Stinks that Ravens, NFL chose protecting an asset over acting properly

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Ray Rice, Janay Rice

Somebody, somewhere, in the NFL office or within the 32 teams, must know what the right thing is and is willing to do it. These are billion-dollar businesses within a multibillion-dollar industry. Is it a job requirement to be crooked and two-faced?

It sure feels that way on yet another sickening day around America’s favorite sport.

It barely took an hour after Roger Goodell’s midtown Manhattan manure-fest for the stench around the NFL to get even thicker. This time, the funk emanated from Baltimore, thanks to ESPN’s report Friday night on how the Ravens went to great lengths to make sure Ray Rice paid as small a price as possible for knocking his future wife out cold — and to fool the public about what they were doing and why.

The easy explanation for the double-talk and the double-dealing revealed in the ESPN report is that the league has no moral compass, that the Ravens have their priorities twisted, or that it all exists in a culture with no accountability.

The individuals who did this shouldn’t get off that easy, just as Goodell and every other owner shouldn’t.

These were rich, influential, successful, largely beloved and respected men who are supposed to know better, who have great responsibility in their hands and, in the end, only cared about themselves, their bottom line and their reputations.

The horrible irony of it is that the Ravens are supposed to be one of the teams that does it right. Then again, the same hard lesson fans learn about their favorite players, applies to the men who hire those players and control so much of their lives: just because they see and read about the owner, president, general manager and other executives all the time, doesn’t mean they really know them.

Who recognises the Steve Bisciotti described in this story? The Dick Cass? The Ozzie Newsome? Scoping out favorable lawyers, lobbying for lenient court decisions, turning a willful blind eye to the brutal facts, talking the head coach out of his better instincts, spinning ugly fables about who was really at fault and who told the truth about what.

John Harbaugh took part in it to an extent, and looked bad doing it — but, the story says, he’s the one who originally wanted Rice off the team immediately. In the end, he was the human shield for the top brass. No one-on-ones on the couch, or open letters to the suiteholders, or determined public silence.

Instead, Harbaugh got the press conference by himself the night Rice was released, and the one after the prime-time game covered by three times the usual media contingent.

Within the hierarchy of wealth and power, somebody had to have said, “We can’t do this.’’ Harbaugh said it. He got silenced, then sacrificed.

Nobody else said it at any other step along the way. Nobody said, “There’s no way out of or around this. He did this to the mother of his child. We owe as much to them as we do to him, don’t we?”

That’s what is nauseating about these last few months in the NFL, in a nutshell. 

Bisciotti, Cass, Newsome and everybody who assisted and enabled them, fought to make sure Ray Rice didn’t have to pay the price.

But their bill is coming. It better be.

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