Giants & NFL Deserve Scorn For Handling Of Brown
It’s too little too late now.
The Giants decided not to have Josh Brown travel with the team to London in their matchup with the Rams on Sunday. This comes in light of SportsNet New York’s Ralph Vacchiano report about a journal indicating Brown confronted his wife at her hotel room and beat her.
The Giants and the NFL should have taken action when reports circulated their kicker beat his wife. They should have suspended him. Even better, the Giants should have given him his release.
It would be a message indicating domestic violence will not be tolerated by anyone playing in the organization. Women are human being, not objects. They should be treated with respect. There is no place in this society to hit them at anytime. Teams should know better since their fanbase features many women following them.
One would think the NFL would learn after botching up the Ray Rice domestic suspension. It did not happen. Instead, he had a one-game suspension. Talk about not sending him a message, especially when he hasn’t been contrite with his actions.
The Giants and the NFL know. Don’t let them say otherwise. They had information about what was going on with Brown. They were hoping this would go away since it was months old.
What part didn’t they understand there were going to be more stories about Brown’s domestic violence coming out? When there’s smoke, there’s fire. There was more to the reports to where it came from.
The NFL should have been proactive in suspending Brown for an indefinite period of time. The Giants should have released Brown. That would have been problem solved.
Instead, the Giants and the league created bad public relations for themselves.
There’s this myth the Giants are a model organization, which they don’t tolerate awful behavior by their players. Anyone that is smart would realize that is not true. This is an organization that enable players such as Lawrence Taylor, Jeremy Shockey, Odell Beckham Jr., Michael Boley, Christian Peter and Plaxico Burress that behaved awful. Those guys were given a pass because they produced and won games for the Giants.
That’s the case with Brown. He’s a great kicker. It’s hard to find kickers like him, and the Giants don’t want to try out other kickers at this point of the season. They don’t want to make changes, which is why the Giants were hoping this would go away.
The Giants should have been above this. It just shows they are no different than any other sports teams. If a player produces, there’s a place for him on this team. If Brown was like Blair Walsh, it’s a different story.
The NFL should really know better after botching Rice’s incident with his wife. Same mistake could not be made twice. For NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to ignore this issue, it shows he does not get it.
Technically, Brown received a game suspension. That is not enough. The punishment does not fit the crime. Beating a woman should be a month suspension at least.
The Giants could have made it easy for the league by just letting him go or not resigning him this offseason. It would have been a standard response.
The Giants were well within their rights to dump him. Mara admitted to WFAN’s Mike Francesa that he knew his kicker was involved in a domestic violence with his wife in Hawaii. This begs this question. Why did he keep him? What was the point?
The Giants owner basically came off as a guy who said the dog ate his homework when pressed by Francesa yesterday.
This is on him, not Giants general manager Jerry Reese or Giants head coach Ben McAdoo. He is the owner of the team. He has the power to make moves like this.
Like the league, Mara failed women yesterday. It showed both feel male fans don’t care about a player dealing with domestic violence abuse since all they care about is productivity. That is true, but the league and the Giants should be making decision on what’s right.
The NFL will review the case. The Giants are likely going to dump him now because of public pressure.
It doesn’t matter. Both messed up. They blew it.
Firing Brown is nothing more than window dressing. It’s nothing more than the Giants covering themselves and the league.
The Giants and NFL don’t deserve any credit for doing the right thing now. Not when public pressure forced them to do it.
In the end, they deserve scorn for letting this fester on as long as they did.
