This afternoon, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell handed down a 6-game suspension to Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger for violating the NFL's personal conduct policy.
While most of the reaction to Goodell's punishment for Roethlisberger has been positive, there has been some grumbling that the punishment is too harsh, given that he has not been charged with a crime.
I imagine Goodell is a very hard man. Some of the punishments he's handed down through his tough-as-nails personal conduct policy have indeed been too harsh. I figure he never laughs and is probably not much fun at cocktail parties. I would hate to be the guy's daughter. I imagine a 16-year-old girl coming home three minutes late for curfew and being sentenced to six months of house arrest and a manual labor punishment involving copious amounts of yard work and scrubbing the floor on one's hands and knees, Cinderella style.
But Roethlisberger is not a 16-year-old girl (though I would advise anyone who is to stay well away from him), he's a grown man who plays professional football who violated moral standards, the NFL personal conduct policy, and despite the lack of criminal charges pursued, probably the law.
If you're old enough to make your own decisions, then you're old enough to face the consequences for them. Roethlisberger can stand there and claim he's innocent of violating the law all he wants. Whether it's true or not, he absolutely did violate the NFL personal conduct policy, and there are consequences for that which he, like every other player in the league, was well aware of.
The fact is that the American legal system probably made a mistake on this one. But for once, the NFL didn't.
I don't like Goodell any more than the next person who doesn't care for folks who can't seem to loosen up, but I sure like him a hell of a lot more than I like Ben Roethlisberger.
Goodell made the right choice. We're not talking about Jeff Reed violating a Sheetz paper towel dispenser here. We're talking about Ben Roethlisberger violating the health, safety, and physical and emotional well-being of a 20-year-old woman.
If you think Goodell threw the proverbial book at Roethlisberger, good. As far as I'm concerned, he was well within his rights to throw a whole library.
Roethlisberger may not be a criminal in the eyes of the law, but he is in the eyes of the NFL, and for once, they're the ones seeing clearly.
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