Playing Cooper Sends A Bad Message, But It Doesn’t Matter

The Denver Broncos already have a dominant defense, and they’ll almost certainly be getting another formidable weapon back against the Arizona Cardinals this Sunday. 

Linebacker Jonathon Cooper was taken off the commissioner’s exempt list after his trial date for a felony assault charge and lesser charges related to a pair of domestic abuse charges was moved to March last week, and he’ll almost certainly be back on the field to at least some degree against Arizona.   

Columnist Sean Keeler wrote about this over the weekend, saying it sends the wrong message to Broncos Country in a piece for the Denver Post. He’s right, but it doesn’t matter. 

It’s an unfortunate fact of life in today’s society and the NFL’s corner of the sports world, but columns like this have become obligatory, and they’re almost always completely ignored by the league.

Credit Keeler for putting out the right message, though. He encourated his readers to forgive if they’d like, but not forget, and rather than get preachy, he simply used short phrases from the police report and the medical evaluations of what Cooper did to his alleged victim that followed. 

They’re hard to stomach, and harder to forget. They include phrases like “strangulation with hypoxia and traumatic brain injury” and “substantial risk of death.” There are others, but those are the worst ones.

Keeler also asked readers to remember that htye have daughter’s, sisters or nieces who will ask what happened to Cooper, and those phrases come from a nurse’s forensic report, not a media writeup. They’re the essence of why Cooper missed the first six games of Denver’s season, but they won’t matter, either, and nor will the court-based information that the linebacker was charged with violating a non-contact order. 

But the NFL has developed a formula for dealing with this sort of thing, and it works. Players are suspended, either actively or passively, with the exempt list representing the passive version of this. Once X number of games have been served, the player is allowed back on the field. 

The league did take this issue seriously for a brief time after the domestic abuse incident with Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice surfaced, largely because the video that showed Rice’s actions was both shocking and disgusting. 

But that was a long time ago — 2014, to be exact, and thankfully it did help end Rice’s career. Videos like that are no longer shocking, though, and football is basically a blood sport, so fans typically shrug, support the player and move on. That’s what’s happening with Cooper now, in spite of Keeler’s effort to change things back to the way they were.