State your case
Yes- by Logan Jones
The NFL has a problem. Without explicit footage, the Ray Rice incident may have merely registered as a mere blip on the police blotter, as so many other crimes committed by NFL players have done. But even with access to the tape, NFL commissioner Rodger Goodell has displayed everything wrong with the current culture in professional sports in just two short weeks.
Inconsistency is enough to get on the nerves of sports fans, but to tick off sponsors like Nike and Anheuser-Busch? That takes a whole new degree of incompetence. Goodell oversees a league that has, until now, ignored social issues with almost no consequences. Of course, Goodell being disliked isn’t grounds for expulsion from a business enterprise as profitable as the NFL.
Hurting the wallets of league owners, however, is exactly what it takes to get people calling his leadership into question. Franchise owners aren’t so much sports fans as they are businessmen, and Goodell’s failure to properly handle the past two weeks of domestic violence and child abuse has major sponsors —and therefore, team owners— worried about their bottom line.
With unhappy owners potentially losing billion-dollar sponsorships over Goodell’s poor decision making and the even greater problem of failing to take a firm stance against domestic violence, the commissioner’s days are numbered.
No- by Taylor Orton
The issue is not Roger Goodell, the issue is domestic violence against women, and as Grantland writer Louisa Thomas puts it, “domestic violence isn’t a football problem, it’s a societal problem… The real problem is that infliction of pain is romanticized and ritualized”.
I feel like with the Ray Rice situation the public is putting their focus entirely on the wrong thing, choosing to zero in on Goodell as if convinced that getting rid of him will solve all the NFL’s problems and end world hunger at the same time. The National Football League has a long history of athletes acting violent towards women and it didn’t start in 2006 when Roger Goodell became the commissioner.
The statistics are terrifying, one in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in her lifetime and 48 percent of all arrests of NFL athletes for violent crimes are domestic violence related. Headhunting Goodell is not going to make those numbers go down.
At this point there have been judgments made against Goodell that are based on speculation and I am not going to get into those, but let me be very clear with where I stand. Mr. Goodell has been far from perfect, but do I believe that he should be run out of the league for how he has handled the problem? No way. Will societal pressure eventually force that to happen? Probably, only time will tell.