The Tyreek Hill saga

Zach Gelb, the resident idiot0in-chief at CBS Sports Radio, has been ranting and raving for two weeks about how the NFL Commissioner was remiss in not suspending Chiefs' wide receiver Tyreek Hill.  Despite getting put in his place by a reporter who actually had followed the story and knew what was going on, Gelb continues to beat this to death.

Gelb interviewed the reporter after spending the first three hours of his four-hour show blasting the Commissioner, along with any fans who dared to defend Hill and/or the Commissioner.  The reporter said that Hill had been unusually honest, sincere, and forthcoming during the eight-hour interview with the Commissioner.  Think of that--eight hours!  And yet Gelb and his fellow sports talk idiots think it is perfectly OK to rush to judgment based on some snippets from a telephone conversation which the woman in question surreptitiously taped while talking to Hill about how their son broke his arm.

And now in recent days Hill was given an ovation by Chiefs fans when he appeared for practice with his team.  This of course set off a whole knew round of denunciations by Gelb and others at CBS, this time directed at the fans who applauded.  Have these CBS morons never heard of forgiveness, of redemption, of welcoming back a family member who had been going through some rough times?

The problem here is the rush to judgment which we all are prone to do at times.  We need to remember that there are two sides to every story, and we should investigate thoroughly before condemning someone. 

This rush to judgment issue has come up in the current issue of The New Yorker, which has an article on the Al Franken resignation.  It turns out that many of Franken’s Senate colleagues have regrets about their roles in calling for his resignation. Seven current and former U.S. senators who demanded Franken’s resignation in 2017 told the reporter, Jane Mayer, that they’d been wrong to do so.  Patrick Leahy, the veteran Democrat from Vermont, said that his decision to seek Franken’s resignation without first getting all the facts was “one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made” in forty-five years in the Senate. Heidi Heitkamp, the former senator from North Dakota, told Mayer, “If there’s one decision I’ve made that I would take back, it’s the decision to call for his resignation. It was made in the heat of the moment, without concern for exactly what this was.”

A more level-headed CBS sports talk host suggested that perhaps the Commissioner should not even be involved in disciplining players for off-the-field issues.  He thought it should be up to the individual clubs to discipline their players.  This is how it usually works in labor relations; it is the employer whose job it is to impose discipline for misdeeds of its employees.  The Commissioner can continue to be in charge of on-field issues, but off-field issues should be left to the individual clubs.