Whose responsibility is it?

Should the National Football League be able to fine or otherwise punish teams for the off-field behavior of misbehaving players?

Enquirer Bengals writer Mark Curnutte posed the question on his Bengals blog, noting that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has told teams he plans to do just that. The issue was explained in an April 28 story by NFL writer Rick Gosselin on the Dallas Morning News Web site. The nut of the idea is that if the league suspends a player for misconduct, it may assess a portion of the player’s salary from the team as a fine. The goal of the policy is to get teams to be more careful about drafting problem players in the first place.

The Bengals, of course, have lots of experience with drafting problem players, but when guys such as Chris Henry and Odell Thurman have been suspended without pay, the team, not the league, gets to pocket their salaries.

I appreciate Goodell’s PR dilemma. How can he make the teams care about the character of the players they hire if he doesn’t make them feel a little pain when those players screw up? On the other hand, as a number of readers commented on Curnutte’s blog, why should any employer, including an NFL franchise, be responsible for the actions of an employee that occur off the job? Most employers reserve the right to fire or otherwise discipline somebody for off-the-job behavior on the grounds that such behavior could reflect poorly on the company or, in the case of an arrest, make the employee unavailable to come to work. Once again Chris Henry comes to mind.

The difference between NFL teams and most other employers is that a history of publicized anti-social or even criminal behavior will kill your chances of getting a job with most companies. In the NFL, as long as you still have the physical goods of size and speed, such behavior might just drop you into the lower rounds on draft day, making you an employment bargain, not a liability in a team’s eyes.

Like I said, I appreciate Goodell’s predicament, but I think he’s on the losing side of the argument. The teams only employ the miscreants; they don’t own them and therefore can’t be accountable for the employees’ behavior outside the workplace. The only way the teams can be “punished” for their roles in hiring somebody who inflicts havoc on a community is for the community – the fans – to do it by withholding their support. So far that hasn’t happened.