Timeout long overdue for Cowboys’ Elliott
Six-game suspension should be wake-up call for star who has often enjoyed a free pass
The Ezekiel Elliott story didn’t start at Ohio State, and certainly not with the Dallas Cowboys, but rather at a wealthy, predominately white, private high school in a western suburb of St. Louis.
John Burroughs School is in the suburb of LaDue and includes such distinguished alums as actor Jon Hamm and actress Ellie Kemper. And if you are serious about wanting to know how Elliott is on the fringe of blowing it, start there.
Free pass is the description given to me by one of Zeke’s classmates, who attended John Burroughs with him from the seventh grade through high school. Another word is sheltered.
The source asked not to be quoted on the record.
Elliott is not the first athlete to be given a free pass in high school. Or college. Or the NFL.
ESPN’s latest 30 for 30 on the 1988 Dallas Carter Cowboys football team is a cautionary tale about free passes given to high school football players. Stupid tends to follow, sometimes with tragic, life-altering results.
We won’t know until Aug. 29 if the NFL’s six-game suspension will be upheld. That’s when an arbitrator decides Elliott’s appeal. Bet on a reduction. Harold Henderson is the same arbitrator who reduced former Cowboys defensive end Greg Hardy’s suspension from 10 games to four in 2015 after he beat up his exgirlfriend.
Elliott, Jerry Jones, the Cowboys and Cowboys Nation won’t agree, but the best thing for the running back is to sit and watch. For the sake of his career and his life, Elliott needs a timeout. Clearly, no one ever put him there.
The NFL can fine him. Jones can admonish him. But the only way this guy is going to understand the edge on which he sits is to take away the game. Even though we now know that football is likely to be detrimental to long-term health, to take the game away from most of these guys is like removing a limb. One of the most consistent phrases uttered about Elliott from the Cowboys is that he loves to play the game.
Not all guys love it. Many just love the lifestyle. They love the money. They love hanging around the guys. They don’t know what else to do with their lives but play.
“Zeke loves to play football,” Cowboys coach Jason Garrett has repeatedly said.
Now someone has to exercise the oldest parental trick playbook and take away Zeke’s favourite little red fire truck, take away the game. Because nothing else has worked.
This story turned uglier, as so easily predicted, once Elliott decided to appeal his six-game suspension.
His people released a slew of information to discredit the accuser, former girlfriend Tiffany Thompson. The NFLPA stood up for its union-paying member and publicly defended him.
Then the NFL shot back to slam Elliott, the union and the representatives for trying to discredit a potential victim of domestic violence.
If Elliott did what the NFL alleges he did to his ex-girlfriend — which is to assault her on three occasions —six games is nothing. He got off easy.
Without visual proof we are stuck sifting through damning allegations and statements, contradictions, and a dose of fear, resentment and a healthy shot of anger.
We will never know exactly what happened other than it’s a giant mess of youthful stupidity.
The NFL didn’t say it, but this suspension is not just about Elliott’s behaviour with an ex-girlfriend in a relationship that appears to have turned from unhealthy to combustible.
This is about a pattern of behaviour that did not begin with the Dallas Cowboys, or at Ohio State, but back in LaDue.
This is about a series of free passes handed out. About not knowing when to go home. About knowing what not to do in public. About a series of behaviours that never stopped. About punishments and lessons that never went far enough.
Those punishments might have involved running after practice. Maybe they involved a lecture from the teacher or the coach or the wellmeaning parent.
They just never took away the game. If Elliott is ever going to learn, someone must take away what he loves the most.
Take away the ball, and tell him to sit and watch while his friends play.
Nothing else has ever worked, because all he’s ever known is a free pass.