Rice's winning appeal reveals how badly Goodell mishandled case

Roger Goodell got it wrong at the beginning. Then he got it wrong again at the end.

What's most alarming, however, is how wrong he got it in between.

The NFL commissioner's decision to suspend Ray Rice indefinitely was overturned on Friday by a neutral arbitrator, meaning the former Baltimore Ravens running back can sign with any team and play right away.

So after giving Rice a too-light penalty initially, suspending him for two games for striking then-fiancée Janay Palmer in a hotel elevator in Atlantic City, Goodell erred on the other extreme.

Former U.S. District Judge Barbara S. Jones, who ruled on the case, wrote in her decision, "I find that the indefinite suspension was an abuse of discretion and must be vacated."

Goodell didn't just mishandle the decision. He mishandled the truth.

"In this arbitration," Jones wrote, "the NFL argues that Commissioner Goodell was misled when he disciplined Rice the first time." She went on in the next sentence to state, "I am not persuaded that Rice lied to, or misled, the NFL."

So if Rice was not misleading, does that mean Goodell misled the public in his account of this ordeal? Jones' decision gives us great insight into that.

Goodell has moved the goalposts throughout this catastrophe. He based the two-game suspension (handed down in July) on precedent, as if ruling in a complete vacuum, and then he came out with his proposal for a six-game ban for first-time domestic violence offenders. According to Jones' ruling, Goodell informed Rice that the new policy "didn't impact on him."

Then, as we all know, it did impact on him. Goodell viewed (or reviewed, if you believe his detractors) the video of Rice's punch and in September decided to move the suspension past six games to indefinitely. He based this on Rice giving him a "starkly different series of events" (in their initial meeting in June) than what occurred.

In fairness to the commissioner, the video of the punch was abhorrent. To watch a man strike his partner is to want him punished indefinitely. Yet it should not have been a surprise just how ugly the video was. Hitting a woman is always ugly – one of the ugliest things imaginable. Goodell should have imagined it.

Failing that, he should have asked for more specifics. Rice gave his series of events to the commissioner in their June meeting, describing the arc of his left arm as he swung. The strike could have been with an open hand or a closed fist, but no one asked either Rice or Palmer about that. Obviously any hit is abominable, but a closed fist gives a better sense of how vicious the strike really was.

When Goodell and his staff reconvened after the release of the second (more graphic) video in September, the group looked back at the June meeting with Rice and Palmer and according to Jones' ruling, "recalled what Rice had said this way: that he and his wife got on the elevator and Mrs. Rice 'struck him, he said that he slapped her, and that she fell, hit her head, and knocked herself out.'"

That makes it sound like the rail did the damage, rather than Rice's action. That shouldn't have mattered to Goodell; Palmer hit the rail because Rice hit Palmer.

Now, it's possible that Rice steered Goodell, purposefully watering down his punch to a more nebulous "hit." It's still Goodell's job to ferret out the details, and he didn't. He wasn't an active listener, which is yet another mark against him in this ongoing crisis.

"The Commissioner's notes are not detailed," Jones wrote, "and do not contain any verbatim quotes of what Rice said happened in the elevator. They do not contain the word 'slap' anywhere."

Goodell wasn't the only problem. The notes of NFL senior vice president Adolpho Birch only include the term "bottle service" in reference to the night of the assault, and he "testified that he remembered Rice saying that Mrs. Rice 'hit him outside of the elevator, they got in the elevator, she hit him again, then he, I don't know what word he used, but he hit her, and … she lost her balance, fell[,] hit her head on the side of the handrail, knocked herself out, something like that.' " Senior labor relations counsel Kevin Manara, who was the assigned note-taker, "admitted that the section of his notes describing the assault was not 'verbatim.' "

This is an embarrassing failure. Goodell, quite familiar with legal proceedings, should have known that a person accused of something terrible would be a candidate to fudge the truth. It seems Goodell didn't want to know the truth, which is also the interpretation we can draw from the narrative that a tape of the Rice assault was mailed to the NFL office and somehow not seen. A slap, whether concocted out of thin air by the NFL brass or conveyed somehow by Rice, is easier to envision than a punch. It was a less disturbing account, even though there should never be levels of disturbing when a man hits a woman.

"That the League did not realize the severity of the conduct without a visual record also speaks to their admitted failure in the past to sanction this type of conduct more severely," Jones concluded.

For months, the media and general public have been fascinated by who lied in this case. It's possible that Rice told the truth when he said he "hit" Palmer, and that Goodell was not being dishonest when he based his second suspension on a belief that the actual hit was worse than what he thought happened.

Even if Goodell is given that narrow loophole to wriggle through, he and his staff botched this process terribly. It's unsettling to think of how many crucial decisions rest with a leader who was so sloppy. Goodell may have been lying to us or he may have been inept. Neither is befitting a commissioner.