The NFL Doesn't Care About Women

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Let's be clear on one thing right off the bat: the NFL doesn't hate women.

No, the NFL can't hate women, because to hate someone or something, you have to give that person or thing a measure of attention and importance, and it's obvious by now that the powers that be at the National Football League have never in their lives spared a passing thought for women.

Oh sure, long enough to dye some merchandise pink - but that's not about women, really, it's about women's money.

Then again, why should we be surprised? The NFL doesn't care about the health and safety of its own players until its bottom line is threatened, so why should it care about the women those players spend their time with?

The NFL decided that "probably knowing" that someone was deflating footballs was worth twice as many games suspended and $941,177 more in fines than beating a woman. Sure, Ray Rice ended up missing more games, but not until a horrific video surfaced and the NFL was facing public anger.

But we never stay very angry for long, do we? Ben Roethlisberger, serial rapist, takes the field every Sunday for Pittsburgh. Oh, and by the way, the suspension he served? Four games.

Darryl Washington smoked marijuana - a victimless crime, and completely legal now in multiple states - and he was suspended sixteen games. So, according to the NFL's metric, using a drug that can hardly be considered performance enhancing is eight times worse than beating a woman, and four times worse than sexually assaulting multiple women.

Terrelle Pryor was suspended five games for accepting gifts while in college. So accepting free stuff [when the NCAA is phenomenally broken] is two-and-a-half times as bad as beating a woman, and 25% worse than sexually assaulting multiple women.

[In case you think the Ray Rice penalty was some sort of exception, Sam Brandon, Leroy Hill, Brandon Underwood, and Cary Williams  were all suspended just two games for beating women.]

"But what they do off the field doesn't interfere with the integrity of the game the way deflating footballs does," you might protest, if you're an asshole who thinks having rapists and woman-beaters on the field doesn't affect the integrity of the game.

If you genuinely see no problem with the punishments laid out by the NFL in response to various infractions, I want you to look every woman you know in the face and tell them that you are more concerned with deflating footballs and smoking marijuana than you would be by their abuser being on the field.

Even if there was video proof that Tom Brady let air out of those footballs personally, while smoking a blunt and giggling to himself, his transgressions would not be worse than those of Rice, Roethlisberger, Brandon, Hill, Underwood, and Williams.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that cheating on the field is acceptable, or even that Brady shouldn't be punished - the point of all this is that the NFL's own metric for punishment values the lives and safety of women less than it does a few hisses of air from game balls.

The NFL doesn't care about women. The NFL has never, ever cared about women - even when they try to pay lip service to the idea, it rings hollow.

The NFL doesn't care about women, so I'm done with the NFL. I'm not buying any more merchandise, or watching anymore games until they make this right.

Given their track record, I think it's safe to assume I'll be strictly a baseball fan from here on out.

The Showdown

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This afternoon's game between the Patriots and the Broncos has been broken down and analyzed and predicted so many times over that it's become tedious.

It's Brady v. Manning, winner gets an all-expense paid trip to the Superbowl - and even as a Patriots fan, I've heard every point of analysis so many times that I change the channel the minute I see anything related to this game on the SportsCenter rundown.

There's nothing left to say about this game that hasn't been repeated ad nauseam all week - but luckily kickoff is just hours away.

Pats v. Sox: No Competition

For some of you, this is a difficult decision. Patriots kickoff is at 1:00, Sox first pitch comes just thirty-five minutes later... What do you watch!? For me, it's a no-brainer. Give me Daisuke's second start after a three month hiatus over Brady and the gang any day. Yes, I know about the smack being thrown around about this game, and I know I'm supposed to hate the Jets. I even realize that there are more Sox games left (if the Sox make it to the ADLS and get swept-which would be the worst case scenario-they have 18 games left) than Pats games (if the Pats make it all the way to the Super Bowl-best case scenario-they have the same number of games).

Football has always been my least favorite of the professional sports to watch, and it's even grown on me in recent years. When I was a younger, I would watch only the Super Bowl... but I would read a book during the play and only watch the commercials. This was during a time that the team was winning, and winning quite regularly. The only season I watched more than a quarter of the games in their entirety was 2007, and that had more to do with boring Sundays at boarding school than the fact that they were relentlessly and systematically crushing every team in the league.

The strange thing is, I like watching football live. Though I've never been to a Patriots game, I enjoyed watching my high school teams play, and I like to watch games at college, but there's something about watching football on television (especially a dorm sized television) that turns me off. Don't get me wrong, I watched last week, and I screamed as loudly as several of my neighbors did during the last six or so minutes... But that was a Red Sox offday. Say what you want, but I'll never skip the Red Sox for the Patriots, no matter how dreamy Tom Brady thinks he is. I mean, the man wears a Yankees hat of all things... doesn't he know where he plays?

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