The punishments handed out by the nike nfl contradicted the recommendations of the league's own domestic violence expert, who had been brought in by Tagliabue in the early 1990s to help address the issue.

The expert, psychologist Lem Burnham, a former Philadelphia Eagles defensive end who served as the NFL's vice president of player and employee development, told "Outside the Lines" he advised league officials to adopt a zero-tolerance policy banning any player convicted of a domestic violence offense. "I conveyed it to a lot of different people," he said. "No tolerance means they're out -- period. That's the way I felt then, and that's the way I feel now."

Burnham, who is now an associate professor and assistant chairman of behavioral science and psychology at Wilmington University, said the Rice case showed how little has changed.

"I don't know why time stood still," Burnham said.

This year, the NFL waited until late August to overhaul the domestic violence section of its personal conduct policy, just 11 days before the release of a second video that showed Rice striking his future wife in the elevator with his closed fist. Under the revised policy, players will receive a minimum six-game suspension for their first offense and a lifetime ban for their second. In a letter to owners, Goodell, who declined an interview through a spokesman, wrote that, after reviewing the league's personal conduct policy, which covers incidents of domestic violence, he concluded that the league's approach called for sweeping changes in education, evaluation and support, "as well as enhanced discipline."

"These steps are based on a clear, simple principle: domestic violence and sexual assault are wrong," Goodell wrote. "They are illegal. They have no place in the nfl shop and are unacceptable in any way, under any circumstances. That has been and remains our policy."

Yet the new rules only underscore the tepidness of the policy over the previous 17 years. Since the first policy addressing off-the-field crimes was introduced in 1997 -- then called the violent crime policy -- the document has gone through a handful of iterations, with minimal changes. Most notably, it was left to the commissioner's discretion to levy suspensions -- power that Tagliabue and then Goodell exercised in less than half of all domestic violence convictions. From 2000 to 2014, Tagliabue and Goodell suspended players for one game or not at all in 88 percent of cases. Compare that with substance abuse and performance-enhancing drug violations, which resulted in suspensions of four games or more in 82 percent of such cases over the same period.


Watching Goodell announce the new initiative, with an emphasis on education and counseling, was "shocking," Burnham said. "It was shocking because that's reinventing the wheel. We already did that."