Ray Rice's Effect On The NFL Community

In February 2014, the NFL had embarked on the biggest crisis the league has faced in its 94 years of existence. Ray Rice, professional running back for the Baltimore Ravens, has disrupted the NFL community because of his domestic violence scandal. The basic information of the case, the negative effects, the positive outcomes, and my opinion should hopefully make you understand the great effect it has on the NFL community.

It all started the late afternoon of February 14, Valentine’s Day, at the Revel Casino Hotel in Atlantic City with two other couples. They had dinner and drinks and then went to the bar at the casino were they had a bottle of tequila. As the night had gone on, the couple eventually made their way back to the room at about

It was then Ray Rice spits and openly smacks his then fiancé in the face as she is walking towards an elevator to get on her floor. As she steps into the elevator, he follows behind her as he begins to yell at her. When she begins to talk back to him, he then spits on her again, violently punches her with his left hand, and knocks her out by her falling into the wall and railing in the elevator. After the horrible confrontation in the casino elevator, the Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti, President Dick Cass and general manger Ozzie Newsome started to make public and private pushes for Ray Rice to get back on the field. In early April Rice’s attorney, Michael J. Diamondstein, got a hold of the inside-elevator video and told the President Cass: “Its f---ing horrible.” But that didn’t convince him that he should view the video and instead pushed for Rice’s legal team to get him in a pretrial intervention program after he heard some of the its advantages. One of the key benefits: it keeps the video from being released. Four days later, the prosecutor signed off on the pretrial intervention program. If he completed the one-year program and went to anger management classes, the court would discharge the felony aggravated assault charge.

In another effort to fix what Goodell and the NFL have done wrong, he changed the punishments for domestic violence. People across the country have been angry due to the light punishment Rice had gotten and inconsistent with other cases. They have announced that the first offense is a six game suspension and the second offense the player will be banished from the league for at least one year. This is one of the rare occasions that Goodell has admitted he was wrong and he usually never back down in the face of criticism. Its taking time but the NFL is trying to make it right with the Ray Rice case.