The NFL wouldn't actually do this ... would it?

The other day, I came across a Sports on Earth post by Will Leitch in which he wrote that it's OK to watch the NFL and still be disgusted by the way the league has handled the Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Adrian Peterson and Ray McDonald situations (although he doesn't mention McDonald by name).

I won't go too far into his argument (you should read the post for that), but he basically calls the NFL entertaining escapism and claims you can both enjoy the games and still want the league held accountable for basically doing everything wrong when it came to domestic violence among its players.

My feelings about the NFL have been conflicted in recent years. I still enjoy football, and I still enjoy watching the games, but the league's ridiculous, growing self-importance, aided and abetted by the media, repels me more than it attracts me. (I say that while admitting my fascination with both hockey culture in Canada and soccer culture in England, but then again, I don't live in either place.)

There's also the growing evidence that the players are maiming themselves for our entertainment and some fans' acceptance of it and even insistence that nothing be done to rectify it.

Between the two, I'm watching watching less and less than before, and that was even before the last couple weeks. However, my Chargers were on TV against the Seahawks Sunday, and I watched, and I enjoyed the win. I won't lie. I'm not like the friend of mine (who I don't think was wild about football to begin with), who not only won't watch the NFL, she posts photos on Facebook of whatever she's doing on Sundays while her husband watches football. It's actually quite entertaining.

And that was before recent events.

But then Leitch wrote this.

"We can't be so entranced by the games that we let things slide like we have in the past. You can already see how last week's events are going to be spun: It's not (commissioner Roger) Goodell -- who appears to have, in spite of it all, almost universal support from the owners, his bosses -- it's those unruly players. You're starting to see a narrative develop: Those players are out of control. It's time for the league to get tough. Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Adrian Peterson ... they're just bad apples. The league just needs to police those players more. They need to come down harder."

When I read that, I thought, "They can't ... can they?" While Rice, Hardy, Peterson and McDonald are all at least allegedly very bad apples, the outrage has been that the league hasn't been tough enough by its own choice. Goodell could have come down on Rice before the in-elevator video was released, when Hardy was convicted, McDonald arrested or Peterson indicted, but he didn't, and neither have the teams absent public pressure.

To make this just about the players, while washing its hands entirely, would be a remarkable bit of verbal jiu-jitsu on the NFL's part.

What's worse, there's nothing to say they wouldn't get away with it.

You know it, and so do I.