New York Giants

Mara and the New York media: Should Josh Brown's actions be considered terrible given the circumstances of his childhood?

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

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New York Giants have some serious explaining to do after losing their starting field-goal kicker this week against the Rams.

The New York Giants have announced the suspension of field goal kicker Josh Brown for his role in domestic violence against his wife, as reported by numerous outlets of the New York media.

The Giants owe much of their success because of Brown’s consistency with a field goal made percentage close to 90% in the first six games of the season. Brown does his job dutifully game after game. You can see him walking to the special teams, booting the ball through the goal posts like as if he were playing paper football, and then goes away off into the sidelines high-riving Eli Manning and the offensive players who allowed the team to advance to field goal range.

The part we did not know about Brown was that he had a tormented past which he had been covering up. As the New York Post observed, the Giants should not have offered Brown a two year extension to his contract after discovering information leading the team to suspect that Brown could be found guilty.

The NFL has been performing a balancing act of disciplining players for their on-the-field antics while making sure players follow applicable civil laws off-the-field.

Roger Goodell has been cracking down on NFL players use of force involving domestic disputes ever since 2015 when the infamous video released showing the darker side of married life in a league that values players, doing, in the words of a famous jurist once said “engaging in a war with the opponent to make the opponent fear losing consciousness and being stirred up,” to paraphrase a torts opinion from a previous decade involving a player who went too far in using contact to bring down an opponent.

As many casual followers of professional sports know by now, it is not only boxing where the goal is to make the opponent “lose consciousness,” but soccer, hockey and other sports involving the use of contact. There may have been a low level reached recently in the past couple of years, when a eel-respected NFL player and a players as benign as a kicker are reveal to have channeled their physical rage against innocents off-the-field.

The response from the harshest critics from sports most respected positions view the Giants position akin to the scandal involving Hillary Clinton with her erasure of emails.

With so much pressure on the Giants organization, you can owner how much Odell Beckham’s distracting behavior was buying time for the Giants to open up a can of worms about the Brown situation. The rules require Brown to stay away from his wife and the Giants will have future meetings with Brown to discuss his future in the organization.

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