The new personal conduct policy that the NFL announced Wednesday contains significant improvements that should, if properly applied, help the league avoid some of the "arbitrary" and "inconsistent" disciplinary decisions of the past, which is how arbitrator and former judge Barbara Jones infamously characterized commissioner Roger Goodell's handling of the Ray Rice case -- the powder keg that set the whole process of league reform in motion.
Goodell's continued insistence on retaining the option to render the final decision in the appeals process will be contentious. You can expect the NFLPA to push back hard on significant parts of the new policy, starting there. Wednesday, the two sides couldn't even agree on how much the NFL had or hadn't invited the players' union to be part of the drafting of the new policy.
The league said did so. The NFLPA said did not.
At this point, even Goodell -- as ham-handed as he's admittedly been at various junctures since the Rice case unraveled -- has to realize there were two overarching things under scrutiny here: NFL players who violently break the law and the office of the NFL commissioner itself, Goodell in particular.
For the public, as well as the NFLPA, the question of what the hell Rice did in that elevator morphed into what the hell was Goodell doing with the absurdly lenient two-game suspension he initially handed down to Rice for knocking out with a single punch the woman he would later marry. This after a botched NFL "investigation" that is still mind-boggling for its laxity and willful incompleteness.
The early suspicions that the league didn't make a serious effort to get a full picture of what happened have been confirmed in dispiriting detail.
With this new policy, Goodell and the league have laid out an encouraging array of new disciplinary procedures, most notably that Goodell is essentially removed from the process of meting out punishments. The league will institute prevention programs and solicit expert advice from outside sources. Goodell also announced plans to install a sort of discipline czar -- someone with law enforcement experience whom the commissioner will appoint to conduct "independent" investigations (though it's unclear if that will happen before or after former FBI chief Robert Mueller finishes his, uh, investigation into the Rice investigation that the league calls "independent," even though Mueller's firm handles NFL business).
There are also clearer league guidelines now on how players accused of violent crimes will be disciplined. It starts with a six-game suspension for first-time offenders, and then a lifetime ban for a second offense.
Harking back to Goodell's early-tenure, law-and-order commissioner days, he also said Wednesday that the league again doesn't feel the need to wait for players' cases to snake through the legal system. Non-player employees who are charged with violent crimes will now be put on paid leave until the league disciplinary procedure is finished. The league intends to do the same for players, but it acknowledges this element might be subject to change based on discussions with the NFLPA.
On Wednesday, union exec George Attalah tweeted this promise: "There will be a lot of analysis about the differences in our formal proposal and what the NFL will present today on personal conduct policy." And the union swiftly issued a statement expressing its displeasure at not being able to collectively bargain changes to the policy.
Goodell has admitted both publicly and privately that mistakes were made in the past. The new policy will only mitigate -- not completely fix -- the crisis of confidence in Goodell himself. This new policy shows he has learned from some of those mistakes by reaching out to a broader and more diverse coalition of advisers and advocacy organizations and, now, giving them a formal place and voice in how the NFL operates going forward.
But it will not enhance faith -- especially among players -- in the league's ability to be fair as long as Goodell insists on remaining the last stop in the appeal process.
Handing off the early parts of the disciplinary process to others means he's not the judge and jury anymore. But he's still insisting on filling the executioner's role if need be. He still wants the power to trump what the tiers of people below him do. And that's problematic.
Prepare yourself to hear a lot in coming days about Article 46 in the current collective bargaining agreement, which the union will cite to question if Goodell has the power to hear final appeals. He clearly thinks he does. And he's not giving it back just because the union wants him to. Neither are the owners, who voted unanimously Wednesday to implement the new personal conduct policy immediately.
None of that, however, changes this: Since the Ray Rice case and the Adrian Peterson child abuse case broke, Goodell became a lightning rod almost as much as Rice or Peterson were. It was said the league "didn't care" about women and children. The public perception was the NFL seemed to be rotting inward from both ends of the food chain, from the players down on the field all the way up to the league's highest corridors of power, folks were seen as out of touch at best and immoral at worst.
And a bit of other news that also came out Wednesday -- this story by ESPN's Don Van Natta for "Outside the Lines," based on a 631-page transcript of testimony in Rice's appeal case -- does not help Goodell.
When confronted with the most serious crises of his eight-year tenure, the testimony showed Goodell admittedly didn't take the time to read reports through and didn't check to see if the league had requested the elevator video (which Rice's lawyer says he would have turned over). Goodell also claimed to not even know public opinion was running against him, and his insistence on numerous occasions that the NFL had done everything to get a full picture of the Rice case was, in fact, not true.
This pattern is not entirely new. The NFL has a long and spotty history of saying one thing and doing another.
It was true when the NFL decried violence on one hand but kept marketing "greatest hits" videos on the other. It was true when the league was revealed to have known far more about the deleterious effects of concussions than it let on until it was forced to fess up. It's been evident in the way damaged retired players have had to fight and fight the league for benefits or assistance to help them navigate all the surgeries and troubles they face now.
And so, while you could sense you were supposed to almost hear angels singing in the passages of Goodell's memo to ownership and league executives Wednesday in which he wrote about the NFL's venerated place "in American society" and the league's responsibility to "lead," the more measured response to the new promises should be this:
Good luck, NFL. Better late than never. We'll believe the reforms are working when we see it.
The hard truth is the NFL desperately needed to fix itself for business reasons as much as ethical ones. Sponsors were barking. Players are still mad. Fans are appalled and hacked off. Even before that, medics were saying the game is horrible for your health. All the Heads Up tackling programs aimed at moms of tomorrow's players aren't going to change that.
Goodell's judgment and conduct in the Rice case were troublesome. And you can see why players aren't likely to feel completely happy until he's out of the appeals process completely.
Teddy Brenner, the old Madison Square Garden boxing matchmaker, once had a line that seems to apply. As Brenner noted, "Sports is made up of people. And the trouble with people is they're always up to something."
