Ray Rice Made Himself Unwatchable, the One Sin the NFL Can't Forgive

Ray Rice’s primary job was never to carry footballs, score touchdowns, win games or lead his team to the Super Bowl. 

Ray Rice’s primary job was to make us feel good about spending three hours per week watching Ray Rice.

That’s every NFL player’s job, every NFL team’s job and the NFL’s job, boiled down to the essence. If we feel good about watching football, we watch football. Our eyeballs become advertising, satellite and cable dollars, plus ticket, merchandise and concession sales.

Good feelings about football become dollars that pay men like Ray Rice. That’s the transaction beneath the illusion, and it shapes everything about pro football, from the gloss of the helmets to the severity of the suspensions.

Ray Rice was in the Watch Ray Rice business, just as I am in the Read Mike Tanier business. His best methods to make us want to watch him were carrying footballs, scoring touchdowns, winning games and leading his team to the Super Bowl. But there were important secondary factors, including (but not limited to) assuring us that he was a decent human being, worthy of our support and admiration.

Ray Rice lost the ability to make us want to watch him. He started to lose that ability the moment he punched his fiancee in a casino elevator. He did not lose all of his ability in that moment, nor in the moment the surveillance tape became public. He could have demonstrated immediate remorse, contrition, grief and honesty. Forgiveness would not have been immediate or absolute, but it would have eventually come. Celebrity apologies, like professional football, are an industry, and we are conditioned to forgive the people ESPN, Oprah or the public relations professionals convince us to forgive.

Instead of contrition, real or contrived, Rice opted for an eight-month open-field juke-‘n’-jive.

He deflected, misled, hid behind his team’s media relations department and manipulated punishment procedures that are, sadly, designed with a high built-in tolerance for manipulation. He spent a little of his currency—the watchability that makes him useful to the football industry—when he led his wife through a stomach-churning mistakes were made-style press conference. He spent a little more when he convinced the NFL to slap his wrist for two games, then a little more when the Ravens closed ranks around him to start training camp.

On Monday, the final account came due. The latest TMZ footage showed more than a man punching his fiancee. It showed deceit, cowardice and a willingness to subject friends, family, coworkers, employers and the woman he struck—the woman he married—to months of allegations, innuendo and PR hornswoggle in order to cover his tracks. The video showed a man committing a terrible crime, but it revealed a man who compounded that crime over and over until it splattered the reputations of everyone who tried to help him.

Warning: Video contains graphic footage

The Ravens and the NFL finally acted, but not because of moral or ethical principle. The Ravens and the NFL should not act on moral or ethical principle, except in the broadest “thou shalt not kill” sense. Roger Goodell, Steve Bisciotti and John Harbaugh are not bishops or elected officials. They should tell no one how to live their lives, just how to contribute to the production of highly watchable football entertainment product.

The Ravens and the NFL finally acted because no one wants to watch Ray Rice play football, making him a liability in the football-watching marketplace.

We are defined in the Internet age by what we are associated with. Our social-networking feeds are our public faces: Smile, and the digital world smiles with you. I am associated with my columns; to you, my writing style is my personality. Adrian Peterson is associated with rugged touchdowns, Roger Goodell with a brand of tone-deaf corporate justice, the NFL with something simultaneously gladiatorial and gorgeous, brutal yet inspiring.

Ray Rice is now associated with punching his wife. Not touchdowns, Super Bowls or fourth-down miracles, but punching his wife. Thanks to all of his machinations, the association stuck, and the sleazy cover-up is now stuck atop the act itself.

Ray Rice can no longer make us feel good about watching Ray Rice. He makes us feel nauseous. He does not fill us with wonder or excitement. He fills us with dread and regret. Rice makes us feel foolish for reserving judgment, giving him the benefit of the doubt or showing any faith in “due process.” For Rice, those were all just tools of deception; our benefit of the doubt was used, like a sloppy tackler’s own momentum, to send us tumbling. No one wants to spend Sunday afternoon feeling nauseous, foolish and regretful.

Before Monday, Rice’s bad feelings were localized. After the TMZ video, they metastasized. The Ravens, too complicit and complacent for too long, switched to survival mode: Bad feelings about Rice became bad feelings about the Ravens. Goodell, already feeling the unfamiliar sense of regret that Rice inspires, pivoted from the “cut future losses” strategy to “eradicate the problem at its source” tactics.

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The NFL and the Ravens did not act out of altruism. They rarely will. They are not in the altruism business, but the business business. They give us players to watch and take away the ones we don’t want to watch, whether they are too old, too slow, too willing to cheat or too reprehensible.

In return, we watch. That’s why they do everything they do. Individuals within the NFL have many virtues and care about many things. “The NFL,” hulking corporate entity and governing body with Goodell leaning on its mighty rudder, cares only about its industry. It does the right thing only to please us, not to be righteous.

That sounds cynical. It’s actually empowering. The obstacle that kept standing in the way of all attempts to make Rice’s assault disappear was us. Rice’s lawyers could ward off a district attorney, but they could not make us want to watch Rice anymore. The Ravens doubled down with promotional support, but they could not make us want to watch Rice anymore. Rice somehow coaxed leniency out of Goodell, but neither of them could make us want to watch Rice anymore.

We made Ray Rice bad for the football business. We wield the same power with Ray McDonald, Greg Hardy and all future domestic abusers and other offenders. Goodell will not wield the NFL’s revamped policy lightly. Teams will not circle wagons around troublemakers so blithely. Someone else has a say in matters now: you and me.

There will still be crimes. There will still be punishments that reek of compromise and callous PR campaigns. But the NFL, the offenders, the teams and the publicists now know there is a limit.

The NFL is in the people-pleasing business. And we, the people, hold the final veto.

Mike Tanier covers the NFL for Bleacher Report.