Other people get a lot of mail so they can have mailbags. I don't, not least because I don't have an email address associated with this blog so nobody could email me even if they tried. I think. BUT Bill Simmons gets a lot of mail, and two days ago he did a mailbag on the whole Ray Rice situation. I'm going to steal his letters and answer them, because I'm better than him.
Q: Why is TMZ doing a better investigation into Ray Rice than the NFL?
—Patrick, Rockford
TMZ is actually a powerful investigative force, while the NFL is a sports league. It shouldn't be surprising when the NEWS website, which by the way has broken (and investigated) a TON of other stories, performs better in the department than the league whose only job is, you know, to play football. It's not even unprecedented for a 'news' entity to perform better than a capital-n News entity regarding a major sports scandal -- remember when Deadspin broke the Manti Te'o story? Seriously, remember that story?? That was one of the greatest moments in Notre Dame--nay, in football--nay, in human--history. And that was Deadspin, which I think is supposed to be a joke. TMZ is a real news entity. It's weird that you're surprised by this. You're weird.
Q: So I have to wait for someone Goodell hired to find out if Goodell is lying? I have no reason to think the AP report isn’t true, and for owners to stand by Goodell because he’s made them enough money is terrible.
—Lee Brewer, Los Angeles
Um... Are you new to professional sports? This shit happens ALL THE TIME. Remember how Ford pardoned Nixon? Same basic idea. In certain jobs, there's a threshold for what you can do, and if you stay below it, you'll never, ever be punished for your actions (outside of some bad press and maybe an early retirement). In the Presidency it's so high that no one's found the ceiling yet. (Then again no President has actually done anything that bad, so let's wait and see if President Jeb Bush ends up hypothetically killing a stripper or something.) In the commissionerships of major American sports leagues, it is at least high enough to excuse:
- Colluding with an owner to steal a franchise and move it across the country, then do the commissioner equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and humming when someone points to the very public evidence of your corruption and asks you what's up.
- Possibly fixing the draft lottery, and responding to questions about the legitimacy of the process by refusing to show anyone the lottery from that point forward (because transparency is way less legitimate than obscurity).
- Brushing the single most egregious instance of referee corruption in American sports history under the rug and entirely failing to investigate said referee's claims that many other referees were doing the same thing.
- Abusing your power, going against your word, and kowtowing to two relatively weak owners when they ask you to veto a trade agreed to by two teams, never mind the MASSIVE conflict of interest that arises as a result of the fact that 1) you own one of the teams, and 2) the people asking you to do this are, by definition, massively biased with respect to the trade. In his temporary defense, said commissioner DID acknowledge the conflict of interest when he agreed not to exercise his power in regards to any trade involving the team he owned. However, he did, of course, immediately go against this pledge and directly exercise his power in the least legitimate way possible.
These aren't hypotheticals. These are things that David Stern did. There are more. The point is that major American sports are multi-billion dollar industries, and that money goes to--guess who--the fucking owners (and the commissioner. Guess how much money Roger Goodell is worth? I'll give you a hint: It's several orders of magnitude more than you). Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, Goodell is powerful as fuck, and he's pretty goddamn well corrupt. Just like every commissioner ever. Get over it.
Q: Will we end up calling the NFL’s new domestic violence policy “The Ray Rice Rule?”
—Joseph, VA Beach
I doubt it. Who wants to immortalize that guy?
Q: Why did it take the TMZ videotape to make this incident become “intolerable” and “outrageous” to the NFL and especially the Ravens? From what I have read and heard, Ray Rice never lied about what happened in the elevator. Yet, the Ravens stood by Rice, called him a good man, held a press conference in which he apologized to everybody but his wife, tweeted her apology for, I guess, allowing herself to be hit and knocked unconscious, and even implied that Ray had some justification for what happened. So if Rice told them what happened and he was still a “good guy,” somebody the Ravens were willing to stand behind, and somebody who deserved only a limited suspension from the NFL, why is he now not that same guy? The Ravens and NFL were willing to embrace the man right up until public opinion made that a bad business move. It’s jaded and it’s insulting and it needs to be called out. The NFL and Ravens (and pretty much every media outlet) didn’t screw up by not finding the videotape; they screwed up by never realizing that what happened in that elevator is unacceptable and intolerable regardless of whether a video exists or not. That’s where the focus should be, right?
—Erica Phillips, Boise, Idaho
Well, yeah. That's the whole controversy. We already knew what Rice did, as did the owners and the commissioner and the team. It's just now that the video has hit the web that the people are outraged, and the commissioner and the team are frantically trying to backpedal and pretend they were outraged from the get-go. Which, of course, they weren't, because Ray Rice is a valuable asset to both parties and they would rather have him around than lose him. This just in: Big Business is not a moral entity. Welcome to America.
Q: If Goodell played the President on 24, would he take Jack Bauer off the job for no good reason, let the bomb go off then deny it’s going off, or hire a second terrorist group to purposefully stop so people would forget about the first one?
—Max, Cleveland
I'm 99% sure that all those things actually happened on 24. Goodell wouldn't even be the worst President on the show. Or in real life, for that matter.
Q: Why can’t the NFL create an ESPN special to announce the suspensions from every offseason? Run it during early July and the dream of owning the whole year is solved. Get the fans involved by having Goodell let fans vote a player to get more or less via Twitter. The world needs this.
—Patrick, Minneapolis
This is a weird idea. Why is this even in the mailbag? This is like a joke, like maybe one you'd say to your buddies if you were trying really hard to impress them, except that it's completely without any semblance of humor.
Q: I can’t wait until next month when the league requires its players to wear pink, because Roger Goodell really cares about women’s health.
—Alex Hensel, Denver
Yep. The league is hypocritical. Um... Not sure what response you're looking for.
Q: Please answer this in your column. Do you believe Ray Rice should lose his football career?
—Sarah, East Lansing
I want to refuse to answer this question just on principle in reaction to that first sentence. Also because I don't want to actually answer it. But here's the question as I'm reading it: It's not "do you think Rice will lose his career," and it's not "if it was up to you, would Rice lose his career." It's "from an abstract moral perspective, do Rice's actions merit a lifetime ban from the league?" And the answer, regrettably, is no. If he goes to jail (which he won't) and pays his debt to society (which he won't), he should be allowed back in the league. That doesn't make what he did any less disgusting or deplorable, and if it was up to me he'd never play another down in his life. But the NFL's role is not to be the universal morality police (obviously), and if they refuse to let him play again it WON'T be because what he did was awful (even though it was), it will be because the bad press generated by his presence will cost them more money than his performance will bring to the league. If you honestly think it's not about this, refer back to my answer to the really long question from Erica.
Q: Does Goodell’s blown cover-up of the Rice tape finally give credence to the conspiracy theorists (like myself) that believe the Spygate tapes were so egregious, he destroyed them to save the face of the NFL brand? Remember, this is a man so drunk with power, he thought the Rice tape wouldn’t surface.
—Connor, Pittsburgh, PA
This has always been a possibility. But Spygate was never as big a deal as people made it out to be. Remember what happened immediately after the scandal? When the Patriots went on a tear the likes of which the league had never seen, despite losing the ostensible advantage of their videotapes? People need to stop bitching about Spygate. It's deep in the past, and it probably didn't have that big an impact on the outcome of the games. The Saints' Bountygate scandal was way (way way) worse and everyone basically forgot it happened a year later. It's been more than seven years since Spygate. Come on, now.
Q: I’m the Commissioner for my fantasy football league. Where do I send in my resume to replace Goodell? Seriously, I think I can be a better commissioner at this point.
—Stephen, Covina
You wouldn't. Seriously. Being a commissioner is fucking hard. It's practically guaranteed you'd end up doing one of these three things:
1) Being an incredibly weak, spineless commish, and obeying the commands given to you by the owners and the players;
2) Literally doing nothing; or
3) Trying to implement some stupid idealistic fan idea for how you think the league would be better and either driving the NFL into the ground or (more likely) getting yourself instantly fired.
Q: Will we look back at the Ray Rice incident as the beginning of the end of the dominance of football’s reign as top sport?
—Sandy Hartwiger
No. What's going to replace it? The NBA is still WAY more corrupt and has even more pimples than the NFL. The MLB doesn't have the appeal. The NHL is too Canadian. And as for the MLS... well, Americans still hate soccer, as much as the hipsters try to disagree. Besides, this isn't even the worst thing that's ever happened in the NFL. Adrian Peterson isn't even the worst thing that's happened. I can't count on one hand the number of times an NFL player (current or former) has fucking KILLED someone in my lifetime. If we're just looking at convictions (for manslaughter and up), we've got Josh Brent, Rae Carruth, Dwayne Goodrich, Leonard Little, Eric Naposki, and Donte Stallworth. If we're counting alleged murders, we've also got Ray Lewis, Marvin Harrison, OJ Simpson, and Aaron Hernandez, to name a few extremely high-profile examples. Then you've got your sexual assault enthusiasts (Dave Meggett, Nate Webster, Keith Wright, the great Lawrence Taylor, and allegedly Ben Roethlisberger), your drug traffickers (Darryl Henley, who in a real-life twist also fucking hired contract killers to murder the judge and a witness in his case; Travis Henry; Sam Hurd; Johnny Jolly; Ryan Leaf, who wasn't actually distributing (everyone else on this list was) but whom I'm including because, well, he's fucking Ryan Leaf; Jamal Lewis; Bam Morris; Nate Newton; and Austin Scott), and your dog-fighters (Michael Vick, naturally). Some of those names are BIG, and some of those events happened while these players were very active, famous NFL stars. Rice is not going to be the tipping point. Probably.
Q: The NBA seems to be an overwhelming winner of the TMZ-Rice scandal. The Levenson fiasco, which would have been the NBA’s second racist owner crisis in about four months, was almost completely buried, right at the time when the NBA seems to be hammering out the terms for its next TV deal. Is there any chance that Adam Silver and the NBA leaked the Ray Rice video to TMZ?
—George B., Cleveland, Ohio
No. Don't be an idiot.
Q: Why aren’t other players like Greg Hardy or Ray McDonald also being suspended? Does it need to be caught on tape so that it looks bad enough for the league to act? Greg Hardy not only committed domestic violence, but had a pile of guns big enough to throw someone on to. The message I’ve gotten from the NFL is not “Don’t hit your wife,” but “Don’t be dumb enough to get caught on tape.”
—Ryan L., Connecticut
Remember when we talked about how it's almost always in the NFL's best interest to brush any bad things its players do under the rug? And how the least punishment they can dole out while still avoiding bad press is the best thing for the league's profits? And how Big Business (and don't be a fool, the NFL is Big Business) is inherently amoral? Yeah, that.
[We're skipping the stupid clip question-that-isn't-a-question.]
Q: Like Tess told everyone in Ocean’s 11? “You of all people should know Terry, in your hotel [casino], there’s always someone watching.” When did that movie come out? 2001! Here’s another attack ad slogan for you: “ROGER GOODELL — THE GUY WHO TOOK ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AWAY FROM OCEANS 11!”
—Michael G, Richmond, VA
Oh, Simmons. You and your pathetic dependence on pop culture references to stay relatable.
Q: I believe the biggest takeaway from the Ray Rice fiasco is how easy it now is to determine which journalists are in bed with the league and which aren’t?
—Ryan Kiefer, New York
The biggest takeaway is actually how the public is suddenly starting to notice--and care--when players do bad things. Weird.
Q: Would you please start calling Goodell “Eggo?” Tired of this waffler.
—Ethan, Rowlett, TX
What exactly is he waffling on? If we consider Goodell to be an amoral entity who exists for the sole purpose of maximizing his league's profits, and if we assume that prior to a few days ago he had no knowledge that the Peterson tape would air, then he's handled this situation perfectly. And since "an amoral entity..." is pretty much what he is... Goodell's handled this situation perfectly. With respect to the financial interests of himself and his billionaire owners (and I mean "owners" in more than one sense). The correct move (from this perspective) at first was to bury the story, because Rice is profitable. The correct move when Goodell learned the story was coming out was to try to beat it to the presses and run damage control. True, with perfect future knowledge he could have punished Rice sufficiently from the get-go, but if the tape HADN'T come out, that would have been a terrible move. Are you mad at the guy for not being prescient? That seems unfair. (Or are you mad at him for being the figurehead for an amoral business conglomerate? Because at that point I feel like you're just being naive.)
Seriously, do you people actually think that Goodell, individually, is responsible for the apparent moral bankruptcy of the league and its players? Seriously? You think that if they find the right commissioner, their Adam Silver (whom everyone seems to actually believe is this basketball paladin who acts morally because he's just a moral person, rather than the obvious, true explanation, which is that he's smart and he realizes that to take firm action toward "justice" on the first scandal of his career is by far the best thing he can do to differentiate himself from Stern and thus gain popularity), then the NFL will magically become a paradise where nobody murders anyone or rapes anyone or beats their wives or children and CTE doesn't exist and nobody gets a concussion ever again and your team wins the Super Bowl every year into eternity? You honestly think Goodell is the problem? Come on. Goodell is the symptom. The problem, and I mean this in the nicest way, is us. It's that we watch football. Seriously. We turn the NFL into this massively profitable entity, and a natural side-effect of this process is that guys like Ray Rice get protected by the league, because guess what? Ray Rice sells jerseys, and he sells tickets, and he sells ads. If you want the NFL to stop being evil, you and everyone else are going to have to stop watching football, so that the NFL ceases to exist. Which is never going to happen. Sorry.
Q: Add this to the list of Roger Goodell’s horseshit resume: he can’t even get the announcers of his own league to correctly name the product of their $400 Million (not an exaggeration) sponsor. How hard is it to tell make sure the producer at every network knows the name of their sponsors? He couldn’t even just send out a memo with the words, “MICROSOFT SURFACE” over and over again?
—EJ, Seattle
Wait, seriously? If I went through YOUR life and YOUR career and listed all the things YOU'VE fucked up, I bet you billion-dollar warships to donuts it'd be longer than Goodell's. He's fucked up a lot, and he absolutely deserves blame and derision for his handling of the Ray Rice situation (speaking now as the moral individual that I am, and not as the devil's advocate), but don't fucking needle him for screwing up product placement. For Christ's sake.
Q: How is it possible that Roger Goodell cannot be fired? Would there be any better possible move than replacing him with Condoleezza Rice. How can you top replacing a privileged buffoon oligarch with a highly qualified African-American woman who has publicly stated that running the N.F.L would be dream job?
—Josh, Indianapolis
Oh look, a kneejerk reaction. He's not getting fired. And Condoleezza Rice isn't remotely qualified to commission a major sports league. God.
Q: Cowherd was discussing Playmakers on ESPN Radio today. I remembered the name but forgot what the show was about. While researching, I stumbled upon your 2003 review. This was an actual quote from you: “Playmakers never seems totally believable; it’s like a distorted, over-the-top version of the NFL. For instance, Episode No. 2 revolves entirely around painkillers, crack, steroids, and players beating drug tests by injecting clean urine into their (expletives) with a catheter. Apparently strippers, lap dances, date rape and abortions are scheduled for Episode No. 3.” Isn’t it unbelievable that in 2003 you (and society in general) thought the above episode plots were unbelievable for NFL players? Damn.
—Jason, Atlanta
This never happened. I never said that. What are you talking about?
(Also, in response to Simmons's response to this question: HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU BLAMING GOODELL FOR PLAYERS USING DRUGS??? "Hey Goodell, nice job singlehandedly creating the 2000's rap culture that glorifies drug use, extravagant parties, and strippers. Oh and thanks for killing Biggie and Pac, you dick.")
Q: Do you remember the show Playmakers, which reportedly was cancelled at the request of the NFL? In one season, the show dealt with steroid use, a gay football player, and a domestic violence incident involving a running back. In one season! Was that the most realistic sports show ever (other than the pick-up game in the parking lot outside the night club)?! That has to surpass anything The White Shadow put together.
—Mike L, Oakland, CA
I don't remember that show. And that's the only question in your email.
Q: After seeing the Ray Rice video online, then hearing the NFL state that they did not see the video until TMZ put in online, I got to thinking — what are the 10 biggest lies of all time? In no particular order:
1. “It’s not me. It’s you.”
2. “There are no soldiers inside of that giant wooden horse.”
3. “Your money is safe with Bernie Madoff.”
4. “I’m searching for the real killers.”
5. “At that moment I hit my face against the player leaving a small bruise on my cheek and a strong pain in my teeth.”
6. “Yes, that feels good.”
7. “I. Did. Not. Have. Sexual. Relations. With. That. Woman.”
8. “There are Weapons of Mass Distruction in Iraq.”
9. “Welcome aboard the Titanic. Yes, this boat is unsinkable.”
10. “We requested from law enforcement any and all information about the incident, including the video from inside the elevator. That video was not made available to us and no one in our office has seen it until today.”
—Dave C., Melrose, MA
You got that first one wrong. And the eighth one. I don't think that ninth one ever happened. So you get a C-minus. You're like George W. Bush in college. You proud of yourself?
Q: I have two daughters: a one-month old and a two-year old. In the first year of my older daughter’s life she donned a Flacco jersey, learned to say ” boo” at the mention of the word “Steelers”, and watched the Ravens win the Super Bowl. The following year (before the 2013 season) she received a Ray Rice jersey which still fits her as we enter her third Ravens season. What do I do? Can she wear it? If I’m in public or at a football party will people think I’m a horrible father — even fellow Ravens fans? Keep in mind that, as with the Flacco jersey, the Rice jersey is scheduled to be a hand-me-down for the current one-month old daughter when her time comes, and that I’m kind of cheap. As you can see, the fallout from the Rice spectacle ranges far and wide.
—Stephen S., Washington, DC
You don't want your daughter to get teased and berated. Probably. I mean, maybe you do. ADRIAN. Buy a new damn jersey.
Aaand we're skipping the last question because it's not a question.
God, apparently Roger Goodell and domestic abuse really make my cynical side come out. Huh. I should probably clarify here for the less reading-comprehension-inclined viewers that I am in fact opposed to domestic abuse and I think Goodell's handling of this whole situation was very poor. In case that wasn't obvious. Peace.
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