Bernstein: NFL Already Shaking Off Its Bad Year
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) Greg Hardy is ready to go for the Cowboys, and Ray McDonald personally talked himself into a fresh new job with the Bears. Adrian Peterson is going to play somewhere, and Roger Goodell still oversees it all from a seat that isn't hot and never was. If Ray Rice could still run, he'd have work, too.
Remember the predictions of the NFL's grim future, a league beset by violent storms of its own making and faced with a cold confrontation of its savage essence, a reconciliation of its place in modern society and all that? It was only weeks ago.
But there are always more games to play and rosters to construct. A new season and new possibilities arrive to wipe clean an ugly slate, and let's get on with it.
Hardy attacked a woman and threw her onto a pile of assault rifles, in an apparent attempt to perform the perfectly stereotypical NFL crime. That he forgot to splash her with Purple Drank and then drive away with a big bag of illegal drugs on his lap is the only thing surprising, but what makes a player untouchable in Charlotte has no effect on Dallas, where he becomes a key contributor to a team trying to win now.
The Bears embraced the post-Brandon Marshall era with gusto, replacing one serial assailant with another at the behest of their new defensive coordinator. McDonald is either a really bad guy or he's incredibly unlucky, what with all of these accusations and arrests that keep happening to him for no good reason. He was released by the 49ers for a "pattern of poor decision-making," but the Bears saw things differently enough to welcome him. Freshly minted general manager Ryan Pace feels insulated by both ownership's blessing and the structure of the contract, which he called a "one-year, prove-it deal." So the Bears get a good fit for a new scheme, and McDonald gets a bunch of money and a year to prove he can avoid hitting a woman or raping somebody.
Peterson, meanwhile, has wasted no time in turning himself into a victim despite the fact that he was the one who beat a toddler bloody with a tree branch and never understood why that was at all bad. Now the world is out to get him, the Vikings are holding him hostage and his craven agent's inflammatory rhetoric keeps making things more difficult for all involved. But he'll tote footballs for some team, somewhere, and my money's on somebody this obtuse and unrepentant eventually whuppin' more of his kids, if he can get around to knowing where all of them are.
And then there's Goodell, whose punishment for a year of bumbling, tone-deaf stewardship was a 2014 compensation package totaling $44 million. It looked for a while like his world was crumbling around him, but he brandished his shield and hid behind one lectern after the other to dodge or deflect every salvo, and out he emerges with his signature squint and smirk, dusting off the shoulders of his charcoal gray suit like an executive-clad Terminator.
Goodell knows the vast majority of fans are some combination of impatient, easily distracted and profoundly stupid, betting correctly that his myriad self-investigations by connected cronies will recede into a cold soup of undesirable detail. He can partner the league with cynical corporate "awareness" campaigns to give enough illusion of progressive thought to mollify detractors, and he can make up entirely phony youth-coaching points about safer tackling, too, so eventually deflated balls and security videos and abused women and bruised brains all coalesce harmlessly behind whatever is next and shiny and bright.
Goodell has Draft-a-Palooza next month in Chicago, wielding power to close streets, reroute traffic for weeks and command police escort details. He has more important things to do right now than worry about any of those silly things that happened last year.
Seemingly, we all do.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. Follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.