NFL has no business punishing Miami Dolphins over Jeff Ireland

Although the newly revealed “my dad was a pimp” context in which the question apparently turns out to have been asked in makes it a lot less inappropriate than if it had come out of the blue, there’s still no defending an employer asking a potential hire whether his mother was a prostitute, no matter the context – which is why there’s no way to go about defending the fact that Miami Dolphins General Manager Jeff Ireland asked that question of wide receiver Dez Bryant earlier this year. And it’s good that the issue has surfaced, because it’s about time the NFL got around to dealing with this kind of thing. It’s not that the intentions of GMs aren’t logical when these questions are asked, of course. Once a player gets on the field, players from the opposing team are going to say every insulting and offensive thing that they can, as soon as the ref is out of earshot. That will include slurs, family insults, you name it, and a team needs to know that in that situation, the player being insulted isn’t going to snap and beat the snot out of the guy delivering the insults and get his team penalized in the process. It’s one of those dirty underbelly aspects of football that most of us as fans would just as soon pretend didn’t exist, along with the money-fueled disloyalty that teams and players show each other so routinely.

Now that the issue is out in the open, the league will likely lay down “good taste” guidelines for all teams to follow when interviewing potential draft picks (and perhaps even employ league emissaries to monitor such interviews), and that’s good thing. But the NFL has been a little too trigger happy of late when it comes to punishing its employees just to try to get on the right side of the public relations equation. The league’s suspension and resulting financial punishment of Ben Roethlisberger for merely having been accused of a crime without evidence was illegal in itself, and he could have gotten his suspension overturned (at least the “unpaid” part of it) in about five minutes if he’d filed an injunction in court; the only reason he didn’t was that he likely knows the Pittsburgh Steelers would cut or trade him if he tried (which would also have been illegal on the part of the team, yet unprovable – but that’s another conversation for another day). If Jeff Ireland is fined, the Dolphins will likely tell him to swallow it as well so that the situation can be put to rest. But if the league gets uppity again and decides to punish the organization in terms of draft picks, don’t expect the Dolphins to stand for it; despite the tactlessness of Ireland’s question, he was breaking no rule and was not deviating from what was – until this week – considered the norm for these kinds of interviews. So while it’s a good thing this came out in public and will now be fixed on a permanent basis by the league, expect Bill Parcells and company to launch a holy war if the league tries to make some kind of example out of the Dolphins that goes beyond making Jeff Ireland’s wallet a little lighter. Even that kind of “message” delivered by the league would be over the top (unless they’re going to go back and fine every other GM who has asked a potential draft pick a similar question in the past month), but the team would likely swallow it. But even the NFL should know better than to come between Parcells and his cache of future draft picks.