Reverse Sexism, Ray McDonald, and the Luxurious Idiocy of the Chicago Bears

George McCaskey has a law degree, and was an assistant state's attorney in two Illinois counties, but he has spent most of his adult life working as an executive in his family's business. This would make him a moderately well-credentialed mediocrity were his family's business not the Chicago Bears, and if McCaskey's job was anything other than chairman of the Chicago Bears. This is not a job that McCaskey earned, exactly, except in the sense that he had the proper last name and the previous chairman—his brother Michael—no longer wanted to do it.

That said, McCaskey's does not seem like a terribly difficult job. You can hire the wrong people for opaque reasons—and the team has had three head coaches and three general managers since McCaskey took over in 2011—watch them fail, get rid of them while expressing your deep disappointment, and still get paid every two weeks until the NFL stops being profitable or the sun goes out, whichever comes first. You will not be fired, because no one can fire you; you will not go broke or be disciplined or disgraced in any meaningful way. It's a nice job, and there is absolutely no way for anyone with the wrong last name to apply for it.

The point being that George McCaskey can do more or less whatever he wants, which is what we might as well presume McCaskey was doing when he signed off on the decision to add defensive end Ray McDonald. This is the Ray McDonald that was released by the San Francisco 49ers in December after being arrested for domestic violence against his pregnant fiancee—he was never charged—and then arrested, in a separate incident involving a different woman, for sexual assault. (He was not charged there, either, and has filed a defamation suit against his accuser.) Players like McDonald are invariably described as Controversial, which isn't quite right. Public policy is controversial. Ray McDonald is a talented athlete who has been accused of violence against women three times in six months.

There are all kinds of reasons to believe that Ray McDonald is a creep and a bad person; there is circumstantial evidence that suggests something even darker than that. The Bears were able to sign McDonald to an affordable one-year deal last week because all those things about him are known by everyone who cares to know them; they were willing to do it because George McCaskey, and the new defensive coordinator and general manager he hired, cared less about those things than they did the possibility Ray McDonald might be able to help the Bears on defense. This is not a very complicated thing to understand, but it is not an easy thing to explain without making it sound like what it is.

This is where it gets difficult for people like McCaskey, who understand that they cannot say what they think—which is that this is a competitive sport, and that after weighing their options they concluded that the benefits of signing an accused woman-beating rapist outweighed the costs—but do not understand how else to say it. At the highest level, the NFL pays people like Frank Luntz, a messaging specialist for Republican campaigns, to write talking points for Roger Goodell, which is why Goodell says that football is "better and safer" six different times in his interview with Peter King. There is no reason to feel bad for Frank Luntz—or no reason beyond the fact that he looks like someone tried to draw Rex Ryan on a thumb—but his finely honed messaging ideas are mostly lost on the NFL's power figures, who transparently resent having to explain anything they do, to anyone.

It is also asking a lot, telling a person who is accustomed to unaccountability that he must explain the decision to pay millions of dollars to Ray McDonald. There may be no way that this sort of cynicism could be spun into something satisfying, and the people sort-of-attempting to do it are clearly doing so reluctantly and under duress. But to the extent that progress has been made after the NFL's most recent year of staggering profit and staggering disgrace, it's that they are now obliged to go through this public ritual.

That is it, by the way. Despite having to justify it, NFL executives can and will still do what they were always going to do. They explain these odious things in an odious way—through justifications that consist of tossed off gotta-hear-both-sides-ing and extravagant bromide-abuse re: second, third, fourth chances—but they still do them. George McCaskey knew what he had to do where the Ray McDonald signing was concerned, and sort of attempted to do it. If it didn't work—and it really, really didn't work—it is only partially because McCaskey is a ridiculous know-nothing clown.

That said, this is very much the work of that man. McCaskey volunteers that his conversation with McDonald, in which McDonald explained his alleged assaults, "took a lot out of me." He notes that he demanded to speak to McDonald's parents—McDonald will turn 31 during the first month of the 2015 season—and remarked that McDonald, "came from a strong two-parent upbringing, which sad to say isn't all that common anymore these days." McCaskey admits that, while he did not talk to anyone that investigated the cases against McDonald, he did talk to Vic Fangio, McDonald's defensive coordinator in San Francisco and the man McCaskey hired as DC in Chicago. From this, he learned from him that McDonald was well-liked by his teammates.

McCaskey did not try to talk to McDonald's accusers because, "an alleged victim, I think—much like anybody else who has a bias in this situation—there's a certain amount of discounting in what they have to say." McCaskey did pursue and receive the blessing of his 92-year-old mother, the team's principal owner, on the signing. Which is not to say that McCaskey felt any special responsibility; to the contrary, he took issue with the thought of it. "To me," McCaskey said, "there's an element of reverse sexism there."

"We recognize at the NFL that we have an opportunity to make a difference in this area," McCaskey also said. "And everyone in the NFL is committed to doing that." Given the context, that statement was more or less a non sequitur. But also the context was mostly one big non sequitur: club-footed evasive action and culture-war posturing periodically interrupted by wild, unmotivated whammy-bar runs on the previously secret scourge of Reverse Sexism and other contemporary ills. That all of this huffy cynicism was delivered in tones of righteous paternalism is both unavoidable—this is how the NFL's power elite talk about everyone but themselves—and perfect. There are few experiences more emblematic of modern American life than being subjected to a condescending and factually questionable lecture from a rich person, and McCaskey has added a masterpiece to that booming canon.

It's easy to laugh at most of McCaskey's gutless, heartless, pompous, point-missing, and bizarrely abstracted performance, ugly though it was. There's not much else to do about it. Virtually nothing McCaskey says or does could get him fired or even censured; virtually nothing anyone else says would prevent him from signing Ray McDonald or the fucking BTK Killer if he wanted to. But for all the dark comedy in McCaskey's performance, there is some satire in it that's too on-target to be funny. It's the rote recitation of the NFL's well-crafted and oft-repeated line about the commitment to Making A Difference in what Goodell once called "the domestic violence space."

There is of course something both laughable and loathsome about the man that just signed Ray McDonald pronouncing himself Committed To Making A Difference In This Area. This would be true even if it had not arrived via this symphony of victim-doubting, obfuscation, and obtuse rhetorical weirdness—McCaskey told McDonald that he credited his repeated violence-against-women issues to "allowing himself to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," telling him in no uncertain terms that, "if he's to remain a Bear, that needs to improve."

It is especially true in this case, but it was also true when the Cowboys signed convicted domestic-abuser Greg Hardy, and will be true when some team signs Ray Rice, which is a thing that will happen and which some other unaccountable someone will half-assedly justify in a similar way. None of this is new, and none of it is likely to change.

In the days after the San Francisco 49ers' star rookie Chris Borland decided to retire due to his concerns about football's inherent and undiminished danger, the more pathologically supplicatory elements of NFL media began using a strikingly Luntz-scented term: "the anti-football agenda." This is illustrative insofar as it demonstrates the NFL's Clintonian permanent-campaign mentality, but also in a broader and less-flattering way. It also advances the idea that the NFL is football, and that to criticize the NFL is to denigrate the sport to which this league—and Late Hapsburg-ian wads like George McCaskey—has an exclusive franchise that it steadfastly refuses to earn. This is a false distinction, but a telling one.

Football is a game that people like to watch; when played at its highest level, it is beautiful and terrible and utterly unlike anything else. The NFL is the business concern that sells it, and which refuses to treat the game or the people who play it as anything more important than that. McCaskey's masterpiece of cynico-paternalist Mad Libs is notable only for how much it reveals about the NFL's inability even to pantomime an understanding of its responsibility or pretend to care about any of the people involved in this creative process. The game is valuable, and the people entrusted with its stewardship cannot even convincingly evince respect for that responsibility.

It is convenient, in a Luntz-ian sense, to imagine that there is an Anti-Football Agenda. The idea resonates with the league's various George McCaskeys, all impervious and peevish and imposed-upon in the prickly and brittle-boned way of the contemporary oligarch. But there is also the counter-argument. There is also this question: how much more damage could even the most committed saboteur actually and actively do to football than the slack, vacuous oligarchs currently milking it dry? How, in other words, could someone dedicated to making football look bad do better at it, or be more damningly and comprehensively wrong, than the people who believe they are saving it?