What the NFL’s Domestic Violence Scandals REALLY Teaches

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell

The NFL has opened the 2014 Season with a firestorm. Unfortunately for the NFL that firestorm hasn’t been around its games as much as around the conduct of some of its players.

The scandal started with the now infamous Ray Rice video and the NFL’s paltry two game suspension for Rice.

In Roger Goodell’s defense, the NFL Commissioner was simply following the SAME tack taken by law enforcement which DID NOT pursue criminal penalties in the case.

Rice was initially charged with assault by the Atlantic City police in the early hours of February 15^th. But on March 27^th, an Atlantic City grand jury, presumably after watching all the Revel casino security camera videos, increased the charge to aggravated assault-bodily injury in the third degree and one count of simple assault. If convicted, Rice faced a penalty of three to five years in prison.

Rice's defense attorney, Michael J. Diamondstein of Philadelphia, then applied for pretrial intervention (PTI), a remedy that allows defendants to avoid conviction if they complete a court-ordered set of requirements. Apparently Goodell took that and Janay Rice’s testimony supporting her husband into account in rendering the 2 game suspension.

What I’ve taken from this ongoing scandal is two things; (1) there seems to be quite an appetite for a return to chivalry (protecting women) and (2) the media seems to either be belatedly waking up to widespread black dysfunction, OR (perhaps more likely) loves attacking blacks, so long as they are also “rich.” To date, ALL of those ground up in these domestic & now child abuse scandals are black.

I’m somewhat more interested in the former, that apparent return to chivalry, as it seems so incongruous coming, as it does, from those who also strongly support “women in combat,” and “more females in firefighting,” etc. There appears to be a disconnect there.

YES, women tend to be smaller, with far less upper body strength than men, so it would seem they NEED some societal protections, HOWEVER, if we acknowledge that a woman cannot fight a man and win (she CANNOT), then she also SHOULDN’T EVER be allowed in military combat, or in firefighting either...if you can’t fight a man, you almost certainly can’t fight a fire effectively either.

Nature is what it is and we are left to abide by that. We CANNOT and would not want to change the size and strength disparity between males and females, as it is so much a part of the physical attraction that leads to the very propagation of our species, so we set about protecting those who need protecting. Such sentiments tend to go away with women in combat positions, asserting that they can “fight as effectively as any man.”

I blame a LOT of this on that circus clown Bobby Riggs, who while making sport of Billie Jean King’s call for “gender equality in tennis,” also kindled a nefarious fiction that has only grown, despite ALL evidence to the contrary through to today.

In the 1980s male tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis garnered outrage by claiming, “The #1 female tennis player couldn’t beat the a male tennis player in the top 100.”

That “outrage” was itself ignorance. EVERY sport is divided between male and female because no woman in any sport can compete with any high performing male player. That’s why female tennis matches are a best two out of three, while men’s are a best three of five and why female golfers tee off closer to the greens and off of higher “lady tees.”

WHY is it inconvenient to acknowledge such a basic truth?

Recently female fighter Rhonda Rousey claimed she thought she could beat male boxer Floyd Mayweather in a MMA event. Good publicity, wrong-headed in every other conceivable way. IF such a fight were sanctioned and ended as it invariably would, the SAME champions of Rousey’s calling for such a fight would then deride it as “criminally sanctioned abuse.”

I admit that I am very unfamiliar with MMA fighting and equally unfamiliar with and disinterested in female boxing, BUT my view has always been, “WHY watch female boxing, except for the tits and ass? I am pretty certain that a male high school aged Golden Gloves boxer would beat ANY professional female in the ring.

What do I base that on?

Well, in 1971 I ran a 1:54.2 half mile (slightly more than 800 meters). In the 1976 Summer Olympics Tatyana Kazankina of the then Soviet Union set a women’s World Record in the 800 meters of 1:54.94. In short I beat the women’s world record holder in the Olympics held FIVE years later, when I was in high school.

And my school had 21 guys under 2 minutes in the half mile back then and I was NOT close to the best of us.

If “men and women are not so different,” males and females certainly ARE!

All this chivalry is good, so long as even greater common sense comes out of this. Let’s unceremoniously end any more calls for women in combat and let’s take a much more skeptical look at women in firefighting, commercial fishing, mining and other such “death professions.”

NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement is an Omen for the Rest of Economy....

From the outside the NFL’s current CBA negotiations which seem headed toward a lockout on March 4^th, 2011 seems to be an argument between billionaire owners and millionaire players, but it’s far more than that.

These negotiations offer a window into the “new economy,” and the consolidating of power among the haves and downsizing of wages for workers across the board – from the highest to the lowest end of the spectrum.

The owners have decided that despite the fact that the NFL has only seen revenues increase over the “Great Recession,” the owners need a greater piece of the pie, to “keep the players in their place.”

But this is NOT merely about “Union-busting owners versus greedy, over-paid players,” far from it. What it’s about is the consolidation of power by the “owner class,” and the shrinkage of what they almost universally see as “excesses,” that is “excessive compensation,” paid to workers that’s seen as unsustainable going forward.

The primary dispute centers around the amount of money that the owners want to take as “credit” from the revenue pool. In the previous agreement, the owners took $1 billion (“off the top”) from the pool of approximately $9 billion, but now the owners are looking to increase that to $2.4 billion, claiming “the economic realities of the era” require that shift.

This would effectively cut the players' share of the revenue by 18 percent, and that doesn’t sit well with the players.

And even though many players DO understand how the increased funding of the owners might well lead to an increased annual revenue thanks to new and improved stadiums, there are no assurances of that AND the owners have refused to open their books to the players.

Beyond that is concern, on the part of the owners, that some player behavior is and has been counter-productive to growing the sport, already America’s #1 Revenue-producing sport.

The owners argue that today’s players are being paid like they’re CEOs and executives at major corporations. CEOs don’t moonlight as reality TV stars. High-profile executives get canned for sexual harassment and multiple accusations of sexual assault. Good executives work year-round.

As Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports notes, “They don’t want to share half of their revenue with people they don’t believe have the necessary character to collectively act in a way that allows them to economically grow the game at a rapid pace. If the players want half the revenue, the owners want to believe the players have a sincere interest in being equal partners in the growth of the game.”

While the players would want some form of self-policing, the owners see an 8 percent to 10 percent shared-revenue cut for players across the board as better insurance than trying to predict who might be the next Brett Favre, Albert Haynesworth, Ben Roethlisberger or Chad Ochocinco.

In fact, there are only a couple of things both sides can agree on, better benefits for retirees and a rookie pay scale so that proven players can get better salaries in their middling years when they are in their prime and their bodies haven't worn down yet.

Ironically enough, and in the spirit of our all being “our own worst enemies” is that Carolina Panthers Owner, Jerry Richardson (the ONLY former player among the NFL owners) is the biggest hawk among the owners.

Richardson is adamant about the owners taking this opportunity to press the players and take control of their league. And just as the vast majority of fans are on the side of the owners, the voters have rewarded the biggest cutters (Governors like Chris Christie, R-NJ and Andrew Cuomo, D-NY) with huge approval numbers.

Which is why that very same dynamic is now in play in the public sector  - the private sector long ago commenced with its own blood-letting. Today, major cities are laying off teachers, cops, firefighters wholesale and looking to scuttle the defined benefits pensions for future and even existing public employees.

Corporations and Municipalities are divesting themselves of healthcare costs and as much of their “future costs” (worker’s defined benefits pensions) as they can) in order to become more streamlined and competitive in the existing global economy.

As painful as this downsizing is, it’s also inevitable.

Bet on the NFL owners...and the public sector managers.