During an awful week for the NFL that has seen the integrity of the league shield dropped by commissioner Roger Goodell and beaten up by Baltimore running back Ray Rice, it has been hard to find a football hero we can trust.
Maybe we have been looking in the wrong place for our football heroes.
Leave it to a player named Pot Roast to man up when the NFL needed it most.
Broncos defensive tackle Terrance “Pot Roast” Knighton tips the scales at a robust 335 pounds. But what are even bigger are his heart and his honesty, two traits in precious short supply during the fallout from a gut-wrenching video that showed Rice punching out his then-fiancée in a hotel elevator.
Should Rice be allowed to play in the NFL again?
“I wouldn’t want to play on his team,” Knighton said Wednesday.
Two days earlier, as the Rice video went viral, Knighton tweeted: “That man should be thrown out of the NFL and thrown into jail.”
At a time when many of us pause to consider our attraction to football’s violence, the league needs somebody to man up. It can’t be Rice, who has gone from Ravens superstar to football pariah faster than you can say TMZ. It won’t be Goodell, who apparently cares more about protecting league profits than promoting healthy respect for women.
Knighton manned up.
He spoke out against Rice, accepting praise with humility and taking backlash without blinking.
“It’s disturbing when you hear people saying, ‘You should be backing up your brother.’ But they just don’t see the big picture,” Knighton said.
As an executive whose primary duty is to make rich league owners richer, Goodell never has been in any position to sit in judgment of players. Justice can’t be blind or impartial when one eye is constantly on the bottom line.
Every move by Goodell in dealing with this domestic-violence case seemed directed more at preserving the value of the league’s multibillion-dollar TV contract than doing right by Janay Palmer, forced to relive her worst nightmare as the rest of America watches the video on the endless, 24/7 news cycle.
What next? For starters, the NFL must seek an independent investigation to ascertain if and when anybody in the league office indeed saw the video before it was released by TMZ.
While the calls for Goodell to step down as commissioner are destined to grow louder, what the NFL really needs to do is what should have been done a long time ago. A third-party arbitrator, not beholden to the players or franchise owners, should be entrusted with the evidence, then determine the league-imposed punishment for any alleged criminal act, whether the accused party is Cleveland receiver Josh Gordon or Indianapolis owner Jim Irsay.
As Knighton stood in front of his locker at the team’s Dove Valley headquarters and spoke from the heart about protecting the game he loves and the women he loves, the big defensive tackle wore a hoodie decorated with his favorite catch-phrase printed in block letters across his chest: Sno dat!
What does the phrase mean?
“It’s a slang way of saying, ‘You should know that!’ ” Knighton explained.
With a tweet heard around the NFL, Pot Roast wrote why he condemned Rice: “As players we must speak up. Stand up for what’s right. I don’t give a (bleep) who u are or how much money you make. No place for this.”
Sno dat.
In an otherwise ugly week for the NFL, Knighton deserves to hear the two most powerful words in coaching, in appreciation for the way he honored a mother who taught him the meaning of respect.
Good job.
And, if you will be so kind as to indulge me, I would like to offer two more humble words of my own to the man they call Pot Roast:
Thank you.
Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or twitter.com/markkiszla
