I agree that suspension with pay is not enough for certain transgressions. But it is not a catch all for a proper punishment. It should only be used temporarily to do due diligence. To be consistent in the application of justice. No one is ever going to agree on the proper level of punishment, but certain facts must be ascertained and evaluated and some kind of ranking must be done. Then a punishment meted out that includes the time served on suspension with pay according to a known schedule.
If you repeatedly follow your own rules, you immediately reduce the number of complaints by more than half. Wouldn't it help the NFL if the players were behind the policy they way they are on PEDs? And if the League did this for a number of years, it could collect something known as data and determine whether this was working or not and tweak it based on actual evidence rather than who gets more airtime on Mike and Mike and First Take.
I don't agree that "activists" are pushing this on the League. The League is trying to avoid this hitting the 6 O'clock news and hurting its reputation. And its most concerned, as vince pointed out, not with me but with more marginal viewers, most of whom are women. The only way that rep gets hurt is if the NFL appears to have no idea what to do, or has a crisis, which is exactly the situation when Goodell first formulated this idiotic policy in 2007, but is only half true now.
For years baseball was able to leave punishment to the League Presidents and no one cared because they were predictable, everyone knew what the rules were. Goodell is just collecting authority, he still doesn't have a plan.
They are 20 years behind other large firms and corporations in how they deal with this. Probably because they have very few female employees, so the issue was not often raised internally and the issue was less likely to hit their radar within their own ranks.
Once you have a policy and a track record of using it effectively and making changes based on actual results, they you no longer are vulnerable to activists or the media, you become an authority on how not to simply accept domestic violence among your workforce as inevitable. And the players accused have access to some due process and for the love of Pete Rozelle, an actual independent Appeals process.
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