Roger Goodell: NFL Has 'Made Tremendous Progress' On Domestic Violence
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- Josh Brown, who was arrested in May 2015 on a domestic violence charge, admitted to the New York Giants that he had abused his wife and once was deemed so dangerous that NFL security had to move his family from their hotel room and keep their whereabouts a secret to Brown.
And yet, when it came time for the NFL's Personal Conduct Policy to kick in, commissioner Roger Goodell did not have enough information to enforce the policy which was created after he previously was proven to not consider domestic violence to be a particularly serious issue.
Now, speaking with the New York Daily News' Gary Myers, Goodell has patted himself on the back for the strides he and the league have made in the issue of addressing domestic violence.
"I think we've made tremendous progress," Goodell stated. "Can we make more and will we make more? Of course."
On the topic of cutting the mandatory six-game suspension down to just one game without any explanation, Goodell still had no answer. He spoke of how complex the situations can be, which is certainly true, and he spoke of how he and the league care deeply about preventing such situations from ever happening, which historically has proven to be false. But he still has yet to explain how a mandatory punishment arbitrarily was reduced by 83 percent.
In the discussion with Brown, Goodell repeated the same course of action he took in the case of Ray Rice, which is to say that "new information" came to light which caused the league to issue more severe punishment.
This is, once again, not true. With Rice, it was known what he did inside the elevator; America just hadn't seen it on video. With Brown, Goodell claims that the May 2015 arrest was the only issue the league could have considered when issuing a one-game suspension to Brown in August. In actuality, NFL security got involved in moving Brown's wife and children from their Hawaii hotel room in January of this year. Giants owner John Mara also said last week that Brown admitted having abused his wife prior to the team signing him to a two-year, $4 million contract in the offseason.
Brown's history of abuse was well-known and documented, and that is on the record. But not in Goodell's world.
For starters, Goodell said that the NFL "didn't get a lot of information" on Brown, leaving out the inconvenient detail that his investigator's "methods" of obtaining information were amateur at best, and that numerous reporters were able to easily gather information with a simple request.
But Goodell compounded this deceitful claim by doubling down on the league's willful ignorance of the situation.
"Here's the issue: the discipline that occurred on the one game [suspension] was for the event on May of 2015," Goodell said of Brown's arrest. "That was the only one that we were able to get of all the different things that we've heard. The decision was made by our team after we had the evidence to be able to support the one game. We knew we would get challenged [by the NFL Players Association] and we were able to uphold it."
The method of the commissioner there was clear: distort reality, then present the situation as a victory for the NFL.
Considering Brown has now been dumped by the Giants (based solely on public pressure and not on morality or ethics) while Goodell remains the $30 million man for the NFL, it's easy to see how he finds it easy to see the entire situation as a win.
It's a strategy that has worked for him many times in the past, but certainly, fewer and fewer people are buying what passes for truth in the alternate reality of Roger Goodell.
You can email Michael Hurley or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.