that thought a two-game suspension was enough of a penalty for a well conditioned athlete to knock out a what I’m guessing is a 130 lb woman. And please, save the rhetoric that this was all done in response to today’s video release by TMZ. If by some circumstance the Ravens AND NFL didn’t see this new video prior to today (which I wholeheartedly DON’T buy) it doesn’t take a freakin’ genius (or the video for that matter) to know what went down inside that elevator.
Second, to further point out those inconsistencies with League discipline, lets not forget that this is the same Commissioner that handed down a two-game suspension to Lions’ defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh for stomping on Packers OL Evan Dietrich-Smith a couple of years ago. It’s also the same Commissioner that slapped Terrelle Pryor with a five-game suspension for selling merchandise that BELONGED TO HIM. Oh yeah, let’s also not forget that Pryor sold his own property while he was in college, not the NFL.
Finally what does Rice’s indefinite suspension mean for Goodell’s new domestic assault policy that was so well received a couple of weeks ago? Is Rice going to get six-games now or are we back to the drawing board with that one since obviously protocol wasn’t really followed if at all?