Hypocrisy thy name is NFL

I like to say I’m surprised at this but I’m not. The NFL was shocked by what they saw on the Ray Rice video. Really?

From the Post:

Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice lost his job Monday, and the National Football League endured a fresh salvo of criticism after surveillance video surfaced showing Rice knocking his then-fiancee, Janay Palmer, unconscious in an Atlantic City casino elevator in February.

Ravens Coach John Harbaugh said he met with General Manager Ozzie Newsome, team President Richard Cass and owner Steve Bisciotti to make the decision to release Rice. According to Harbaugh, he and Newsome spoke to Rice in the afternoon.

“It changed things, of course,” Harbaugh said of the video at an evening news conference at the team’s training facility in Owings Mills, Md. “It made things a little bit different.”

You need video to figure out what happened in that elevator. What did they think happened they fist bumped each other. No one and I mean NO ONE should need to see what happened inside the elevator when there was footage from the lobby showing what happened when the elevator doors opened. Rice moved his then financee’s limp body out of the elevator like it was a sack of potatoes and showed no interest what so ever in her condition.

The NFL said it had never seen the video.

This is from a column by Sally Jenkins which I agree with whole heartedly:

If NFL executives and Baltimore Ravens staff had never seen that tape before, there are only two reasons: willful blindness, and the determination to maintain plausible deniability. Two NFL analysts with reputations for impeccable sources, Peter King of Sports Illustrated and Chris Mortensen of ESPN, were told months ago the league had to have seen the tape. Ray Rice’s own attorney had a copy of it. It simply defies belief that league and team officials couldn’t have seen it if they wanted to.

This once again reinforces what the bottom line is for the NFL. The NFL’s image and ability to spin the issue. Concussions spin it for a while. Say riding a bike is more dangerous than a concussion. Call into question the conclusion of doctors on what’s going on in player's brains. Do that until players are killing themselves and the scientific evidence is overwhelming and then see the light. Settle a lawsuit pledge money for research. Blah Blah. Players are committing crimes right and left. Sweep it under the rug until the PR becomes so bad, you have to do something about it.

The reason the NFL did what it did was not out of some sense of outrage over what Rice did but the terrible backlash that was and is happening against the NFL in the media and public.

As I said in the beginning hypocrisy thy name is NFL