Imrem: Fans and media also to blame for NFL's mess
Man, is there ever enough blame to go around concerning the Ray Rice mess.
At the top, of course, is the perpetrator himself. Then there's the NFL for fumbling, bumbling and stumbling through its investigation. Then there are the authorities in New Jersey for the way the case was adjudicated.
Last - or perhaps first - are you and me.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says the league is held to a higher standard. I say we're the ones with the responsibility to hold the NFL to that higher standard.
Wednesday the story kept unfolding: an Associated Press report quoted a law-enforcement official as saying in April he sent an NFL executive a tape of Rice's assault on his fiancee.
True or not, it's clearly time for all of us to take a personal inventory of our own morals, ethics and scruples and demand the league live up to them.
In our zeal for the sport, we have failed that assignment.
Instead, our addiction to football made us make the sport more important than it is and in a way license its owner, executives and administrators to get away with anything and everything.
It's time for us quit winking when the NFL goes easy on players that commit crimes.
Only time will tell whether Ray Rice has broken the spell of us accepting that some bad people populate NFL rosters, or at least that some teams have some good people doing bad things.
Generalizing about pro football players is unfair because the majority never get into trouble. Still, enough do that the perception is the league's police blotter overflows.
So, what to do about these bad apples, peaches and pears that spoil the whole bunch?
The answer is to do something different from what you as fans and we in the media have done in enabling the NFL to lose its way before our own blind eyes.
What we have done pretty much is cringe, shake our heads and then quietly escape to next week's menu of games.
I often half-joked that if O.J. Simpson emerged from prison in the prime of his career, teams would line up to sign him.
Only half-joked because it might be true.
The NFL is driven by those twin troublemakers: winning and making money. They conspired to make football the most popular sport in America.
Meanwhile, too many of us compartmentalized what happens on the field and off the field. One common comment is, "I just want to be entertained and don't care what players do away from the game."
No wonder Ray Rice was cheered at Ravens training camp a few months after punching his fiancee unconscious in an Atlantic City casino elevator.
Finally, but only when a video of Rice's crime surfaced this week, everyone from Baltimore to Chicago to the rest of the country gasped at what they saw.
Where was the outrage when details of Rice's assault were only on paper? If a tree falls in the forest and isn't videotaped by a security camera, did it really fall?
The image on the punch video caused such a stir that the NFL can't essentially trivialize the issue of domestic battery.
The hope is that the league is embarrassed enough to take a firmer stand; that fans are shocked enough to no longer tolerate domestic abuse by their favorite NFL players; and that the media will recognize the story has enough legs to keep running.
For me, it's OK if players play until their cases are resolved in court. It's also OK if the guilty are allowed back into the league after serving their sentences.
During the time between due process and second chances, however, fans and the media have to view off-field violence as more than a necessary evil of pro football.
Heck, it's bad enough that on-field violence is viewed as a necessary evil of pro football.
mimrem@dailyherald.com