I love the sport of football. I love the sport more than I should. I grew up around the sport and some of my very first moments at a young age are of watching football with my Dad. 31 years later and it's still the think I talk to him the most about. I started writing this blog on Monday and like probably most of you my opinion changed back and forth and I changed many things in this blog as I learned more information. I feel I could write a novel about my opinions and tried my best to narrow it down to the main talking points.
The first thing I will say as most of you know I have a bias view on much of the NFL and the actions they take. I am not going to stop watching football because of Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, or the few other bad apples that have on-going issues. This is mostly because I love the sport more than the players themselves. What Adrian did and the Vikings reaction to it I have little control over so why should that stop me in doing they thing I love to do on Sunday. The main issue I've had with all this Adrian Peterson issue is the media reaction to everything and the pitch fork mentality they are taking.
I want to start by saying on Monday I felt that Adrian should be arrested and serve time behind bars. I feel what he did was child abuse and unless he serves time I don't think he will fully learn from his mistakes. I feel he shouldn't have to go to prison for life but maybe a six month sentence and counseling to have a better knowledge of more parenting tactics that are less physically harmful to a child. Here is the thing though, he isn't in prison right now so I don't know if the Vikings or even the NFL for that matter need to be the judge, jury, and executioner of the situation. He is a free man and I think in or society that should be worth something.
A common theme that came up on Monday was the Vikings saying they are going to wait for due process to take its course. This caused many people to want to throw their arms up because all the evidence is out there and Adrian isn't denying what he did. No I wouldn't be upset if the Vikings said that was enough for them to say they wanted to suspend Peterson because there is a clause in his contract about ethics and a code of conduct about how to act off the field. By Adrian being indicted for reckless or negligent injury to a child that does fall under the code of conduct. The fact that I believe many people are over looking is the Vikings also have the right to look the other way, which I understand may sound stupid but different players are giving different rights. The NFL is like many jobs in the World in that the more you achieve the more rope you are given. More accomplished people are held to a higher standard but are also given more slack when negative things may come out. The Vikings just last year had a player AJ Jefferson get accused of domestic abuse and the Vikings cut him right away. Why act so quickly on him and wait for due process from Adrian is simple, Adrian is worth more, which is not only true in sports but in life. If a CEO at a fortune 500 company sends out a negative email the company will most likely send out an apology and the CEO will do different positive PR moves, but if an intern sent it out they most likely would get fired. A basic example but just trying to show that different people are held to different light. So the Vikings cut AJ right away because he wasn't very valuable and hang on to Adrian because he is. I'm not arguing if this is right or wrong just that it happens on every level.
I want to now get to my main issue I have with this whole story and that's the media's coverage of the situation. I love freedom of the press and I know without them we would live in a country like North Korea. Reporters ask the tough questions and get the answers that the people of this country deserve on many levels, and of course this isn't just sports. I think the media however took this story out of control and actually is a great example of the World we live in. After 9/11 24 hour news channels boomed in popularity and it wasn't long after that the viewers learned it's hard to come up with news 24/7. Stories would get more airtime than normal and things had a way to become more main stream because more people would hear about them. Then the Twitter age came about and not only everyone had to be the first to post something and everyone had an opinion on everything. I'm not saying 24 hour news and Twitter are bad things, they just changed how we handle things. How this is all tied to the Adrian story is every day the media changed its tune and feelings and I felt were mostly not listening to what the public thought, you know the main people that they are working for. Everywhere I listened wanted Adrian gone and the Vikings were making a huge mistake, which is a fine position to take but I feel they were mostly saying that because it was a better story to fill their airwaves. If the media says, well let this all play out and let AP play, that really doesn't fill their talker time does it. I decided to do some research so I talked to my friends and family members, read different message boards, and listened to callers on talk radio. What I found out is that right or wrong about 80% of people were fine with Adrian still playing. No one said what he did was right but many felt that due process was a good thing to have in our society. If average Joe would still be able to work at his job while this was all going on, why couldn't Adrian. I will admit many of the people I talked to were probably bias like me and knew Adrian gave the Vikings the best chance to win. I do think a fair point was made by a caller that in a case like Adrian's intent should play a big role. If Adrian intended to hurt the boy and that's why he was hitting him feels different than if he thought the boy did something wrong and was trying to punish him. Adrian can't learn from the incident if those scars are what he wanting to give the child, but can learn if it was an incident that went to far and he is sorry for. That is why there is a legal system and a judge that can decide when hearing all the facts what is the best course of action for Adrian to learn from his mistakes.
I want to end by saying that by not playing Adrian in football games on Sunday teach him a lesson? I think yeah they do because it will hopefully show him how serious his actions were. But on the other side, I do think he also could have learned those lessons by playing on Sunday and going to counseling. Either way we need to know that sometimes there are gray areas in situations and different people will have different views. Don't just attack someone that disagrees with you and make them out as a bad person. We need to work better as a society to work together in all things and not just hate the people that don't agree with what we believe in. Different people in this Adrian story had different views on how to discipline children and what punishments should be given out. Who really knows what views are right and what views are wrong. Because it's something you believe is that what makes it right, why do you know so much more than the next person. People say they were hit as a child and they turned out fine and better for it, while other people said they were hit as child and now they are aggressive towards their own children. So I feel there is no right or wrong way in anything, just your own opinions. We need to as a society realize that most people want what's best for everyone we just might have different ways of coming about to it. The only thing that was common in all this Adrian news is that every single person felt for that poor child that was hurt. So instead of calling the Vikings organization horrible people for flip flopping, changing their mind, not knowing what to do at first, and worried about winning a football game. Let's instead make this about ending child abuse so people like Adrian Peterson realize they harm it does and we as a whole become better at life.
I will now step off my soapbox, thanks for reading, or at least skimming.
