Ray Rice reinstated by NFL, here’s everything you need to know

The drama isn’t quite over. Rice won his hearing in front of a neutral arbitrator, and with that victory comes a brand new batch of questions to consider. Where and when will be see Rice again? And what is to come for Goodell and the NFL? Let’s discuss:

Will Rice play again?

That depends whether or not a team wants to sign him. He struggled mightily in 2013 for the Ravens, averaging just 3.1 yards per carry in a down year for Baltimore. He had established himself as one of the most productive running backs in the NFL before that. From 2009 to 2012, he had at least 1,143 yards rushing and 1,621 total yards in four straight seasons. His best season was 2011, when he set career highs with 1,364 yards rushing and 76 catches for 704 yards receiving. And prior to his arrest, he was known as a positive locker room influence, too.

When can Rice play?

As soon as he is signed, so in theory this weekend. But whether any NFL team will pick him up this late in the season is iffy. It would be taking on a lot of baggage for a player who has sat the entire season and wasn’t productive the last time he played. Outrage towards Rice has perhaps dissipated a bit due to how Goodell and the Ravens handled the situation, but it’s a safe bet that a lot of fans are still angry at the running back.

The more likely scenario is that Rice chalks this season up as lost and focuses his attention on getting back in shape and making himself a viable commodity in the offseason free agency period. It doesn’t seem likely that he will play in 2014, but may be even more unlikely that he doesn’t get signed at all.

Who will Rice play for?

Let’s lay out the criteria of a team that might try to sign Rice this season.

1) Needs a running back.
2) Is in a strong enough position to contend to justify the negative press.

Based on the above criteria alone, the Denver Broncos could fit the bill, but C.J. Anderson has filled in nicely in recent games. The Arizona Cardinals, Detroit Lions, and San Diego Chargers are the bottom trio of teams in yards per carry, which makes any one a potential destination for a talented running back. But that doesn’t mean they’d invite the circus that signing Ray Rice would bring.

Did Goodell lie?

Judge Barbara Jones said in her ruling, “I am not persuaded that Rice lied to, or misled, the NFL at his June hearing.” She also called the second suspension “arbitrary,” the crux of her ruling in the appeal siding with Rice and the NFLPA on the notion that Rice had been unfairly suspended the second time for the same incident.

A number of reports have suggested that the NFL (but not necessarily Goodell) was in possession of the tape of Rice’s punch in the elevator well before Goodell claimed he saw it. An Associated Press correspondent reported that the league’s security chief had possession of the tape in April, and that he heard a voicemail from a female employee with the NFL confirm that the tape had been received.

Goodell used the second video tape as the basis for giving Rice an indefinite suspension. In a letter to the NFLPA, he explained that the video showed “a starkly different sequence of events” than what Rice and his representatives told him during a June meeting with the commissioner. That letter and the commissioner’s continued insistence to the press that Rice was “ambiguous” could now come back to haunt Goodell.

Could anything happen to Goodell?

On this, we can only speculate. Whether anything happens to the NFL commissioner may depend on how long this story stay in the public consciousness. The nature of scandal is to die quickly without any new developments. Unfortunately for those who are angry, the Rice scandal may not have done much long-term damage to the image of the NFL, though things certainly looked different in September.

More importantly, NFL teams aren’t losing any money because of how Goodell handled the investigation. Proof of that may be the success of the games held at Wembley Stadium in London this season, where a burgeoning and impressionable market still showed in droves despite a poor on-field product and ugly off-field problems dampening excitement before the season began.

Though many want Goodell’s head, a new, relatively neutered commissioner may be the next best thing.

Could anything happen to the Ravens?

ESPN’s OTL report from September made allegations that the Ravens deliberately misled media and the NFL about what it knew about the incident in Atlantic City, and took lengthy measures to suppress the second video tape from leaking. The report also cited friends of Rice, who said that the team encouraged the running back to claim he hadn’t been forthcoming to officials, contrary to Rice’s stance. Rice filed a grievance against Baltimore for wrongful termination, and could receive compensation as a result.

The Ravens refuted the report point by point, and that statement may be the last we hear about the team’s potential impropriety. Any discipline would have to come from an NFL front office that arguably made greater missteps. The Ravens went public with their support of Rice, who they said he had been forthright about what had occurred in Atlantic City before the second video tape was released. General manager Ozzie Newsome testified that Rice told Goodell that he had punched his fiancee during Rice’s meeting with the commissioner, which was a rather damning thing say about the man in charge of running the league.

The OTL report claims that the Ravens’ party line came after the front office implicitly offered Rice a deal if he took a fall for the team and the NFL, but in the afterglow of Rice’s reinstatement those actions look better in comparison to a league office that may have lied.

How will this change the league?

The Rice case already has. It humbled the NFL commissioner enough to enact a new domestic violence policy in August that, among other things, beefed up the suspension length from two games to six games for first time offenders. Goodell’s memorandum also promised support and training to athletes to help prevent future cases of domestic violence, though the NFLPA has a host of concerns with the program -- chiefly, that the program is too concerned with how players may be punished if they commit an act domestic violence, rather than fostering values to stop domestic violence from occurring in the first place.

Other than a revamped approach to domestic violence cases, the players union may have gained more power in its relationship with the league. The ability to collectively bargain changes to the league’s personal conduct policy would be a significant precedent that could ultimately remove the commissioner’s office to punish players, unilaterally.

The NFL will almost certainly be more vigilant in how handles domestic violence cases going forward. Though the sheer mass of the league may make it slow to change, the uproar over Rice’s case was loud enough to be heard at every level of the league, and perhaps across all American professional sports.

That doesn’t necessarily make the NFL more human, however. This shouldn’t have been a lesson learned by trial and error, but the league has a history of reacting to off-field distractions only when they demonstrably effect its bottom line. The NFL will come out of the Ray Rice ordeal bruised but bandaged, and the core problem may still persist. The NFL is incredibly good at making money, and as long as that’s the case it doesn’t have much need to be accountable any more than is necessary.