The NFL created an environment that embraced gambling at every turn. It then handed out a punishment steeper and more swiftly than for any other scandal we’ve seen this year. ConorOrr on Calvin Ridley ↓
Ridley is just a pawn in the NFL’s somehow irony-free search for integrity on gambling. If the NFL wanted to impress someone today, it would have announced some kind of task force to find out how deep and problematic the environment with legal gambling it’s created has become. Of course, that would involve admitting some kind of fault. That would involve looking at themselves in the mirror, which league executives have avoided at all costs.
The NFL Network first reported that one of the games Ridley bet on was a Falcons game. The league’s media arm also noted that, when the charges came to Ridley’s doorstep, he admitted what he did. This is likely because the NFL made gambling feel so benign, so casual. The NFL is creating the snowglobe that Ridley exists inside and yelling at him for all the tiny white droplets hitting the ground. It suspended him for longer than domestic abusers the league wanted to see back on the field to improve its fantasy football product. Longer than people who committed federal crimes with serious, real-world implications.
Even if Ridley won a fistfull of Floyd Mayweather money , he shouldn’t serve a quarter of his suspension until the NFL cleans up its own duplicitous act on gambling and begins to seriously investigate the power players who are shaping the way that games are won and lost behind the scenes. Otherwise, this is a pathetic version of the same old story, not unlike what the coaches and general managers do every summer: make an example out of one expendable person for violating some senseless rule while holding open the gate for the more important folks to keep on keeping on without the slightest fear of a slap on the wrist.