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"FacebookPinterest\n\nPity the shield. The NFL is having a rough go of it lately; the same casual fans who once found themselves drawn to the sport are now repulsed by it. Adrian Peterson, arguably the best running back of his generation, is accused of wanton child abuse and has been suspended indefinitely from the Vikings; Ray Rice knocks his fiancee out cold in an elevator and only faces real consequences when the public sees full video; and underneath it all, there&amp;#39;s the nagging suspicion that this hyper-violent game somehow condones, or creates, violent acts out in the world.\n\nMake no mistake, though: from the NFL&amp;#39;s perspective, at least, this is above all else a public relations problem, a case of too much bad news at once. The league has been playing this game of chicken for some time now, hoping that the visceral enjoyment of professional football can trump all the rational reasons to question it. It&amp;#39;s a matter of product staying just ahead of conscience, of our national opiate winning out every time because, duh, people gobble up drugs knowing full well that they&amp;#39;re making a poor decision. The Adrian Peterson story on top of the Ray Rice story was simply too much. Suddenly, longtime sponsor Anheuser Busch was threatening to bow out. The corporations had spoken: The NFL was getting toxic.\n\nIt&amp;#39;s probably necessary at this point to state the obvious: if guilty, Adrian Peterson did something awful. For now, whether he went too far with an accepted cultural practice or was just plain wrong is a question of semantics; either way, the result was the same, and that&amp;#39;s what he&amp;#39;ll have to answer for. Ray Rice, too, committed an act that should be unthinkable to anyone in a real partnership.\n\nExcept there&amp;#39;s a key difference here: Peterson was a single bad actor, while Rice&amp;#39;s story was as much about the NFL&amp;#39;s inaction and possible cover-up as it was his crime. It&amp;#39;s na\u00EFve to think that individuals ever truly act outside of patterns or institutions\u2014if nothing else, the conversation about Peterson&amp;#39;s own upbringing is evidence of this\u2014but one is simply bad for the NFL, while the other is the NFL itself doing wrong. Be as mad as you want at Adrian Peterson; by all means, condemn Ray Rice. Two violent offenders doesn&amp;#39;t mean the league is full of them, though. That&amp;#39;s the perception the NFL is concerned about\u2014for now. It&amp;#39;s classic broad-stroke logic, the kind of reverse branding that smart leagues can rinse away. And it&amp;#39;s certainly less damning than the actual story around Ray Rice.\n\nWhat&amp;#39;s more, in lumping Rice and Peterson together, we&amp;#39;re behaving like dissatisfied NFL consumers, fans who want their shiny toy back. The two events register on a visceral level, on the same wavelength as football usually does. There&amp;#39;s no principled objection to the league, no real critique of how it works or what it stands for. There&amp;#39;s only the frustration that we don&amp;#39;t feel about the NFL like we once did\u2014a PR problem, a branding disaster, but not a real hard look at the league or the sport. In a lot of ways, Adrian Peterson has made Ray Rice less of a problem for the NFL. The narrative becomes one about violent athletes, not Roger Goodell&amp;#39;s backward attitudes and cold-blooded agenda. When news broke yesterday that a reformed drug policy was practically a done deal, it only propped up this view of things: the league is run sensibly, players are the problem, all this will be over soon.\n\nIt will be over soon because, as brutal as football can be, and as frequently as NFL players get into trouble, no one really wants to believe that a sport can warp people in this way. And really, it might be a question of chicken-and-egg: Do violent people seek out football or are they predisposed to it? Either side of the equation sounds extreme and silly, the kind of thing that borders on hysteria. And that&amp;#39;s exactly where the NFL wants us: freaking out about isolated occurrences, generalizing from there, and eventually backing off when we remember that people really aren&amp;#39;t that bad. And football really isn&amp;#39;t that bad\u2014at least not in the way we&amp;#39;re currently afraid it is.\n\nWhat remains fucked up about the NFL isn&amp;#39;t that it makes players into violent offenders but that it continues to be a sport that&amp;#39;s extremely violent to its players. The connection worth exploring isn&amp;#39;t the one between the behavior of Rice and Peterson, but the ways in which Goodell&amp;#39;s handling of the Rice situation\u2014concealment, minimizing, double-speak, and dissimulation\u2014mirrors the way the league continues to deal with the long-term effects of the sport on its athletes. The players aren&amp;#39;t, on the whole, villains. They&amp;#39;re probably closer to very well-compensated victims, at least of circumstance. They happen to excel at something that will destroy them over time, a line of work that offers little in the way of support as the years go by\u2014or as the damage is being done. Goodell doesn&amp;#39;t want anyone asking hard questions about the league&amp;#39;s attitudes toward violence, since that leads back to the fundamental ambivalence of the sport. We watch dudes basically kill each other in real-time because it makes for great product.\n\nExcept even before League of Denial, it was common knowledge that football could cause severe problems over time and yet nobody stopped watching. There was hand-wringing and think-pieceing but at the end of the day, no one walked away. The irony of the Peterson/Rice combo is that, if we really started talking about the Rice story in the larger context of the league&amp;#39;s core values, if we talk about the ways that football doesn&amp;#39;t sanction violence but instead does its best to downplay it, then maybe we&amp;#39;d have hit a very different tipping point. But that would have required a willingness to really give up on the sport, not just ask it to redeem itself so that every Sunday can go on according to plan."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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