While the NFL currently holds its players accountable for drunk driving, recent events indicate that the current system of discipline isn’t completely effectively preventing misbehavior.
Otherwise, three players wouldn’t have been arrested for DUI over the past two weekends.
And so to the extent the league’s system of fines and suspensions is meant in part to deter players and other team and league employees from endangering the lives and property of paying customers by putting their hands on the wheel after bending an elbow a few times too many, it’s not working.
So the NFL needs to stiffen the penalties. And the NFLPA should readily agree with an efforts to do so.
The goal for the NFL should be zero DUI arrests. Not a total of three in nine days.
Until the NFL does something more to drive that number down, the media needs to ask the kind of questions that Cliff Christl of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel posted to G.M. Ted Thompson after the team signed Koren Robinson in 2006, only a few weeks after he led police on a drunken high-speed chase through the sleepy streets of Mankato, Minnesota: “Ted, what if he kills somebody in this state? Driving drunk or speeding away from cops?”
Thompson called it a valid question. So why don’t questions like that get asked more often?
Until they do, here’s some musings and/or rantings from today’s PFT Live.