Joseph Randle is a young man who has some problems. Now he has another one. But the Dallas Cowboys have a much bigger one.
The former Cowboys running back was arrested last October for shoplifting cologne and underwear in a department store. He was arrested earlier this year for possessing marijuana, a mistake that led to a potential suspension. Last week he called police while home alone, reportedly feeling paranoid. The police found no evidence of anything amiss when they arrived.
This is a young man who is clearly troubled, who needs help and support and structure. He’s not a saint, but neither is he unredeemable. But he was averaging only 4.1 yards per carry behind one of the NFL’s best lines, so Cowboys owner Jerry Jones dropped the axe. Randle was cut earlier this week. Hopefully he gets the help he needs and can continue his career somewhere, but the Cowboys clearly don’t care about him as anything but a statline and a price point.
Joseph Randle is an excellent example of how young men with real problems are used up and thrown away by owners who don’t care about them in the slightest. Jones, in particular is really good at this.
Meanwhile, Greg Hardy, who is one of the best pass rushers in football, gets all the support he needs from the organization, even in the face of graphic evidence of his treatment of women.
Jones has called Hardy—whose domestic violence charges were somehow unbelievably expunged from his record this week—a “real leader,” even as video showed Hardy slapping clipboards from coaches and screaming at teammates on the sidelines last week.
Greg Hardy has an anger problem. And a problem with women. And a problem with being a decent human being in general. Jerry Jones has no problem with any of that. That’s the real problem. It’s what makes the Cowboys the worst organization in professional sports. It starts with ignoring genuine, legitimate outrage in favour of a boost on the D-line. It gets worse when you call one of the worst examples of athlete behaviour a leader.
But it really hits home when you treat other, decent-but-troubled men like Randle as though they’re disposable, simply because they’re not as good at their job as Greg Hardy is at his.
I understand that the Super Bowl is the end goal of all this, and that pursuit can lead to difficult decisions. But at some point an organization, and the man atop it, need to look in the mirror and decide if the (rapidly shrinking, thank goodness) chance of a championship is worth all that it costs them morally.
Nobody’s saying an NFL team needs to be a charity (though it’s worth noting that until last year the league itself was technically a non-profit), but when an organization relies upon public support for revenue, and the future of the business it operates is already being called into question for the damage it causes to its workers, perhaps not being utterly heartless and cynical and devoid of thought for anything but the bottom line would help ensure there will be those eventually fighting for it when the time comes.
Because make no mistake, the next time something bad, or even slightly questionable, happens to the Cowboys—and this is the Cowboys, so that should be, like, next week or so—there will be no sympathy, no understanding and a lot of finger-pointing from the media. And rightly so.
I’m supposed to be an objective journalist, and I am rooting for the Cowboys to fail, and for Greg Hardy to fail more spectacularly than most of them. I promise I’m not alone in that among my colleagues.
The Cowboys have made their own messy, nasty bed here. We should all hope they’re forced to lay in it sooner rather than later.
