The Vikings have no idea what they’re doing with Adrian Peterson

On Monday, in a bizarre press conference that never should’ve happened, Minnesota Vikings general manager Rick Spielman said this about Adrian Peterson:

“We didn’t know where we were at Friday,” Spielman said of the initial decision. “We thought it was best to step back, evaluate the situation and keep Adrian out of the game this past weekend.”

Not 72 hours after all of the Friday confusion that caused the Vikings to step back and evaluate what to do, the team decided this (emphasis mine):

”This is a very important issue. I want to take time to emphasize that the issue of child welfare is extremely serious. We want to do the right thing. This is a difficult path to navigate regarding the judgment of how a parent disciplines his child.

“We feel strongly as an organization this is disciplining a child.”

Despite everything that happened in the past week, and everything that should’ve been learned, the Vikings started by doing the right thing and deactivating Peterson, but then settled on the typical “he’ll play until the legal system determines what’s wrong” card and misread the situation entirely.

Fast forward to Tuesday at midnight (the seldom-used middle-of-the-night news dump), when the Vikings decided to essentially deactivate Peterson indefinitely:

While we were trying to make a balanced decision yesterday, after further reflection we have concluded that this resolution is best for the Vikings and for Adrian. We want to be clear: we have a strong stance regarding the protection and welfare of children, and we want to be sure we get this right.

The NFL and its teams have no clue how to handle a real-world problem or a crisis and can only start to figure it out by being reactionary to public outrage. In fact, they can’t even learn from the very recent past, or the mistakes of others, to do the right thing.