Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are tackling
a story that is, well, it's a massive collision
point in the history of modern sports. It really
is. It's a narrative that forces you to hold
two completely contradictory ideas in your head
at the exact same time. We are talking about
Ray Rice. And, you know, depending on who you
are, maybe just depending on how old you are,
that name... triggers one of two very very different
images oh absolutely for one work he's the ultimate
underdog hero yeah the kid who basically single
-handedly saved rutgers football the fantasy
football god and of course the guy who converted
a fourth and 29 that physically shouldn't have
been possible. And then for the other group,
and this is probably the broader cultural memory
now, he is the man in the elevator. He is the
face of a domestic violence incident in 2014
that didn't just end a career. I mean, it fundamentally
rewrote the NFL's rulebook and completely changed
how we as a society talk about athletes and violence.
Exactly. And that's our mission for this Deep
Dives. We want to bridge those two images. We
aren't here to just, you know, read off this
Wikipedia page. We really want to understand
the arc. The full projector. The full trajectory.
How do you go from being one of the most beloved,
productive, charitable players in the entire
league? I mean, a guy who literally transformed
a university program to becoming a pariah whose
career just vanishes overnight at age 27. It's
an extreme path. You know, usually when a star
falls, it's a slow decline. It's injuries. It's
age, diminishing returns. This was a cliff. Sheer
cliff. One day you are a franchise icon. The
next day they are recalling your jersey from
the pro shop. It's just gone. And we've got a
massive stack of sources today. Biographical
deep dives, game tape analysis, court records
from 2014, and a lot of reports on his life after
football. So let's map this out for you. We're
going to start at the very beginning, the tragedy
in New Rochelle that really fueled his drive.
Then we have to spend some real time on the Rutgers
years. Oh, we have to. I just don't think people
fully appreciate how bad that program was before
he showed up. You can't. You can't understand
the hero worship that came later without understanding
the, I mean, the miracle he pulled off in college.
Then we'll get into the NFL, the technical side
of it, his leverage, his insane versatility,
and, of course, the hey -diddle -diddle play.
then we have to go deep into the 2014 incident.
The video, the league's mishandling of it, the
legal fallout, all of it. All of it. And finally,
we'll look at the aftermath, the redemption tour,
the silence from the league, and what his legacy
actually looks like today. It's a heavy one for
sure, but it's a necessary deep dive if you want
to understand the modern NFL. All right, let's
get into it. Section one. origins. So Ray Rice
was born in New Rochelle, New York in 1987. And
when you start digging into the sources on his
childhood, it isn't just a story of, you know,
hardship. It's profound, profound loss. It really
is. You often hear that cliche, right? The athlete
using sports to escape their circumstances. But
for Rice, the trauma was incredibly specific
and it happened so early. How early were we talking?
His father, Calvin Reed. was killed in a drive
-by shooting when ray was just one year old wow
one year old so he has no memory of him no organic
memory whatsoever he's growing up with this this
void where a father figure is supposed to be
right from the very start a phantom limb basically
yeah navigating the world with something missing
that he never even had precisely and tragically
that wasn't the only major loss When Ray was
10, which is such a formative age, you know,
you're right on the cusp of becoming a teenager.
His cousin, my Sean Rice Nichols, was killed
by a drunk driver. So you have two violent. Completely
senseless deaths, taking away these male role
models before he's even hit puberty. I mean,
how does a kid even begin to process that? Well,
from all the biographical accounts, he processed
it by funneling absolutely everything into competition,
into sports. The football field. The football
field became the one place where the world actually
made sense. It's controlled chaos, right? You
can't control a stray bullet, you can't control
a drunk driver, but you can control whether or
not that linebacker is going to take you down.
And he took that control with him. to New Rochelle
High School. He played for a coach named Lou
DiRienzo. Now, I was looking at these high school
stats you pulled, and I honestly had to read
them twice. They look like video game numbers.
They're almost comical. They really are. He was
the running back for the Huguenots, which, by
the way, is a fantastic team name. Great name.
Let's zoom in on one specific day, October 24,
2004. This is his senior year. Just paint the
picture for us. What happened? Okay, so this
was a game that has become like... local folklore
in New Rochelle. Rice didn't just have a good
game. He didn't just have a great game. He carried
the football 42 times. Wait, hold on. Pause there.
42 carries in a single high school game. 42.
That sounds, I mean, that's almost negligent,
isn't it? That is an insane amount of physical
punishment for a 17 -year -old kid. It's an immense
workload. I mean, in the modern NFL, a workhorse
back might get 20, maybe 25 carries on a heavy
day. 42 is just attrition warfare. What does
that tell you, though? It tells you two things.
One, his coach's absolute total reliance on him.
He was the offense. And two, Rice's just freakish
durability. He wasn't a big guy, but he was built
like a little fire hydrant. A tank. Okay, so
what did he do with those 42 carries? He gained
462 yards. Four. 462 yards. On the ground. In
one game. That's a season for some high school
players. I mean, that's half a season for a good
college player. Exactly. He averaged over 10
yards every single time he touched the ball.
And that's over a huge sample size of 42 touches.
That is statistically absurd. It means that every
time the quarterback handed him the ball, on
average, the team was guaranteed a first down.
You don't just beat the other team with that.
You completely demoralize them. And this wasn't
just a flute game in a mediocre season. The year
before, as a junior in 2003, he led them to a
state title. Right. They beat Webster Schroeder,
I think it was, 32 -6 at the Carrier Dome. He
was the engine, the absolute engine of that entire
program. And we should probably touch on the
Turkey Bowl, too, because if you're from that
area of New York, you know about this. The huge
Iona -New Rochelle rivalry. It's an institution.
It had been played every single Thanksgiving
since 1949. Rice played in the very last one
back in his sophomore season in 2002. They won
53 -6. He was kind of part of the closing chapter
of that history. But his senior year, despite
that monster 462 -yard game, it actually ended
on a bit of a sour note, didn't it? It did. In
the state championship game in 2004, they lost
a heartbreaker. It was a shootout, 41 -35, to
a team called Christian Brothers Academy. And
who was on that other team? Because that's a
fascinating little piece of trivia. It is. The
star quarterback for Christian Brothers was a
guy named Greg Paulus. No way. The Duke point
guard, Greg Paulus. The very same. Before he
was throwing alley -oops to J .J. Redick at Duke,
or, you know, playing quarterback at Syracuse
later on, he was the guy who beat Ray Rice in
a high school football championship. It just
shows you the level of elite talent that was
concentrated in that one high school game. So
Rice leaves New Rochelle a legend. He's got the
tragic backstory that fuels his engine. He's
got the state records. And now he has to pick
a college. And this is where the story takes
a really interesting turn. Because he doesn't
go to, you know, Ohio State or Michigan. He chooses
Rutgers. Which, to a modern listener, you hear
Rutgers, you think Big Ten, you think, OK, that's
a normal power five choice. But we have to contextualize
what Rutgers football was in the early 2000s.
It is not a football factory. Not a factory.
It's being incredibly polite. Rutgers was, and
I'm not exaggerating here, it was essentially
a graveyard for football ambition. Wow. They're
technically the birthplace of college football.
They played in the first ever game back in 1869.
But by 2005, they had been completely irrelevant
for decades. They were the doormat of the Big
East Conference. I have a note here that just
blows my mind. In the 136 year history of their
football program up to that point, they had been
to two bowl games. Total. Two. Two bowl games
in a century and a half of football. That is
the definition of historical futility. So when
Greg Sciano, the head coach at the time, was
recruiting Ray Rice, he wasn't selling him on
a trophy case. He was selling him on a construction
project. He was saying, come here and be the
cornerstone, be the foundation of everything
we're trying to build. And Rice gets to campus
in 2005 as a true freshman. So does he redshirt?
Does he sit on the bench and learn the system?
Not for a second. He starts immediately. And
the impact was, it was seismic. It was immediate.
In his freshman year, Rutgers had their first
winning season in 13 years. They went to the
Insight Bowl. Just his presence on the field
completely flipped the script for them. He rushed
for 1 ,120 yards as a true freshman. He had a
217 -yard game against UConn. He proved instantly
that his size, and he's only 5 '8", wasn't a
liability. It was an asset. But 2006. That's
the year, isn't it? That's the year that everything
changed for Rutgers football. That is the pandemonium
and Piscataway season. This is when Rutgers became
a national brand, a national story. The team
won 11 games, which tied a school record. They
finished the season ranked number 12 in the entire
country. For a team that used to celebrate getting
three wins in a season, finishing 12th in the
nation is, it's unimaginable. Rice was the reason.
He was the engine. He rushed for 1 ,794 yards.
He shattered the school's single season rushing
record, a record that had stood since 1973. He
scored 20 touchdowns. He was just an absolute
machine. I want to talk about the dynamic in
that backfield, though, because it wasn't just
a solo act. And I feel like this really speaks
to that character narrative that was built around
Rice at the time. Let's talk about Brian Leonard.
This is a crucial part of the story. Brian Leonard
was the fullback. But before Rice showed up,
Leonard was the guy. He was the star. He was
the one on the posters, the one leaping over
linebackers. He was so good, he could have easily
gone to the NFL after the 2005 season. He had
legitimate NFL talent, no question. He did. But
he chose to stay for his senior year in 2006.
And he didn't stay to be the star. He stayed
to block for Ray Rice. He voluntarily took a
lesser role, carried the ball less, sacrificed
his own stats, his own glory, to clear the way
for this younger, smaller running back. That
says a ton about Brian Leonard, obviously, but
it also says something really powerful about
Rice, doesn't it? Right. That a senior and established
star was willing to basically become a battering
ram for him. It implies that Rice was a teammate
worth sacrificing for. It created this halo around
him. Rice wasn't just a talented player. He was
seen as the humble leader of this brotherhood.
That 2006 team felt special because of that chemistry.
I mean, Rice finished seventh in Heisman voting
that year, but he'd be the first one to tell
you. that he owed half of those yards to Brian
Leonard's lead blocking. And he didn't slow down
after that. 2007, his junior year, he kept it
going. If anything, he sped up. He was named
the Big East Offensive Player of the Week three
separate times, and in all three of those games,
he rushed for over 200 yards. 200 yards. Three
times. 201 against North Carolina, 202 against
South Florida, and a career -high 225 against
Pitt. He was just, he was unplayable at the college
level. And then comes the swan song. The final
game. The International Bowl in 2008. January
5, 2008. They played up in Toronto against Ball
State. And this was basically his goodbye letter
to college football. He went out and ran for
a school record 280 yards and four touchdowns.
280 yards in his last game. It's like he was
trying to see if the scoreboard had a limit.
He had a 90 -yard touchdown run in that game.
It was the longest of his entire career. He essentially
just looked around at the collegiate level and
said, OK, I've conquered this. There is nothing
left for me to do here. And he declared for the
NFL draft right after. So he leaves Rutgers as
a deity. I mean, he put the entire school on
the football map. He has the production. He has
the tape. But now he's heading to the NFL combine
and the scouts start taking out their measuring
tapes. And suddenly being five foot eight isn't
just a quirky detail. It's a problem. The NFL
is obsessed with prototypes. They are. They want
the six foot one, 220 pound slasher with long
strides. Rice measured in at five foot eight.
206 pounds. And despite everything he did in
college, every record he broke, he slid out of
the first round. He fell all the way to the second
round, pick 55, where he was scooped up by the
Baltimore Ravens. Which in hindsight was the
absolute steal of that draft. But we need to
unpack why he was so successful at that size.
Because the big critique from the scouts was
that he was too small to see the holes to see
over his offensive line. Right. How can you see
where you're supposed to run when your linemen
are all six foot five and basically blocking
your view of the entire defense? And the irony
is that was his superpower. In football, we always
talk about leverage. The low man wins. Well,
when a linebacker who is 6 '3 tries to tackle
a 5 '8 Ray Rice, that linebacker has to bend
at the waist, drop his hips, and completely fold
his body to get down to Rice's level. It's biomechanically
awkward for the defender. Incredibly awkward.
It takes a split second longer, and it compromises
the linebacker's balance. Meanwhile... Rice is
staying compact and powerful, and visually he
would just disappear. He'd hide behind a massive
offensive tackle like Jonathan Ogden, and the
defense would literally lose track of him. Then,
boom, he'd burst out of a gap at full speed.
By the time a linebacker even saw him, it was
way too late. He weaponized his height. He turned
a perceived negative. into a tactical advantage.
Exactly. And the Ravens figured this out very,
very quickly. He signed a four -year deal, and
by his second season, 2009, he had already taken
the starting job away from a very good running
back in Willis McGaughy. And this brings us to
the core of what made him so dominant in the
NFL, his versatility. If you just look at Ray
Rice as a runner, you are missing, like, half
the story. At least half. He was a dual threat
back before that term was really, you know, in
vogue for running backs. So let's look at 2011.
That was his statistical masterpiece, right?
Yeah. It was his peak. He rushed for 1 ,364 yards,
a great number, second best in the league. But,
and this is the key, he also caught 76 passes
for 704 more yards. 700 receiving yards. That's
a solid season for a starting wide receiver,
let alone a running back. Exactly. You add it
all up, and he led the entire NFL in yards from
scrimmage with 2 ,068. That means he was responsible
for more forward progress, more total offense
than any other single skill player in the league.
He was the entire offense. You couldn't take
him off the field on third down because he was
your best short yardage receiver. And the Ravens
knew exactly what they had. In 2012, they paid
him. Big contract. Five years, $35 million. He
was a franchise cornerstone. He was the face
of the offense. Joe Flacco was the quarterback,
sure, but Ray Rice was the engine. He was the
guy that made everything go. Let's talk highlights
because stats are great. But legacy is built
on moments, and Rice had some moments that are
still played on highlight reels to this day.
The first one that really announced his arrival
on the big stage was in the playoffs, January
2010. It was the wildcard round, and they were
playing the New England Patriots in Foxborough.
Which is a notoriously tough place to play, especially
in the postseason. Very tough. And it was the
very first offensive play of the game. First
snap, Rice takes the handoff. Finds a little
seam on the left side and he just goes 83 yards
for a touchdown. Just silenced the entire stadium
on the first play. You could hear a pin drop.
It was the second longest run in NFL postseason
history at that time. It completely set the tone
for what ended up being a blowout victory for
the Ravens. But that's not the play. The play
that really defines him, the one that seems to
defy the laws of physics, is Hey Diddle Diddle.
Oh man, the Hey Diddle Diddle play. November
25, 2012. Ravens versus the San Diego Chargers.
I feel like every single Ravens fan remembers
exactly where they were for this. You have to
set the scene for us to really understand the
impossibility of what happened. Okay. So the
Ravens are losing by three points. There is under
two minutes left on the clock. It is fourth down
and 29 yards to go. Fourth and 29. That is, for
all intents and purposes, a death sentence in
football. The probability of converting that
is, what, less than 1 %? It's basically zero.
It's zero. Usually you just punt the ball away
or you throw a Hail Mary deep down the field
and you just pray for a pass interference penalty.
That's your only real shot. So Joe Flacco drops
back to pass. He's under immediate pressure.
He looks deep, but everyone is covered. So he
does the only thing he can do to avoid a sack.
He dumps the ball off to Ray Rice on a little
check down. pass can we just explain check down
for a second because that's a key detail for
sure a check down is the safety valve it's the
last resort it's a short pass to a running back
who's you know near the line of scrimmage and
it's almost never designed to gain big yardage
in a fourth and 29 situation throwing a check
down is basically seen as giving up you throw
it two yards he gets tackled immediately game
over so flacco throws his passive desperation
to rice who catches the ball Where? He's still
like 28 yards away from the first down marker.
Even worse. He catches it basically right at
the line of scrimmage. And he has three charges
defenders immediately closing in on him. The
play is over. And then? The magic happens. He
takes the short pass, and he makes the first
guy miss with this incredible little juke. Then
he cuts back across the entire field. He gets
a phenomenal block from Anquan Bolden, who just
sells out. Rice then splits two more defenders,
dives forward, and the referees spot the ball.
at exactly 29 yards. It's the kind of play that
just makes you believe in destiny or something.
They brought the chains out to measure it, and
he got the first down by the absolute nose of
the football. It kept the drive alive. They went
on to kick a field goal to tie the game, and
they won it in overtime. It was called the GMC
Never Say Never Moment of the Week, but honestly,
it was the play of the year. It just showcased
everything about him, his vision, his incredible
balance, his sheer refusal to go down. And of
course, that 2012 season ended in the best way
possible. Super Bowl XL7, the Ravens go all the
way and defeat the San Francisco 49ers. Ray Rice
gets his ring. He had 20 carries in that game.
He was a champion. So let's just freeze the frame
right there. It is February 2013. Ray Rice is
a Super Bowl champion. He's a three -time Pro
Bowler. He is absolutely beloved in the city
of Baltimore. In fact, in 2012, he was literally
voted the city's most charitable person for all
his work with anti -bullying campaigns and homeless
aid. He is at the absolute apex of his career.
He has the money. He has a championship ring.
He has the stats. And he has this impeccable
reputation as a good guy. And almost exactly
one year later, that entire edifice just crumbles
to dust. And that brings us to section four,
the incident and the fall. The date is February
15, 2014. The location. Yeah. Atlantic City,
New Jersey. Specifically, the Revel Casino. Ray
Rice and his then fiancee, Jenny Palmer, she
is now his wife, were there for the weekend.
And by all reports, there was heavy drinking
involved throughout the night. They got into
a very heated, very public argument at a table
in the casino. And the argument continued as
they moved towards an elevator. Right. And we
have to be really specific about the details
here because the timeline of how the information
was released is absolutely critical to understanding
the public reaction and the league's reaction.
OK. Inside that elevator, things escalated dramatically.
They were shouting obscenities at each other.
Reports later stated that Palmer appeared to
spit in Rice's face and Rice responded with an
act of extreme violence. Now, initially, the
public did not know exactly what happened inside
that elevator. The doors closed and that was
it. Correct. Four days later, on February 19th,
the gossip site TMZ released a video. But this
was the hallway video. This was the first piece
of evidence. It showed the elevator doors opening
and Ray Rice dragging an unconscious Janae Palmer
out of the elevator and into the hallway. I remember
seeing that video and it was deeply disturbing
just on its own. Seeing a man drag an unconscious
woman across the floor like she was a piece of
luggage. It raised immediate massive alarms.
It did. Rice was arrested and eventually indicted
by a grand jury for third degree aggravated assault.
Now, that is a serious felony charge. It carries
a possible jail sentence of three to five years.
But the NFL's reaction. This is where the story
becomes just as much an indictment of the league
itself. We have to remember the context of 2014.
The NFL's domestic violence policy was it was
vague. It was inconsistent. And frankly, it was
extremely lenient. It was just treated as a personal
conduct issue, often lumped in with things like
bar fights or DUIs. So on July 25, 2014, after
months of deliberation, the NFL announces Ray
Rice's punishment. They suspended him for two
games. Two games. For an incident where a woman
was rendered unconscious and he was indicted
on a felony assault charge. The backlash was
immediate and it was fierce. Sports writers,
women's advocacy groups, fans. Everyone was outraged.
It felt like a complete slap on the wrist. But
the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell, they
defended it. They claimed they had followed precedent.
They claimed Rice had taken responsibility for
his actions. And they claimed they hadn't seen
any evidence that contradicted Rice's own account
of what happened, which he described as a mutual
scuffle. A mutual scuffle. That was the key phrase.
And then September 8, 2014 happened. The second
video. TMZ obtained the footage from inside the
elevator with audio. And this changed everything.
This changed the world. The video showed the
argument, but then it showed Ray Rice winding
up and delivering a vicious left hook directly
to Janae Palmer's face. It was brutal. She hit
her head on the handrail as she fell and was
instantly knocked unconscious. The difference
between reading the words, he struck her, in
a police report and seeing the punch. Yeah. It
was just so visceral. It's the power of visual
evidence. We had known the facts, right? We knew
she was unconscious. We knew he did it. But seeing
the violence with your own eyes stripped away
any ability to minimize it or explain it away,
you couldn't call it a scuffle anymore. It was
a brutal assault, plain and simple. And the reaction
this time was instantaneous. The Baltimore Ravens
terminated his contract and released him that
very same day, within hours. And the NFL suspended
him indefinitely. So in the span of, what, a
morning? Mm -hmm. He went from being the starting
running back who was scheduled to return in week
three to being unemployed and banned from the
league. And the public relations fallout was
nuclear. The Ravens did something I had never
seen before. They recalled Ray Rice jerseys from
their pro shops. They offered an exchange program
where fans could literally trade in their old
Rice jerseys for any other players. They were
actively scrubbing him from the franchise's visual
history. We need to unpack the legal side of
this for a minute because it gets complicated.
Despite the felony charge. He never actually
went to jail, did he? No, he didn't. The criminal
charges were ultimately dropped because Rice
agreed to enter a court supervised counseling
program. It's called pre -trial intervention.
It's a fairly standard legal path for first time
offenders in New Jersey. If you complete the
counseling program and you stay out of trouble
for a year, the charges are dismissed from your
record. And he did that successfully. But he
also fought the NFL suspension. And this is a
nuanced point that I think a lot of people forget.
He appealed the indefinite suspension. His legal
team argued double jeopardy, not in the constitutional
sense, but in the sense of labor law. Their argument
was simple. You already punished him. You gave
him a two -game suspension. You cannot punish
him again for the exact same incident just because
a video leaked that made you look bad. And the
core of that argument was that Rice had been
completely honest with the NFL from the very
beginning. Exactly. Testimony from the appeal
hearing showed that Rice had told Roger Goodell
and the league officials in person explicitly
that he had punched her and knocked her out.
So when the tape came out, the NFL couldn't claim
they were shocked by the facts, only by the public
seeing the optics. The arbitrator, a former federal
judge, agreed with Rice. She ruled that the NFL
had acted arbitrarily and had punished him twice
for the same offense. So in November of 2014,
Rice wins his appeal. The indefinite suspension
is overturned. He is reinstated. He is free to
sign with any team in the league. And on top
of that, he settled a wrongful termination lawsuit
with the Ravens for about $3 .5 million in back
pay. So by early 2015, legally and administratively,
Ray Rice was back. He was 28 years old. He was
healthy. He was only a year removed from being
a Pro Bowl level player. But he never played
another down in the NFL. And this brings us to
Section 5, the aftermath, what you could call
the silent ban. Why didn't a single team sign
him? We see teams overlook serious character
issues for talent all the time in the NFL. Why
was Ray Rice different? It was a cold, hard calculation
of public relations versus production, and the
PR was just too toxic. Yes, teams sign troubled
players, but Rice was a running back, a position
with a very short shelf life, and he was approaching
age 30. His stats in 2013, the year right before
the suspension, had already started to dip. He
averaged only 3 .1 yards per carry that season.
So he was a declining asset who brought a three
ring media circus with him. Exactly. If he were
still in his prime, you know, rushing for 2000
yards from scrimmage, maybe a team takes that
heat. Maybe an owner is willing to stand at a
podium and defend it. But for an aging running
back, the toxicity of that elevator video was
just too high. No owner wanted to be the one
to answer the question, why did you sign the
guy from the elevator video? He tried really
hard to get back in, though. This wasn't a case
of him just giving up. Not at all. He stayed
in peak physical shape for years. In 2016, there
was a report that he offered to donate his entire
salary to domestic violence charities if a team
would just give him a chance to play. His whole
salary? His entire salary. He wasn't doing it
for the money at that point. He was doing it
because he needed to redeem his identity as a
football player. It's who he was. But the phone
never rang. It didn't. In 2018, he finally officially
announced that his football career was over.
So he had to pivot. And this is where the story
gets really complex again. Because he didn't
just hide. He didn't disappear and live off his
money. He actually leaned into the ugliest part
of his story. He became an advocate. He started
traveling the country, speaking to high school
and college football teams. I mean, major programs
like Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State. And his message
wasn't, I was treated unfairly. His message was,
I am the cautionary tale. Look at me. Don't do
what I did. What specifically was he telling
these young athletes? He would tell them that
he was a hero in his city, a Super Bowl champ,
a guy everyone thought was a good person, and
that it all evaporated in 30 seconds of a horrible
decision fueled by alcohol and ego. He owned
it completely. He even mirrored the language
Roger Goodell eventually used about the incident,
admitting that he didn't get it right. He spoke
about toxic masculinity, about the need to walk
away from conflict, about what real strength
is. And it's worth noting, as we mentioned earlier,
that this charitable side of him wasn't some
PR stunt that was invented after the assault.
He had a long track record of community work
before 2014. That's the dichotomy we just keep
coming back to in this story. He was the same
guy who was giving out Christmas presents to
low -income families in Baltimore in 2016, just
like he was the guy fighting cyberbullying in
2012. He is a complex human being who did a lot
of good in his community and then committed a
horrific, inexcusable act of violence. Both things
are true. And that leads us to the final thought,
right? The synthesis of this entire deep dive.
Ray Rice's legacy is just, it's permanently split
down the middle. It is. You cannot tell the story
of the 2012 Baltimore Ravens Super Bowl victory
without him. He was essential. But you also cannot
tell the history of the NFL's domestic violence
policy without him. He is the reason the league
was shamed into instituting a strict six game
baseline suspension for first time domestic violence
offenses. He is the reason the league started
taking investigations more seriously rather than
just relying on whatever was in the police report.
He changed the game. Just not in the way he ever
intended. Precisely. His downfall forced a change
that was long overdue. So here is the question
that we really want to leave you with today.
It's a question about redemption, and it's not
an easy one. Ray Rice has spent the last decade
trying to atone for his actions. He has spoken
to thousands of young men. He has stayed married
to Janae, and they have raised a family together.
He seems to have done everything right since
that night. And yet whenever his name is mentioned,
the first thing that pops into our heads, the
first image we see, is the grainy footage from
inside that elevator. Right. So the question
is, can an athlete, or really can anyone, ever
truly outrun a moment like that? When the evidence
of your worst act is so visual, so brutal, and
so permanent, does all the good work you do after
ever actually balance the scale? Or is the video
the only legacy that will ever truly matter?
It's a question that doesn't have a clean answer,
but it's the question that I'm sure Ray Rice
lives with every single day. That's it for this
deep dive into the rise, the fall, and the complicated
aftermath of Ray Rice. Thanks for exploring all
the gray areas with us. Thanks for having me.
We'll see you in the next one.