Ray Rice Crisis

NFL Crisis (Ray Rice)

The crisis in the NFL over the past several months has become quite prominent. Some people have begun to even expect new cases of players “behaving badly” to be as common as the celebration of their on-field accomplishments. Among the topics that have been raised in recent past have been domestic violence, child abuse, and drug use. While these are the three that have gained most of the headlines recently one can be lead to assume that other crisis situations have occurred during this time period and have not received the amount of attention as the other “high profile” cases have. While there have been other crisis’ that have taken place that include the NFL and/or it’s players in the past, we seem to be in a time where they are becoming more frequent and public.

The NFL and crisis’ involving the misbehavior of their players and former players is nothing new. Some examples of previous crises include but are not limited to OJ Simpson, Ray Lewis, and Plaxico Burress, but these situations all were mainly handled by the police. All penalties that were received by the players in these situations were sufficient (except for Ray Lewis, some people still say he got away with murder). Now however, the NFL is under scrutiny for its handling of these new situations involving domestic violence, especially the situation involving former Baltimore Ravens standout running back with Ray Rice. On Feb 15, 2014 Rice and his then fiancée Janay Palmer had an altercation in Atlantic City which resulted in Rice initially receiving a two game suspension (the following July 24th) from the NFL as well as having to appear in court to address the situation. The most bitter pill for the public to swallow in this situation was that the suspension was “too lenient” in the case of the domestic violence situation, especially since star wide receiver Josh Gordon of the Cleveland Browns was given initially a sixteen game suspension for testing positive for marijuana. This...