Mike Celizic

Roger Goodell’s campaign to clean up the NFL doesn’t seem to be going very well.

Jaguars receiver Matt Jones is the latest NFL player to show up on a police blotter, arrested in Arkansas while sitting in his car cutting up lines of cocaine. The drugs, which apparently were destined for his nose, are instead in an evidence locker.

Brandon Marshall of the Broncos is on his third arrest, Jevon Kearse got nailed for DUI, former kicker Tony Zendejas has been charged with rape, Terrence Kiel is dead in a motor vehicle accident after drugging himself out of the game, Michael Vick is bankrupt and serving a prison term, and the Jones formerly known as Pacman is waiting to be cleared to resume his NFL career.

It seems that no more than a few days ever go by without another NFL player making headlines for all the wrong reasons. If Goodell is cleaning up the league, the results are not readily apparent.

What Goodell should be in the process of discovering is that talking about cleaning up a society is a lot easier than actually doing it. But he has a growing perception problem. Increasingly, the NFL is being seen as a haven for players with no respect for the law, and he’s got to change it.

He’s lucky in that the NFL is so enormously popular that even a constant stream of player arrests has had no readily apparent effect on the willingness of the fans to watch the games and spend their money on tickets and NFL-licensed products.

But he’s unlucky in that his game is drawing increasing numbers of players who grow up in places where guns and crime are seen as a normal part of life. And as rookie pay rises, they’re getting enormous amounts of money before they know how to behave in civil society.

I’d like to say there’s an easy solution, but there isn’t. He can’t adopt a zero-tolerance policy and throw players out for their first offense. It wouldn’t be good for competition, and it wouldn’t be popular with fans who don’t want to see their heroes banished for one mistake.

I’ve seen studies that show that just one in 45 NFL players will be arrested during any one year, which is about half the rate of people in general society. It’s also not that many considering there are nearly 2,000 players who go through the league every year.

But it’s also nearly one a week, which keeps crime and the league logo constantly interlocked in the sports pages. If you think that a week never goes by without an arrest, you’re basically right.

That doesn’t mean the NFL is rampant with crime, but it does mean it looks that way, and to the public, that’s pretty much the same thing.

I feel for Goodell, who faces a real dilemma. He wants to show that the NFL will not tolerate criminal behavior, and yet there’s no indication that any get-tough policy has ever worked to keep people from behaving badly.

Once upon a time, a lot of states decided to get tough on drug offenders. It didn’t matter what you were caught with, above a certain amount and you were going to prison. The laws did nothing to curb drug abuse. It did fill up prisons with people whose only offense was against themselves.

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The federal government spends more than $40 billion a year to stamp out illegal drugs and a recent study showed that no country has more drug users than the United States.

It was a similar deal with the three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws that some states enacted. That one was going to show the criminals who was in charge once and for all. Commit three felonies and you went to jail — forever. And all that’s done is force states to provide free housing for thousands of inmates, many of whom were guilty of multiple five-and-dime kind of offenses.

Crime rates go down when the economy is booming. When the economy is in the tank, crime rates go up. That’s pretty much been the story forever. Anti-crime measures have an effect, and neighborhoods can be cleaned up, but human beings — especially young ones — do stupid things.

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