Last year about this time, Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti and others in the organization were reportedly working the NFL to get a lenient suspension for Ray Rice.
That's what an ESPN "Outside the Lines" story claimed. If nothing else, Bisciotti and the Ravens didn't act when a video of Rice dragging his unconscious fiancee out of an elevator surfaced. When the in-elevator video surfaced, showing Rice punching then-fiancee Janay Palmer (the two have married since), the public tide turned and the Ravens cut Rice.
The Ravens have refuted many parts of that ESPN report, including that Bisciotti and other officials asked NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to give Rice a light two-game suspension, which he did. Whatever really happened, there's a much different tune from Bisciotti about Rice a year later. Bisciotti is saying now that the Ravens should have sought out the video and had they seen it, they'd have cut Rice immediately.
Bisciotti talked about regrets in a conference call with season-ticket holders, according to ESPN.com.
"We did the best we can," Bisciotti said, according to ESPN.com. "I can't say I don't have regrets. I said back then, my regret was not cutting him. My regret was not demanding to see the video. I believe we could've gotten it. If we had seen the video back in the spring, I think we would have a different circumstance. We would've released him. We should have seen the video in May and not in September."
I'm sure Bisciotti does have regrets. The Ravens haven't received nearly the criticism of Goodell for not putting in much effort to see the video from inside the elevator, or really taking any action at all. Would the Ravens really have cut Rice had they seen it and the public hadn't, and the public hadn't had the chance to react so strongly to it? That's what Bisciotti says. The video from outside the elevator and Rice's admittion to the team he hit his then-fiancee (the Ravens say he told them he hit her with an open hand and not a fist, which apparently was a big distinction to them) didn't cause the Ravens to take any action, so believing Bisciotti's comments now require a bit of a leap of logic.
If the incident changed the way the Ravens think about domestic violence, then that's good. The organization that supported Rice even though there was a video of him dragging his then-fiancee out of an elevator knows it was a major mistake to treat domestic violence like any other off-field incident.
"I think that we were pretty stupid not to recognize domestic violence as a category by itself," Bisciotti said, according to ESPN.com. "No other infractions -- failed drug tests, bar fights or DUIs -- nothing to me should rise to that level. I'm embarrassed to say that they were lumped together. So, I'm happy that we found ourselves comfortable taking that categorically and putting it into at the top of the list as something that is just unacceptable."
That's nothing new. Anyone who has thought critically about the Rice suspension knows it wasn't an isolated mistake, because the NFL had an embarrassing history of light punishments for domestic violence cases for decades. There just wasn't a video of the incidents in those cases.
But the fact that Bisciotti is still answering about what happened to season-ticket holders says the Ravens still have a way to go before they can move beyond what happened last year.
- - - - - - -
Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdowncorner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
0 comments:
Post a Comment