On Feb. 15, the then- Baltimore Raven Ray Rice and his then- fiancée, Janay Palmer were in a physical altercation. Janay was rendered unconscious by Ray after he struck her in the head with his hand.

After being indicted by a grand jury in March, the couple stated that they were happy and in counseling. In May, both apologize for their role in the incident while speaking for the first time together in front of media. Initially, Rice was suspended for two games, which NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said wasn’t enough and that he “didn’t get it right.”  The first suspension for domestic violence was increased to six games.

Then, on Sept. 8, TMZ posts a video of the two trading blows before Ray punched her in the face, causing Janay to fall into the handrail. After the video was released, Ray was cut from the Ravens, to which the Ravens’ coach, John Harbaugh stated, “[the video] changed things, of course.” Later the NFL suspended Ray Rice from the league indefinitely.

After the official script is where things start to get a little messy for the Rice couple and the NFL. There are reports that people in the NFL league office had in fact already seen the tape in the summer when the two game suspension stuck.

This discrepancy in the narrative could show the NFL culpable of reneging a suspension only after the world could see it. If true, the report suggests that the NFL only finds domestic violence worthy of indefinite suspensions from the league if the whole world could see it. If the NFL saw the tape before the public, then the NFL is certainly culpable of hypocrisy. The NFL will give a slap on the hand and nothing more if the world doesn’t know, but since everyone could see, the NFL wanted to go beyond the rules of their league to make a scapegoat out of Rice.

Many of us at the University News are wondering however, “why does the tape matter?” One doesn’t just become unconscious and the Ravens had to know from the police report that Ray Rice had hit his fiancée. How does this, according to Harbaugh, “change things?”

While the NFL may be culpable of hypocrisy, the NFL and the surrounding culture of sports and elite athletes is already culpable of perpetuated violence, against women or not. There are the many high profile cases: Ben Roethlisberger raped a woman and then settled in court in 2010. Roethlisberger was given a six game suspension.

In college football, Jameis Winston became the subject of another rape charge last year. He came out of an investigation unscathed (there were numerous reports of an inept investigation by campus authorities that didn’t even question Winston.) He became a Heisman trophy winner and will likely be a first-round draft pick by the NFL in the next couple of years.

For those that played high school ball, this lenient response to poor, and sometimes violent behavior, is an extension of the idea that bad grades or other discrepancies are fine as long as they can play. This sort of behavior by coaches is also echoed by normal fans; before the video came out, Ray Rice’s appearance at a Ravens’ preseason game garnered standing ovations from the 50,000 plus fans in attendance.

What this video did is make a violent crime that is usually behind closed doors public. No one sees rape or domestic violence, and we’re concerned that it took a video for the NFL and for the rest of the public to take this issue seriously.

If the NFL will continue to treat violent crimes against women in this way, then this editorial board will be pleased with the increasingly vocal stance the NFL takes. Nonetheless, there is still a concern that the NFL only suspended Rice indefinitely to get the media and public off its back. If this is true, then the league hasn’t really learned anything at all.