Greg Hardy’s Suspension
Greg Hardy’s punishment situation is officially final. 4 games off. It’s hard to look at that result and not shake your head in wonderment as the NFL once again seems to pull a punishment out of their butt. This is complicated and I have OPINIONS, so Chicago Bear with me as we go on a magical journey of anger and indignation.
Now a lot of people are pointing out the injustice that “Greg Hardy gets 4 games for beating a woman and Brady gets 4 games for letting some air out of a football, how is this fair”. I don’t like this line of thinking. I think it’s honestly an unfair comparison. Hardy didn’t really get 4 games, he got a full year plus 4 games. He sat out all last year. He got paid, sure, but he was suspended all season. This was going to be an additional number of games added on. Secondly, Brady’s suspension hasn’t been finalized yet, and there is a good to great chance he at least gets it reduced (I still predict 2 games). So lets not compare these two yet, shall we? Thirdly, Hardy’s situation was an off-field incident. Brady’s was an on-field transgression. Brady broke no real laws, just NFL laws, so it’s okay that the NFL is acting as judge, jury, & executioner because his case is entirely an NFL matter. Hardy was not, and in the eyes of the law, he is free and fine. He was not convicted. The NFL right now is essentially only punishing him purely on possible damage he cause to their image. I’d argue that no matter how guilty you think he is, it’s not the NFL’s job to punish him for off the field acts. They are under no true obligation to punish him at all, really, what he did was barely their problem. He’s getting punished for the #brand damage, not for hitting anyone. Hell I’ll take it one step further and suggest that the NFL punishing Hardy based on crimes he was never convicted for is in some ways just as much a travesty of justice as giving a convicted criminal an easy break. If you got in trouble with the law, but you were never convicted or proven guilty, wouldn’t you be mad if your place of employment punished you for it anyway, based purely on some preconceived notions? It seems a touch unfair when you look at it a certain way.
But regardless of how unfair the comparison between Brady and Hardy is, there is a clear and obvious perception about it. They have to realize that people are going to compare the two anyway. They have to realize just how bad this looks. They have to have someone aware of the perception they are putting out here. Yet nobody is coming out to try and dissuade it, to turn the conversation in their favor. I just spent the last paragraph defending the NFL more effectively than anything the NFL itself has done. I think Hardy should have gotten 6 games. I’m surprised he got 10 initially, and surprised again when it was reduced to 4. 6 games was the policy Goodell came up with after the Ray Rice PR disaster, so that’s what he deserved. The fact that he got 4 games just feels…random. It feels like the NFL just pulled a random number that they felt was fair out of their butt. If you aren’t going to follow the policy than give a reason why. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. No punishment outside the strictly defined substance abuse policy seems to have any sort of base. For ages it feels like Goodell has just pulled whatever he felt like doing out of his butt. It’s disgraceful and if the NFL actually has a thought process and basis for these punishments, they should be transparent with them. They should explain the reasoning behind the decisions. Yet they never do, it’s baffling. How do they not realize how bad it looks? They simply want to punish him because he damaged “the shield”. They are too stupid to realize their own actions here are damaging their #brand as much if not more than anything Hardy did. Are they honestly that egotistical and “above” us that they genuinely think none of that matters? Even after they got torn apart for this very thing last year? I think letting us know the reasoning and methods in which they came to their punishment conclusions would be smart, they’d have a chance to defend themselves. Instead they just try to sneak it out on a late Friday quiet news dump trying to hope no one notices. We notice. The double edged sword of being so popular is that we always notice.
All this has done is shown the NFL still has no goddamn clue. That they haven’t learned jack from last year. While this probably won’t blow up in their faces as much as Rice did, it feels like another Ray Rice situation is coming at any second, because the NFL is still doing everything wrong.
Lastly, as for Hardy himself, I don’t know if he’s guilty of this crime. I think he is, but it’s just complicated enough that I don’t wish to go around preaching it as if it is true. The only fact about Greg Hardy that is 100% true is that he chose the Dallas Cowboys, and for that he can go straight to hell.
It must have been hard(y) to bring up this subject
Welcome to Whose Fine is it Anyway! Where the punishments are made up and the crimes don’t matter!
I love this. Read it in Drew Carey’s voice too. Just perfect.
Didn’t Drew Carey own part of the Browns at one point?
How quickly you forget Clive Anderson.
In fact, that would make a good one shot, Goodell dressed as Carey saying that. Apply to any and all rulings he hands down.
We’d need to go full-on if we did a real version of Whose Fine. Who would play Colin, Ryan, et. al.?
“That’s right, the punishments are made up. Just like a Cleveland championship sports team.”
I’ve been waiting for ages for someone to write what you wrote in the 2nd paragraph. We can be best friends now. Here’s my juice box.
Although I agree wholeheartedly with your overall point that the NFL’s punishments are random and inconsistent and that like the substance abuse policy they should publish and stick to clear guidelines and justify any exceptions, I would raise two points:
1) Greg Hardy was convicted. And convicted of a far more cold-blooded and messed up charge than Ray Rice. He appealed the decision, as was his right and the case was only dismissed when the victim failed to come forward, the general suspicion being she reached an out of court settlement (was paid off by) with Hardy.
2) I get your point that it some ways, the NFL punishing for unrelated incidents is unfair on the surface, however, it is on the CBA that Goodell can do that, so its not like this is out of the blue. More importantly, fair or not, people look up to professional athletes, they become role models, especially for people in situations where they have no other means of getting ahead in life. That, before even getting in to the major unresolved issues in our society with domestic violence and more generally the treatment of women, and I personally think that any player who is convicted, or there is credible evidence that they could be, of such crimes (or any felony for that matter) should be out of the league on their asses forever as a lesson to those that would use them as role models that such behavior is not cool.
Keep in mind, South Carolina treats crimes differently than the rest of the country. They treat you as guilty until proven innocent, so when you show up for a charge, the judge finds you guilty and you have to appeal the decision to even have your case heard.
I wish more people would realize this fact.
Well, saying he was convicted is kind of disingenuous considering “On July 15, 2014, Greg Hardy was sentenced in North Carolina to probation after being convicted in a misdemeanor trial without a jury by Judge Becky Thorne Tin.[22] Such bench trial convictions are automatically appealable with de novo review, and have been referred to by the Supreme Court as “no more than an offer in settlement.”[23] ” “and Hardy’s appeal was resolved when the Mecklenburg District Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges against Hardy on February 9, 2015, saying: ‘[T]he victim did not appear in court to testify. The victim appears to have intentionally made herself unavailable to the State.'”
I did not know that, and I apologize that I did not research further. However, the whole thing still feels fishy to me and in this situation at least the NFL seems to have reviewed a lot of evidence before they got there original 10 game suspension. That of course raises two questions, if they had such good evidence why did they reduce the 10 game suspension, and second if Hardy’s side of the story changed their minds so much, why wasn’t he interviewed in the first place.
Ultimately, the NFL needs to be more transparent in this process and have clear guidelines for what they do and why. Even with the new information, i find that I still do not have sympathy for Hardy but the NFL needs to get its act together and I am in support of their being even tougher on this kind of thing, but there needs to be a clear processes and all decisions need to be transparent.
@CH – read: she done got paid off.
To clarify, I don’t think such Draconian measures could be implemented fairly, but in an ideal world its what I would like to see. In the end, as you said, the NFL needs to publish and stick to clear guidelines, including whether or not the exempt list should count as time served, and homestly I would like to see guidelines in place for teams who have repeat offenders or pick up players with previous issues who reoffend. I still think the Ravens should be punished for the effort they put in to defending Rice. Teams have the resources to keep an eye on trouble players, as the Cowboys did successfully woth Dez Bryant, they should use those resources or be fined.
I think the NFL could go alomg way towards repairing its image by publishing, and soon, their guidelines of punishment for players and teams, the level of evidence they require for each tier, a clear appeal process, and should probably start by banning Ray Macdonald for life(low hanging fruit, perhaps, but it would send a message).
I don’t think the NFL needs to fix its public image, actually. At the end of the day, there is only one true measure of public image, and that is in the revenue stream. Goodell gets hammered all the time by fans, and incompetent is among the nicest things said about him, but the NFL keeps getting bigger and bigger TV and sponsorship deals. The court of public opinion may say one thing, but ultimately it rules with viewership and consumption of NFL products and those are at all-time highs. As far as the NFL is concerned, everything is just fine and dandy. Despite (or maybe because of) the off-field drama surrounding the league, the draft had higher ratings than other major sports’ playoff games. These things keep the NFL in the news and for them, I think, that’s a good thing. No such thing as bad PR and all that.
It’s not hurting the profit margins right now for sure, but if they keep acting like this, there is a good chance it will. People are taking notice now for the first time in decades, if the NFL continues to ignore this, ignore the concussion problem, etc, it’s going to bite them after some years have passed and people have gotten over the initial outrage and have moved on to simply paying attention to other things. They aren’t thinking long term and it’s building a bubble that will inevitably burst at some point.
“people” are hardly taking notice. Professional internet activists with axes to grind are taking notice, because they can use certain situations to further themselves in their faux-outrage social circles. No one who actually watches football cares. No one who is a balanced and sane individual cares. Whiny teenage girls on tumblr care, and they are hardly the linchpin of the NFL’s future
I am not certain that there are enough words to say just how wrong you are about this.
Doubt a “bubble” matters that much. Businessmen are trained to only care about the quarterly profit. For a sports organization, maybe a whole year to balance the lower profits in off-season with greater profits in-season. Sadly, doubt they care — they all intend to get their golden parachute just before this bubble bursts.
I’m just glad that I’m not the only person thinking that the NFL just improvises with their punishments.
In this particular case, Goodell did not handle the appeal, it was done by an arbitrator named Harold Henderson. The PA was/is concerned about his impartiality after he rubberstamped Adrian Peterson’s appeal.
In this case it looks like he followed his own mind and picked a number that doesn’t make sense to anybody.
Are Goodell’s eyes red here because he’s high while aiming or because he’s evil? They’re white when talking to Hardy (although maybe that’s just because he’s concealing his evil in public)
That’s not how a dart board is laid out. 10 and 4 are both on the other side! From top to bottom that should be 14, 11, 8.