As many of you may know, Adrian Beaterson's, whoops I mean Peterson's, hearing with the NFL regarding his child abuse charges was this week. The NFL and their neutral arbitrator have decided to keep Peterson off the field until at least April, pending his appeal. The appeal will be bullshit anyway, but I'll get to that later. AP has been on the commisioner's exempt list while waiting on the criminal justice system of the good ol' USA. This meant that he could not participate with the team BUT he was still getting paid his millions in cash. The further suspension that was handed down this week not cuts that pay out of the deal, making AP's position much less desirable. Between losing most, if not all, of his sponsorships, AP needed his salary to pay for his expenses (aka his 100 kids and baby mama's all over the US and of course his mounting legal bills).

Full disclosure I think that the way that this case and Ray Rice's case have been handle entirely the wrong way. Both of these men are guilty of commiting crimes. This is not ground breaking information. However, the NFL has been dicking these guys around in an unjust way. I'll leave Ray Rice for another article, but the treatment of AP is not too disimilar. The NFL and Goodell have abused their power and let the outcry of the stupid people on Facebook and Twitter control and effectively end the careers of these men. NEWS FLASH: these aren't the first cases of NFL player misconduct in the history of the league. However, they are the first players to get royaly fucked by people's unifromed opinions on social media. Does anyone remember Ray Lewis? Yea Ray Lewis, the now famous NFL analyst. Well he barely escaped murder charges just a few years back. No, he wasn't placed on some bullshit list. Yes, there was outrage. No, the NFL didn't get its panties all bunched and try to appease to the idiot public. He continued to play, won a super bowl, became MVP and then retired and gained a cushy job with ESPN.

Peterson will never recover from this. Early signs point to his career effectively being over (as a 30 year old RB with a child abuser stigma). Peterson will appeal his "sentence" as he rightfully should. The only problem is that his appeal will be heard by, wait for it, Roger Goodell. Goodell has already publicly stated his dissaproval of Peterson, so we can all imagine that his appeal will essentially be a farce. After that he will have to serve his sentcne and effectively dissapear from the spotlight. Ultimately the whole situation is a product of the collective bargaining agreement between the NFLPA and the NFL. Since the NFL's player misconduct policies are cleary an underutilized its just a damn shame that these guys essentially agreed to the exact policies they're getting fucked by.

My advice after all of this? Read that contract, ask your lawyer to read it, and then ask him what the worst case scenario is. If you're the one getting fucked when the chips are down, you'd better renegotiate.