Rozner: Goodell equally laughable, disgraceful
Roger Goodell would be someone to laugh at if he weren't so utterly flawed as a public figure who has the power to change and affect conversation.
This is a man, after all, who gave Ray Rice a two-game suspension after the running back beat up a woman in an elevator, dragged her into the lobby and dropped her comatose arm on camera for everyone to see.
Two games.
Smoke marijuana and you might get a 16-week, unpaid vacation. Beat up a woman on camera and get two games.
Two flippin' games.
It's a sickening, stomach-turning video of a man beating up a woman.
That is, if such a thing bothers you. Roger Goodell is apparently not similarly disturbed.
Goodell claims he never saw the video. Ask 100 people and 99 - or maybe 100 - will say Goodell lied. If he actually didn't see it, that makes him a man so lacking in curiosity, judgment or fairness that he is unqualified to operate the hot dog cart that sits outside his posh NFL headquarters on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.
He didn't see it. Sure he didn't.
This is a man who preaches "integrity of the league," his minions bowing before him, while shrieking with laughter behind his throne and knowing he has forgotten to wear clothes again.
Goodell says he had no proof. He had no video. He had no beating on tape. He says he did not have all the evidence a decent human could need and did not know Ray Rice punched out a female half his size.
Maybe Goodell just didn't care.
Wearing $2,000 suits and sitting in comfortable, leather chairs, he buried one domestic-violence case after another for a decade, and at the same time sold pink T-shirts out of the back of his van, vile and duplicitous behavior by a commissioner who has redefined vile and duplicitous while raking in $44 million a year.
Only when the Rice video was leaked did Goodell finally take action against all the fine gentlemen who think violence against women is not just acceptable, but actually quite normal.
Yeah, Goodell is a joke. And it would be funny if his actions regarding an issue so serious didn't carry such frightening ramifications.
Which brings us to Tom Brady, who has been suspended a quarter of a season for his "probable" involvement in having footballs deflated. It's the equivalent of suspending Jose Abreu or Kris Bryant 40 games for having pine tar 19 inches up the bat, instead of 18 inches.
It's a technicality.
Pine tar helps a hitter grab the bat. Some use it, others don't. Some batters wear gloves, others don't.
Some quarterbacks wear gloves, others don't. Deflated footballs help some quarterbacks grab a football, while others like more air in the ball.
It's a technicality.
In a league that changes rule after rule after rule, year after year after year, in order to promote more offense and make it more difficult to play defense, why wouldn't you want the most important player on the field to have the football exactly the way he wants it?
Meanwhile, ask any ex-NFLer and they'll tell you that virtually every NFL team started altering footballs to suit the QB after Peyton Manning got the rule changed from having to use brand-new, slippery footballs to prepping them before games so that the QBs could get a better grip.
So after years of failing to police actual crimes in his league, Goodell took a jackhammer to a petunia to prove he's tough and protect his job.
He runs NFL investigations that 100 percent of the time find Goodell innocent of all charges - as in the Rice video story - and then he runs investigations of others using a kangaroo court where the judge and jury is a man who has a Kardashian consistency combined with a God complex, and he plays the executioner with equal parts Three Stooges and Cosmo Kramer.
It would be laughable if it weren't so disgraceful.
brozner@dailyherald.com
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