jrober38

No, the polls weren't that skewed. When Trump took office, 41% of people disapproved of the job he was doing. Since then, that number has sky rocketed to 57% (an increase of 39%). The majority of the country is firmly against him. He's lost much of the support that got him elected.

His disapproval rating is 57%. Only 36% of voters approve of the job he's doing. That number has declined drastically since he took office.

This would usually be the case, but the rules of how things work don't apply to Trump. Too many people hate him. Those people are going to go out in droves next time to get whoever he's running against elected.

Pretty much anyone would beat him. His approval rating is historically low. He's gained zero votes since the election and realistically he has probably lost millions of people who took a chance on him only to be extremely disappointed. If an election were held today, against pretty much any Democratic Senator, he'd lose in a landslide. It would be a massacre given that 57% of voters disapprove of the job he's doing.

I'm not a huge fan of mortgaging the future for the third best QB prospect in a draft class. Odds are they're not going to work out.

It could. Hard to imagine Trump changing his ways though. Also, I imagine the Breitbart guys are going to be even more aggressive in the future having to recover from the blame they're inevitably going to get for pushing Roy Moore in this election. If they'd not got involved with pushing their "movement" and just allowed the Republicans run Luther Strange, I'd have gone to bed an hour ago...

Obviously. I'm just saying that in a head to head general election, Hilary would have been dusted by pretty much any of the other options. They'd have attacked her numerous flaws, and unlike Trump, she'd have had nothing to attack them on. Hilary was a horrible candidate. She had so many flaws and negative talking points it's unbelievable the Dems went so out of their way to rig things so that she got in ahead of Bernie (who I think would have destroyed any Republican candidate). As do I. Their insistence that Hilary had to be the candidate was mind boggling. They let Bernie wipe the floor with her in the debates for months, only to push her to the forefront in the middle of a major investigation. Such horrible decision making.

Hilary was a terrible candidate all on her own. If she'd have run against anyone other than Trump I think she'd have lost in a landslide. I agree about the high ground. Trump's endorsement of Moore is going to hang over his head for years.

He's not employed in the NFL for a reason. He's horrendous.

I'm not saying it's going to die anytime soon, but think about how much advancement there's been in NFL head injuries over the past 10 years and how it's affected the game, and imagine what things are going to look like in 50 years. My guess is we're going to have a generation of players from the 90s and 2000s dying early due to CTE. It's going to become a full fledged epidemic among NFL players, and as the scientific research behind the affects of playing football gets more worrying, participation will continue to decline and eventually you'll have such a poor product on the field viewers will turn their attention elsewhere. As I said, the NFL has nothing that's going to make more people play the game, which is pretty much the opposite of every other pro league in North America. Basketball is growing, baseball is growing (they also don't compete against anything in the summer months), hockey is growing, soccer is growing. The NFL on the other hand is losing market share, and I don't see anything that's going to turn that around.

Great post.

I'm not sure that tons of kids will always want to play. At some point common sense will prevail and parents will force their kids into other sports.

I disagree. Football is a dying sport. I'm not saying it's dead, or going to be dead anytime soon, but the trajectory of the league is downward. Youth participation is falling, and will likely continue to fall. In a sport where the average life expectancy of a player seems to be considerably less than the average life expectancy of athletes who play any other major sport, parents will continue to hold their kids back from playing and put them in other sports instead where you don't run the risk of living the majority of your life with the effects of severe brain trauma. The NFL has nothing that is going to get participation to increase. All that's going to happen is the league is going to continue to lose market share of youth participation, and eventually, maybe 50+ years from now, it will have been lapped by other spectator sports. My guess is that soccer will be the sport that capitalizes over time. There's no major risk of injury, it's global and as MLS continues to improve it's quality US interest will ascend with it.

No. I haven't been accused of something I didn't do. And yes, if someone is being falsely accused and wants to defend themself go ahead and do so. If you've got nothing to hide it shouldn't be a big deal.

Maybe I was unclear - my stance is that when these victims come forward the initial reaction is that they should be believed. The authorities, or their employer, or whoever is involved should treat them as telling the truth and fully investigate their claims assuming they are telling the truth. If during that process their stories wind up filled with holes, or there is a lack of supporting evidence, then they should be treated as having lied. It should be relatively easy for an employer to release a statement saying they fully investigated the incident and determined no wrong doing. In this situation, the NFL hasn't fired anyone. They've suspended a bunch of employees and are likely conducting their own investigation. If they deem the victims accusations to be credible, I imagine that they'll be fired. If they determine the victim was lying, then they'll likely get reinstated. The process can play out, but while under investigation of sexual assault, the NFL can't leave these guys on the air and pretend everything is normal. They need to figure out what happened and act accordingly.

Timing shouldn't matter because there's no right or wrong time to come forward. Obviously it would be best if it happens immediately, but in a lot of these cases people are reluctant because the initial belief is that they won't be believed. Say you're a secretary and your boss assaults you at work. There are no witnesses. Do you come forward and risk not being believed, and possibly fired from your job. Or do you just internalize it and pretend it didn't happen and live with it knowing you'll keep your job and be able to pay your bills? Some people might come forward right away, but it should be easier to see why not everyone does. Then imagine years down the road you've moved onto another job and someone else comes forward accusing the same person of wrong doing. It might seem "convenient" to come out of the shadows making accusations, but it might also seem like an easier battle to be believed for an accuser once they know someone else has experienced the same ordeal, and the two of them together are more convincing than one of them on their own. There's no right or wrong way to do these things. It's like all the Priest abuse cases from the early 2000s. Why did all those hundreds of boys stay quiet for decades? Once the whistle was blown, it was easier to come forward because there was a much greater chance of being believed.

Sure there are. The legal system isn't perfect, but as I've said many times in this thread no one is threatening to send any of these guys to jail. For the most part, all of the stories in the news are about men who have had a long history involving numerous accusers. Does anyone really think they're all lying?

Sorry but it's 2017 and nothing stays swept under the rug for long.

There's no one size fits all. If you didn't do something, you should be able to convince people of that. Just because something can't be proved, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Clearing your name should be invaluable, yet most of these men never try to do that. I don't think that's by accident.

Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt applies to criminal cases. No one is sending any of these guys to jail. Unfortunately for them, most of them are facing multiple accusers and they have no defense. These cases, if they even get to civil court, just need to show that something is more likely true than not true, which is how most opinions are formed.

Their lives often get destroyed because they can't prove their innocence. Usually there are multiple accusers, and those accusers have usually told other people about what happened at some point in time. As you said earlier, they need to take responsibility for their actions.

One guy in 20 years. Anyone else we should have signed or did you just prove my point for me?

There's a reason why there's criminal court and civil court. No one is threatening to send any of these guys to jail........

Proving innocence would be incredibly easy. Also, none of these accusers go to the cops. They don't just go out arresting people who get accused of sexual misconduct. These cases are tried in civil court, and rarely if ever do the people accused wind up suing the accuser for defamation. These cases are almost always settled out of court so that there's no record of the accused having to testify or be deposed.