Recently the National Football League has committed some major fumbles when disciplining players for off-the-field behavior. As a compliance issue, the NFL lost as much yardage for how it communicated its policies and procedures as it did for the actual content of those policies. And the players (along with their lawyers) didn’t do much better in managing the message of their messes.
Barbara Jones, a former federal judge, overturned the NFL’s decision to suspend Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens indefinitely, after a horrific video surfaced in which a punch by Rice knocked his then-fiancée unconscious in a hotel elevator. The NFL initially suspended Rice for two games and fined him approximately half a million dollars. After the video aired, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell changed his mind and argued that the video revealed a “starkly different sequence of events” than what Rice had told him, so he suspended him indefinitely. But according to Jones, Rice had never misrepresented his actions and didn’t deserve a second punishment.
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