The unrest over the Ray Rice domestic violence investigation continues to haunt NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
USA TODAY Sports reported Tuesday that a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on domestic violence in professional sports, blasting the respective sports for the failures of their top executives to appear.
Ray Rice now in control of Roger Goodell's fate?
But under questioning from soon-to-be Senate Commerce Committee chair John Thune, NFL executive vice president Troy Vincent admitted that Goodell should not have needed a second video to impose more than a two-game suspension to Rice for hitting then-fiancée and now-wife Janay.
Vincent described Rice's actions in the original video, in which he dragged Palmer's limp body out of an elevator at an Atlantic City casino as "heartless, gutless, despicable," USA TODAY Sports reported.
John Harbaugh wanted to dismiss Ray Rice After First Video
"I don't think you needed a second video" to have arrived at a determination a stronger penalty should have been given to Rice, added Vincent. "We've learned. We've acknowledged that we've made mistakes. ... We failed. We failed to impose proper discipline."
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told USA TODAY Sports in an email after the hearing that Vincent was not acting as a rogue NFL employee; Vincent merely was repeating what Goodell said in a September interview to CBS News.
"According to a quote provided by McCarthy, when Goodell was asked during that interview whether he had needed the second video to make his decision to change Rice's suspension from two games to indefinite, Goodell replied: 'No, we certainly didn't and I will tell you what we saw in the first videotape was troubling to us in and of itself and that's why we took the action we took. As I've said before, we didn't feel that was sufficient, we didn't get that right'" USA TODAY Sports reported.
NBA Players Union executive director Michelle Roberts was the only league of chief executive to appear at the hearing, disappointing the committee members.
Rice, whose wife went after Goodell earlier this week for his comments that Rice wasn't clear about what happened that night in February, turned on his former employer, the Baltimore Ravens, saying they gave him and Janay a script on what to say to the media when they held their news conference last spring.
"We were given what to speak about," he said, according to USA TODAY Sports' For the Win. "It wasn't truly coming from us, if you can understand, but I made that clear in my last time I was able to speak that my wife is an angel. She can do no wrong. I take full responsibility for my actions."
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