Video of Ray Ray punching fiancee released by TMZ

CBS pulls Rihanna song from tonight’s pregame show

Posted by Michael David Smith on September 11, 2014, 5:49 PM EDT


In the wake of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, CBS has thought better of opening tonight’s pregame show in Baltimore with a feature including a song by one of America’s most prominent survivors of domestic violence.

CBS Sports officials told Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated that they will no longer use a planned opening segment featuring Rihanna’s “Run This Town.” Rihanna, like Janay Rice, was the victim in a high-profile domestic violence case.

Instead, CBS will begin the pregame show with a report from Norah O’Donnell, who interviewed NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on Wednesday.

This was not the way CBS expected to open its coveted Thursday Night Football programming, but CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus told Deitsch that the Rice case is simply too big not to be the focal point of tonight’s game in Baltimore.

“It’s important to realize we are not overreacting to this story but it is as big a story as has faced the NFL,” said McManus. “We thought journalistically and from a tone standpoint, we needed to have the appropriate tone and coverage. A lot of the production elements we wanted in the show are being eliminated because of time or tone.”

This story has done something that few off-field stories in NFL history have managed to do: It has overshadowed the game. CBS has a tall order juggling the need to address that story with the need to satisfy fans who tune in to watch a football game.
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Seriously?

Iamtdg said:

This makes absolutely zero sense. So, he gave Rice a lesser sentence because a worse sentence would reflect worse on her character? wut?

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Well, I have heard some dummies justify that since she married him, suspending him more would end up hurting her financially as well.

All in all, it is just effing stupid.

Iamtdg said:

Report: Goodell went light on initial Rice punishment out of respect for Rice’s wife

Posted by Josh Alper on September 11, 2014, 4:04 PM EDT
Roger Goodell
AP
When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell met with former Ravens running back Ray Rice before initially suspending him for two games, Rice’s wife Janay was also in attendance.

During that meeting, she told Goodell that she believed she was partially to blame for being punched in the face and knocked unconscious inside an elevator at the Revel Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. According to a report from Kevin Clark of the Wall Street Journal, Goodell then went on to give Rice the nearly universally reviled penalty out of respect for his wife.

Clark reports that an NFL owner said that Goodell told him and other owners that he felt a harsher penalty would have been “insensitive” to Mrs. Rice “because it would have come across as an indictment of her character.” That owner and another source told Clark that they believed the lack of thoroughness “reflected Goodell’s discomfort” with making a decision that didn’t fit with her description of the events. The NFL and the Rices declined opportunity to comment.

According to the owner, Goodell also told him that he believed Mrs. Rice fell during a scuffle between the couple and became unconscious as a result. That’s in direct opposition to the police report from the incident, which is very different than Goodell’s statements that the work of law enforcement was the league’s guide in how to approach the issue.

It’s unknown if the unnamed owner’s goal was to make Goodell seem more sympathetic, but the report, if true, doesn’t do that. It serves to blame the victim not only for being abused, but for the league’s failure to do a complete investigation of what happened that night. And it provides further evidence that the league erred in a major way by interviewing the alleged victim of abuse next to her alleged abuser and his employers in the first place.

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This makes absolutely zero sense. So, he gave Rice a lesser sentence because a worse sentence would reflect worse on her character? wut?

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Holy crap. Why would you even have the victim in the room with him if you cared about what happened?

boozeman said:

Well, I have heard some dummies justify that since she married him, suspending him more would end up hurting her financially as well.

All in all, it is just effing stupid.

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That may be the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

dallen said:

Holy crap. Why would you even have the victim in the room with him if you cared about what happened?

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No doubt.

Now Goodell is contradicting himself. This could get even more ugly for him.

Lol...they were going to play a Rhianna song before the game, but decided against it since she is associated with domestic violence.

Carp said:

Lol...they were going to play a Rhianna song before the game, but decided against it since she is associated with domestic violence.

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Probably replacing her with Chris Brown.

dallen said:

Probably replacing her with Chris Brown.

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They clearly should have gone with this:

It won't matter if there is an independent investigation. The investigation that will be the most thorough will come from the FBI. The Congressional inquiry that puts it in motion will leave no stone unturned. The have subpoenas powers that a lot of other bodies don't have.

I blame rap music.

pdom said:

I blame rap music.

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I know you were joking but judging how that sliver of culture degrades women and glorifies violence, you might not be that far off.

boozeman said:

I know you were joking but judging how that sliver of culture degrades women and glorifies violence, you might not be that far off.

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Yes. Degrading women and violence didn't exist before rap music.

pdom said:

Yes. Degrading women and violence didn't exist before rap music.

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The rest of America seems to be moving on from it a lot faster than the gangsta rap loving subculture.

Clay_Allison said:

The rest of America seems to be moving on from it a lot faster than the gangsta rap loving subculture.

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Please elaborate. Who and where is "rest of America' and what artist does gangsta rap now?

N.F.L. Stands By Its Leader
SEPT. 12, 2014


Joe Nocera

In 2006, the year Roger Goodell was named commissioner of the National Football League, the Washington Redskins were the most valuable team in football, according to Forbes magazine, with a valuation of $1.4 billion. Washington’s revenue that year was $303 million, with profits of more than $108 million. In second place came the New England Patriots, valued by Forbes at $1.18 billion, followed by the Dallas Cowboys at $1.17 billion.

Fast forward to Forbes’s most recent financial analysis of N.F.L. teams, published earlier this month. Today, the Dallas Cowboys, the No. 1 team, are valued at $3.2 billion, almost triple their valuation of just eight years ago, with revenue of $560 million and profits of $246 million. The New England Patriots, meanwhile, saw their valuation jump to $2.6 billion. The Washington team, though now in third place, is still worth $1 billion more than it was in 2006.

And these numbers are, if anything, an understatement: The Buffalo Bills were just sold for $1.4 billion, a record price for a professional football team. Forbes had estimated the Bills’ value at “only” $935 million.

If you want to understand why Goodell’s job is almost certainly safe, despite his complete botch of the Ray Rice domestic violence case and the many calls for his ouster, this is why: The only people who can fire him are the 32 N.F.L. owners — and they have zero interest in letting him go. After all, he makes them money. Currently, the N.F.L. takes in about $10 billion overall; Goodell has told the owners he wants to make it a $25 billion business by the year 2027. You can practically see their mouths watering at the prospect.

Just listen to them circling the wagons: John Mara, the co-owner of the New York Giants, has said flatly that Goodell’s job is not in jeopardy. Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, has come to his defense. In 2012, the owners paid Goodell a staggering $44.2 million. “I think he’s worth it,” Kraft told The Times’s Ken Belson in February, when Goodell’s pay was revealed.

Of course there is another reason the owners think he is “worth it.” He takes the heat for them when they need him to. Daniel Snyder, the owner in Washington, is adamant that he will never give up the nickname “Redskins,” even though it is deeply insulting to Native Americans. Goodell backs him up. The owners don’t want to pay pensions to their referees? Goodell locks them out. “It’s a mistake to view Goodell as powerful,” says Gregg Easterbrook, the author of “The King of Sports: Why Football Must Be Reformed.” “The owners have all the power.”

And so it is in the recent controversy. Football is a violent game, and though they’d never say so out loud, N.F.L. owners accept some violence outside the white lines as an inevitable consequence. Indeed, it happens frequently enough that USA Today compiles a database of N.F.L. players who have been arrested.

The website Sidespin, using that database, found 56 examples of domestic violence committed by pro football players in the years since Goodell became commissioner. Once, in 2011, a player was suspended for the rest of the season — but that was by his team, the Minnesota Vikings, not Goodell. Another time, in 2006, a player was suspended by the league for two games. In every other instance where N.F.L. headquarters mandated a punishment, it was only a one-game suspension. According to Sidespin, in nearly three dozen cases of domestic violence, the N.F.L. took no action at all.

No wonder Goodell thought that his original two-game suspension of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for knocking his then-fiancée out cold was enough: He had never given out a longer suspension for domestic violence during his time as commissioner. Then came the leak of the video of Rice’s punch — followed by the scene of him dragging his unconscious fiancée out of the elevator door — which was so horrifying that even the N.F.L. couldn’t look the other way.

Goodell suspended Rice indefinitely and gave an interview to CBS News in which he tried to accept the blame for his mistake but came across as evasive and defensive. And he ordered up an internal investigation to be headed by Robert Mueller, the former F.B.I. director.

There is a small chance, I suppose, that Mueller will discover that Goodell lied when he said he had not seen the video before it became public earlier this week. In that case, the owners would have no choice but to fire him. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. What is far more likely is that Goodell will survive the calls for his ouster and go back to doing the one thing he truly knows how to do: Make money for his overlords, pro football’s owners.

Shit.

pdom said:

Please elaborate. Who and where is "rest of America' and what artist does gangsta rap now?

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From the American Bar Association:

Overall, African Americans were victimized by intimate partners a significantly higher rates than persons of any other race between 1993 and 1998. Black females experienced intimate partner violence at a rate 35% higher than that of white females, and about 22 times the rate of women of other races

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I'm not mincing words. When it comes to violent crime in America, look at any set of statistics and young black men from the inner city are doing most of it. I wonder what kind of music they listen to.

Clay_Allison said:

From the American Bar Association:



I'm not mincing words. When it comes to violent crime in America, look at any set of statistics and young black men from the inner city are doing most of it. I wonder what kind of music they listen to.

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what does this have to do with rap music, though? this stat is more indicative that african-americans are biologically more prone to domestic violence simply because they're black.

with your assumption of 'I wonder what music they listen to,' you could just the same blame watermelon, fried chicken, and jeri-curls

any stats about white ppl that have committed dv and what percentage listens/doesnt listen to rap music?