America’s most wanted: NFL turning a blind eye to players’ crimes

In April, the Buffalo Bills selected Matt Araiza from San Diego State University with the 180th pick in the 2022 NFL Draft. Astute observers were shocked so many other teams mysteriously passed on a player whose kicking prowess earned him a national reputation and the nickname “Punt God”. In July, the Bills claim they discovered that Araiza was named as one of three students accused of gang-raping a 17-year-old girl at an off-campus party last year. They cut him from their roster just last week, only after the facts of that case became public knowledge. To that point, until a media outcry ensued, they seemed quite willing to take their chances on him.

Fresh from being exposed for having seriously skewed values (nobody actually believes they didn’t know this relevant information when they signed him), the Bills kick off the NFL season against the Los Angeles Rams at SoFi Stadium on Thursday. For a sport with such a surfeit of criminal activity that Brent Schrotenboer helpfully keeps a database of arrests for USAToday.com, the recent months have been all too typically squalid. Players fell foul of the law for offences ranging from the mundane (speeding) to the bizarre (the Cleveland Browns’ Malik McDowell was arresting wandering naked through the streets of a Florida town) to the disturbing (several instances of domestic violence).

The New Orleans Saints’ safety Marcus Maye was arrested for aggravated assault for pointing a gun at a car full of young women during a road-rage incident. The Chicago Bears’ wide receiver David Moore was picked up in the car park of a Texan Taco Bell for being asleep and in possession of controlled substances and three unlicensed pistols. The Kansas City Chiefs’ cornerback Chris Lammons is awaiting trial on charges of sucker-punching and stomping on a man who had the temerity to try to get into an elevator with him and other NFL players at a Las Vegas casino.

This is just a sample of the crimes and misdemeanours involving playing personnel. Others have had their issues too. Aqib Talib, the former Denver Broncos cornerback, has stepped away from his highly touted pundit role on Amazon’s televised NFL games following an incident at a children’s gridiron game where his brother, Yagub, shot an opposing coach dead. Talib was also coaching at the encounter involving nine-year-old boys.

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James Saxon will be sitting out the season too. The Arizona Cardinals have placed their veteran running backs coach on administrative leave following his arrest on two counts of domestic battery back in May. That was the same month the academic journal Violence Against Women published the results of a peer-reviewed study examining the effects an arrest for violence against women had on the sporting lives of 117 NFL players. It found that in the period between 2000 and 2019, their professional careers emerged largely unscathed from such incidents.

“I was kind of expecting that the best players, or even just high-performing players, would be exempt from some of these consequences of an allegation,” said Daniel Sailofsky, author of the study and a criminology lecturer at Middlesex University in London. “But all it took was being not that below average. The top 75 per cent of players didn’t really see, on average, of course, an impact from their accusation.”

Sailofsky’s troubling findings might have rattled any other league or any other sport. Not this one. Beyond the New York Times reporting diligently on his work, it scarcely registered across American media. Perhaps the rest were too consumed with tracking the denouement of the prolonged Deshaun Watson saga. That culminated in the Browns’ quarterback being suspended for just 11 games of the forthcoming campaign after he settled 23 civil suits against him. That’s 23 cases (and one outstanding) brought by women massage therapists accusing him of unwanted sexual contact.

Worse than the paltry punishment is that Watson, after initially appearing contrite, has lately sounded like a man who believes he did nothing wrong, a schemer whose apology was merely designed to get him back on the field as soon as possible. In an equally disgusting twist, it has also been reported that several club owners pressured Roger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL, to make Watson’s penalty less than one season. That way, the Browns have to count this truncated and almost certainly doomed campaign against his five-year $230m contract, denying them the full benefit of the deal and making him a free agent earlier too.

These men, some of whom also own Premier League clubs, put the desire to score points against a rival team over the need to see any sort of proper justice done. And Goodell, the charmer who infamously didn’t ban Ray Rice for beating his fiancee around an elevator, until a video of the assault was leaked, dutifully did their bidding. In defence of all involved, that might be described as simply doing things the traditional NFL way.

After all, by the time Ozzy Osbourne takes the stage for the half-time show of the opening game, none of those watching at home or in the stadium will care a jot that this off season, like so many others, has demonstrated the league is a moral cesspool with no sense of right and wrong. Fans won’t be unduly bothered about that because this is truly the national sport, something that still somehow unites a fractured country divided on almost every other score. Except that they all don’t care how their football team wins and with who. Just as long as they do.