The NFL survived Michael Vick and a pile of dead dogs. It survived a massive concussion lawsuit and the factors that led to it, including the suicides of popular Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, players who presumably decided death was preferable to life with brain damage.
And the NFL will survive this, this week from hell, which began Monday with video surfacing of Ray Rice punching his fiancee and shifted mid-week to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell's flaccid search for the truth, and plumbed new depths Friday when one of the league's best and most likable stars, Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, was indicted on charges of child abuse. Peterson called it discipline. Prosecutors call it "reckless or negligent injury to a child."
The NFL will survive this crisis as it has survived the others, but damage is accumulating. In all things there is a tipping point, a place where any entity -- be it an athlete, a business, an entire sport -- absorbs so much self-inflicted punishment that its brand is permanently damaged.
Is the NFL there? And if not, how many more stories like Ray Rice knocking out his fiancee or Adrian Peterson whipping his 4-year-old son with a "switch," or part of a tree branch, can the NFL take before it reaches that tipping point?
Baseball reached its tipping point in the 1990s, when a strike that ended the 1994 season in August -- no World Series that year -- was followed by a PED scandal that continues in different forms to this day. Baseball has survived, isn't going anywhere, remains economically viable. But baseball isn't America's pastime anymore. Did it happen because of the 1994 strike and the ensuing steroid scandal? Not necessarily, because football had been sneaking up on baseball for decades. But the 1990s is when baseball reached its consumer tipping point, and the scars remain.
Football will be there soon. Could be there now. The fallout is still happening, whether it's the National Organization of Women calling for Goodell's resignation or the involvement of Congress, which saw a dozen members of the House Judiciary Committee demand transparency as it relates to the Ray Rice video -- what did Goodell know, and when did he know it? -- in an investigation being overseen by the former director of the FBI.
Now this, the Adrian Peterson story. The details are sickening, none more than this one: Peterson is convinced he did nothing wrong and volunteered to investigators that he pulled a branch from a tree and removed the leaves before lashing his son so many times, he lost count. What happened to those leaves? The boy told police that "Peterson put [the] leaves in his mouth when he was being hit with the switch while his pants were down."
Details like that leave a mark, most irrevocably on the child but also on the rest of us. This isn't the concussion saga that had the nation debating -- for a time -- the future of football and wondering about our culpability in showing up or tuning in to watch NFL players inflict such damage on each other. That was an existential crisis, whereas this week from hell is more visceral, more personal. Because this crisis isn't about the damage NFL players are inflicting on each other.
This crisis is about the damage NFL players inflict on regular people, innocents. Their own families. Women, children. It's not just Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, either. Ray McDonald of the 49ers was charged two weeks ago with felony domestic violence for "inflicting injury" on his fiancee, who is pregnant. Greg Hardy of the Panthers was found guilty in a July bench trial of beating up and threatening to kill his girlfriend. And on Tuesday, a day after the Ray Rice video surfaced, the Cardinals signed Chris Rainey -- who has been kicked off two different teams for domestic incidents.
The NFL is in a crisis, and might not even realize it. While Rice was released by the Ravens and Peterson was deactivated for the Vikings game Sunday against New England, the other three in question -- Hardy, McDonald, Rainey -- could play this weekend, capping a week that began with the Ray Rice video, included the Adrian Peterson indictment and now could end with three alleged (and two convicted) perpetrators of domestic violence basking in the glow of an NFL game.
But how bright will that glow be?
And how long will it last?
>> Want more on Peterson's situation? Vikes star turns self in
