Ruffled Feathers: How the Ravens mismanaged the Ray Rice situation
In this crazy sporting world, negative incidents involving players that occur are controlled or magnified by how they are handled within the organizations dealing with them. The Ray Rice situation in Baltimore has quickly become a shining example of how not to handle such a polarizing and negative incident by a top star within your organization.
Unless you hate football and America, you most likely are aware of Ray Rice cold-cocking his then fiancée and now wife Janay in an Atlantic City resort elevator back in February of this year. Although no video has been shown of the actual KO punch, the dubious footage of Rice dragging his unconscious fiancée out of the elevator like a sack of bricks and laying her face down with little emotion has now become infamous. Although no charges were pressed against Rice, the feeling within the football community was that we would see a hefty penalty assessed against him for the incident.
After much deliberation and time spent with third parties reviewing, The Ravens and the NFL have seemingly handled the situation as you predictably would with one of your top stars: you slap them on the wrist and hope everyone forgets. But in a world that is trying to change domestic violence and spousal abuse against women, a two game suspension penalty against Rice by Roger Goodell and the NFL has proven to not be enough.
The backlash of anger and disgust with this decision has been overwhelmingly heard throughout the country, and both the Ravens and the NFL will have to deal with the consequences of damaging their reputations. But it didn’t have to be this way. Looking at the timeline of events, you can see where Baltimore went wrong. The Ravens have been trying their best to paint over a hole in the wall without even repairing the damage first. In fact, everything they have attempted to control the situation has only seemed to increase the negative attention around Rice and the team. Here we take a look at where they went wrong.