BillsFanSD

Dude. People have sex at college parties. Most of those people are intoxicated, and some are under age. It happens. It is currently 3:11 on a Friday afternoon. I am very confident that sometime in the next 12 hours, at least one minor will have sex with a student enrolled at my university. Now, in my state the age of consent is 16, which is a lot more reasonable than 18, so there will not be any legal repercussions from any of this. But morally it is the exact same thing, just in a different jurisdiction.

Not really. For all we know, the Bills talked with witnesses who directly disputed the plaintiff's testimony. We don't know what the Bills know or when they learned it, but we can be extremely confident that they know a lot more about this situation than we do one way or the other. Also, are you familiar with Biscuit 97's life after football?

They didn't know about this when they drafted him. They just found out about a month or so ago. That said, they could have kept Haack or signed some other punter if they were concerned about Araiza. It's not like they're heavily invested in this guy or anything.

I'd be shocked if they haven't been interviewed by Araiza's attorney. This is speculation on my part, but I'm tentatively assuming that these are the witnesses he claims are contradicting the plaintiff's story. Otherwise they plaintiff's attorney would be citing them as corroborators. (Edit: This is pure speculation, of course. I am extremely interested in hearing what these folks have to say, and their testimony will greatly inform my views.)

FYI, I agree with you that we should not be making sweeping assumptions about the plaintiff based on her choice of attorneys. She and her family might not have been well-positioned to evaluated the quality of their representation. Her attorney might be a mash-up of Lionel Hutz and Saul Goodman, and she still might be telling the truth about everything.

This is the problem with making snap judgements based on emotion. You end up locking yourself into a position ("this guy must be cut," "it's a shakedown," etc.) and then, human nature being what it is, you backwards-engineer arguments to support that position that you would never have adopted under other circumstances. No NFL team is cutting anybody because they spread an STD. My employer (public university) would never in a million years fire somebody for that. It just isn't a thing that results in discipline with your employer unless you happen to work in some very specialized industries. The rape allegation is extremely serious. If Matt Araiza raped somebody, he should be cut. And prosecuted of course. The rest of the stuff in this complaint is all red herrings.

Well, a 21 year old having sex with a 17 year old is okay, at least to me. I strongly support "Romeo & Juliet" provisions specifically because of stuff like this. To clarify, I am 50. If I hit on a 17 year old, I am a creep and the DA should throw the book at me. Likewise, a 21 year old hitting on a 14 year old is creepy. Throw the book at that guy, absolutely. But 17 and 21 are approximately the same age. There's always going to be some gray area here, but this is fine IMO.

So what? I had sex with a minor once upon a time, and so did my first girlfriend. We were just doing what teenagers have been known to do from time to time. It was fine.

If the "gang rape" allegation doesn't pan out, this whole thing will blow over in five minutes. Nobody cares if a college student had drunken sex with a 17 year old girl consensually.

If there's a tape, then this is all going to get resolved with something close to 100% certainty. Just wait for it to come out in court.

Yeah, but honestly, do you really care if a 21 year old has sex with a 17 year old? I don't. That's just another Saturday night in literally every town in the United States with any population to speak of. For full disclosure, I have two kids who are now 24 (son) and 21 (daughter). One was definitely sexually active in high school and I just assume the other one was. Not happy about that, but I was sexually active in high school, and so were most people posting in this thread. It's normal.

Well, it sounds like there's a rape kit in evidence someplace. Those results could easily persuade me that a rape took place. Also, according to the civil complaint, one of the girl's friends looked in through the window and tried to enter the room where the rape allegedly took place. I think (not sure) that there was another friend or two at the party. Those folks can corroborate or undermine her account of the evening, and we haven't heard from them yet. I would definitely update my priors based on their testimony.

Yes, that's possible. We don't know whether the girl in question was raped, and we don't know by who. Yet.

You don't actually know that there is a victim in this story. I mean, maybe there is. But you can't possibly know that.

I've terminated people for sexual misconduct, and I can tell you that this is not true. My organization (a public university, which is relevant here) does not dismiss people just because they were sued in civil court. We need something beyond that.

I don't think it matters morally, but in California the age of consent is 18 and they don't have a "Romeo & Juliet" exception. Technically a 21 year old who has sex with a 17 year old in the Golden State is guilty of statutory rape regardless. Again, not saying it matters, because this particular angle doesn't matter to me at all. In most states, something like this would be legal. CA law is just a little on the weird side.

For the record, I 100% do not care if a 21 year old has consensual sex with a 17 year old. It would not matter to me if the girl showed her ID and the guy knew with certainty that she was underage. There's nothing particularly wrong with a sexual relationship between two people of those ages, and this isn't the sort of thing that statutory rape laws were designed to prohibit. Prosecutors generally don't bring charges in cases like that, and if I were on a jury I would be a solid vote for jury nullification. The "rape" part is extremely important. The "statutory" part is not.

So what does this tell you about the information that the Bills have at their disposal? Araiza is a 6th round pick, and he plays (arguably) the least important position in the NFL. It's not as if the Bills are highly invested in the guy or anything. If Haack had "won" the punting job, a lot of us would have been disappointed but nobody would have seriously second-guessed that decision. There's really very little incentive for the team to retain a guy who they have serious doubts about, so the fact that they chose to retain him sends a signal that I should pay attention to. But this is all speculative, because I imagine we'll learn more about what happened over the next few days.

Another way to look at it is that the Bills did their due diligence and made a decision based on better information than what we have. I mean, maybe they screwed it up. It's certainly been known to happen. But there's literally no harm in reserving judgement for the time being.

According to the lawsuit, the plaintiff has friends there with her who can testify that she was in a room with her rapists for 90 minutes and that she reported being raped immediately before leaving the party. If they back up that story, that would be enough to put me in the "cut him" camp. If not, there's nothing here. I'm not seeing a reason to rush to judgement either way. We're going to find out in short order what the evidence shows.

I don't know about "we" -- I can only speak for myself. With the benefit of hindsight, the 50 year-old version of me realizes that the 20-something version of me didn't fully appreciate the Jim Kelly era when I was living through it. The Bills had a great QB with a great offense, and they were making deep playoff runs over and over. It'll always be like this, right? Well no, actually, it's not always like this. Not putting any special pressure on Josh. Just trying my best to sit back and soak it in while it lasts.

Maybe the Browns will regret moving on from Mayfield, but the bottom line is that if I were the Browns GM, his body of work didn't justify signing him to the kind of long-term contract that he was looking for. I think Mayfield probably has a long-run career in the NFL as a broke man's answer to Ryan Tannehill. If that's his ceiling, it's hard to fault the Browns for moving on even if it's very easy to fault them for moving on to Deshaun Watson specifically. In other words, I think the Browns are likely to regret giving up assets for Watson but unlikely to regret parting ways with Mayfield.

There is not a single GM anywhere in the league who has batted 1.000 on every personnel decision. Obviously Bean would like to have the Ford pick back, and obviously he'd like to have Teller back. Guy took a completely irrelevant franchise and turned it into the best top-to-bottom roster in the NFL and you guys are looking for nits to pick.

I literally just rewatched the week 17 game against the Jets yesterday afternoon. I wish Haack well, but I'm glad we drafted Araiza.

We have way more than one game worth of data on Keenum. He's not a rookie, and there's lots of game film out there.