Talking Sports: NFL must put an emphatic end to spread of its players' domestic violence

The Arizona Cardinals’ Jonathan Dwyer was arrested on allegations of aggravated assault on Wednesday. The arrest was reportedly connected to two separate incidents at his Phoenix home back in July involving his 27-year-old wife and an 17-month-old child.

Police say he head-butted his wife, breaking her nose, and struck his son in the stomach with a shoe. The boy wasn’t injured.

Along with former Raven Ray Rice, the Vikings’ Adrian Peterson, the Panthers’ Greg Hardy and the 49ers’ Ray McDonald, Dwyer makes the fifth NFL player to be arrested in the last two weeks on domestic violence charges.

Aren’t you sick of this yet? This is a serious trending problem plaguing the NFL and its players, who are considered men before professional football players.

This really has nothing to do with football other than these players’ association with the NFL. Rather this has everything to do with a complete lack of respect for human life and self control in these men, all of whom are 25 or older. It’s beyond unfortunate that these men happen to be pro football players, whom many children have viewed as a role models in the past.

But if anything, football has provided an even bigger stage for news and publicity of their alleged abuse to spread. That is a great thing for any actions taken toward correcting this problem. It puts the NFL on the spot and that’s a start.

But here’s another problem: the NFL is the most powerful sports league in the world. With its religious following in the U.S. and increasing number of fans overseas, many view the league as invincible.

Indeed, the way the NFL has been able to circumvent off-the-field issues in the past is to simply “play the games.” The league knows that with a full season of Sundays packed with football, the fans will likely become too immersed in their own favorite teams and the raging fantasy football mania to remember these incidents.

For years, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has been able to hide behind that idea – give the public football and it’ll move on. Goodell knows that suspending players will anger a team’s fan base, which already shows blind loyalty. Therefore, he has tried his best to avoid suspending Adrian Peterson. The same goes for Hardy, McDonald and Dwyer.

But it’s far past time to change this. The league did the right thing with Rice – he may never play another snap of football in his life. Harsh? It might seem that way at first, but the league needs to set an example of what will happen to players who engage in this behavior.

No more “Player X is suspended indefinitely while legal processes play out” rubbish. No more allowing the owners of the NFL’s 32 teams to pass exclusive judgment on what happens with these players.

On Wednesday, both Hardy and Peterson were placed on the NFL’s commissioners exempt list. This means that while they undergo their legal processes, Peterson and Hardy have been deactivated from their team’s respective roster and have been banned from all team activities. Only Goodell can add a player to this list and it reserved for extreme circumstances.

Bravo, Mr. Goodell. That is an excellent first step. But there are gaping holes in this method of punishment. You earned in excess of $40 million last season to run this league with dignity and now you have to prove you can do it in the face of these charges.

Goodell must keep a watchful eye on what happens with these five players over the next few weeks and be ready to bring down the hammer if needed.

I’m going to suggest something rather extreme. If I were Goodell, I would suspend a player, if convicted, without pay for one full season on the first offense. That would be in addition to any punishment handed down by the courts. On a second offense, the penalty would be a lifetime ban from the NFL.

Time after time, the NFL has bent its will to that of its star players and its teams’ owners. That cannot continue. Can you imagine the repercussions of Peterson – maybe the league’s best running back – being suspended for an entire season without a cent of pay in a prime year of his career? I would think the domestic abuse incidents would grind to an immediate halt.

Obedience driven by fear is obviously not an ideal means to an end. But after five arrests in the past two weeks, the NFL has been backed up to the edge of a mile-high cliff and needs to do whatever is necessary to correct this spread of domestic abuse.

Professional football players should be admired for their athletic ability and prowess within the sport. But the very second even one player starts to believe he is too big to fail and steps out line, appropriate disciplinary measures must be taken.

At the end of day, these are men just like the other 3 billion or so on this planet. When it comes to our responsibility to women and children, men should all be held to the same standards regardless of how they make their living.

What these players – these men – have done, especially when a child has been involved, is unspeakable. They need to be dealt with accordingly. Football doesn’t have to stop – there are far more genuinely good men then domestic abusers playing in the league.

But in the meantime, the league needs to be prepared to take serious action without fear.