Rob's House

Would you be fired by your practice or would you be suspended by the medical board?

I may. Where I think they !@#$ed up is by making suspension the standard response to minor offenses. Now it's no longer a one-off situation for particularly egregious cases, which opens the door for the comparisons and expectations. That in turn leads to ill conceived policies like this new 6 game mandatory minimum. Mandatory minimums are almost always bad, but they backed themselves into a corner and had to adopt bad policy to appease the fan base.

I'm trying really hard to think of a dumber response to my post, but so far I'm not coming up with anything. I'll let you know if I think of one.

I'm saying I don't think we should expect the league to act like police; period. I don't question their ability or right to do so, I just don't agree with them assuming that role. I apply that across the board. I don't understand why the NFL tests for any drugs other than those of the performance enhancing variety, nor do I understand why a player who gets arrested for possession gets suspended by the league. It seems to me that if anyone besides the court is going to formally punish a player for conduct unrelated to the league it should be the team he's contracted to play for. The way I see it, the league undertook this role to try to shape its image and now is realizing the unintended consequences it now faces as a result. It is now not only allowed to, but is EXPECTED to play the role of police, judge, jury, and executioner. And now it must do so according to the whims of a fickle public, the bulk of which operates primarily on emotion rather than logic, particularly with these kinds of matters. I'm actually okay with Goodell getting canned over this; just probably for the opposite reason that everyone else does.

No. It's also so we the spectators can feel good about ourselves for being outraged. For the NFL, news media, and the fans it was never about the victim.

Exactly. Which means all this outrage has nothing to do with any responsibility of the NFL to police domestic violence and everything to do with PR.

Other than image, I have yet to hear anyone explain WHY the NFL should be concerned with punishing Rice. Whether he deserves it or not is irrelevant. When did we get to the point where employers need to start monitoring and punishing private conduct unrelated to employment?

Big surprise.

Perfect illustration of why Olbermann is widely considered a joke of a man. I'm not crazy about Goodell, but calling for his resignation for not acting as a strict enough moral authoritarian is the epitome of self-righteous retardation. We have court systems for that. * Assuming this is his rationale.

You can get malware from internet porn.

The problem is it's treated like a term of art when it actually has a very plain meaning. If anyone, woman or otherwise, comes at you aggressively, blocks your freedom of movement, or destroys your property you have a right to use reasonable force to alleviate that situation even if it means "putting your hands" on them.

I think you're 100% right. The league and teams would probably prefer to let the courts work out crime and punishment, which I think is actually the way it should be done. Now they've put themselves in a position with all their conduct policies and punishments that the unthinking masses look to the league to be a secondary court system now. I already told you I was wasted when I said that. I'd just gotten in from the bar and had a head full of whiskey fueling my fire.

To me the video is most significant because it indicates there wasn't much provocation. I know the culturally-conditioned unthinking masses accept sayings like "you never 'put your hands' on a woman" as the absolute word of God, but the thinking man knows that context matters. If she'd nailed him square in the nuts and was beating him with a high-heeled shoe I wouldn't have much of a problem with him laying her out. Now that we know that wasn't the case it looks far worse for Ray Ray Rice.

Pet Peave: The term "put his hands on her" to mean offensive touching. I don't know what limp dick d-bag started this term, but let's just say, I'd like to "put my hands" on him. It's such an awful term for describing that which it is so commonly used to describe. I agree that your words are being unfairly twisted. I don't think the video is clear enough for me to say whether she was knocked out by the punch or by her head hitting the rail, but I don't think there's anything offensive about your posts.

If the roles were reversed and we'd put a beating on the Pats I think we'd find it more impressive than a Dolphins OT FG win over the Bears.

Do we now know the details of the incident, or are we just being generally supportive?

I hope Andrew Luck is mauled by a pack of wild boars.

Even with Luck's sorry first half I'm not breathing easy. This one could come down to the wire. The stakes are too high for me to relax.

I missed the first quarter when EJ put up nice stats, so I can't speak to that, but from what I saw he looked okay, but not great. He made some plays when we needed them, didn't have many egregious mistakes, and if he can do that consistently we have a good shot at a winning season. That said, pretty much all the passes I saw required the receiver to break stride and/or contort to catch them. If he can't correct that he may be a serviceable game manager, but will never be great.

I don't know if you're trolling, but your posts in this thread are not reflective of intelligence. When the guy's been given the opportunity he's produced.

Yeah, he's just a lucky guy. Probably the luckiest guy in the history of the NFL. To have so little talent and yet consistently perform year after year is amazing. That, or maybe you just don't know what the hell you're talking about. That could be it.

2014 was awful. None of those guys ever even started an NFL game.

525

Like the fella says, mercy is for the weak.