Rex Ryan has made 'workplace' violence an NFL issue

— -- Last week, little-known linebacker IK Enemkpali broke quarterback Geno Smith's jaw in the Jets' locker room. Starting quarterbacks don't often get punched in the face, much less by their own teammate. The Jets immediately cut Enemkpali, but he was signed the very next day by the Bills, a team that will face the Jets twice this season in the AFC East.

Bills coach Rex Ryan, who drafted Enemkpali while he was the Jets' coach, vouched for the linebacker to management to smooth the way. "Hey, it's not perfect," Ryan said. "Something happened. I think it's an isolated incident. It's not a major concern for me. I feel pretty good about our locker room.''

Is the NFL really OK with that? You can break a man's jaw and two days later lace 'em up for practice five hours north on I-81? That situation isn't exactly isolated give the fact that "Fight!" has been a preseason buzzword, with fresh video arriving daily of the latest camp melee. 

As for Ryan: "It's certainly a bad message if your company is trying to convey that it doesn't sanction violence off the field," said Kim Gandy, the CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, who has been following the NFL's anti-violence strategies for the last year.

Ryan might as well have goosed NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in person, because he's immediately put the NFL in another winless position -- either exercise some form of discipline or make the league look toothless when it comes to its centerpiece program to enforce workplace respect.

Last week, Jonathan Martin retired from the NFL, citing back issues. He survived one full season in the league after what was deemed harassment at the hands of his Miami teammate  Richie Incognito. The case was investigator Ted Wells' first foray into the texting habits of an NFL football player -- which do not translate well into legalese.

"As all must surely recognize, the NFL is not an ordinary workplace," Wells begins his concluding remarks in a report that seems at times to have been written with a pair of white gloves.

Wells was very critical, and the Incognito situation merely involved words, as in the kind that don't break bones and can never hurt me. In the wake of the first Wells report, the NFL's human resources department instituted an educational program to combat bullying and instill professionalism in the workplace.

Some in the NFL front office wonder whether that message is getting through after last week's episode in the Jets' locker room. This is while the league is embroiled in a very public power struggle with marquee quarterback Tom Brady, making the NFL less and less popular when it comes to leveling penalties for off-the-field behavior.

Many, including Jets coach Todd Bowles, said that Enemkpali crossed the line. Yet in the context of an NFL locker room, there was a kind of logic to what allegedly happened between Smith and Enemkpali. The story goes that the Jets quarterback taunted the second-year linebacker about the $600 Enemkpali laid out for Smith to attend his football camp. Smith, who didn't go to the camp, agreed to repay the money but hadn't and wagged a finger in Enemkpali's face. There are people within that bubble who feel Smith wasn't blameless.

It's worth noting that Jets wide receiver Brandon Marshall disputed the first version of events, yet it's hard to imagine the same thing happening to Aaron Rodgers, Brady or Jay Cutler. OK, maybe not Cutler.

But either way, this is reality: The Bills now have a player on the roster who hurt the Jets' chances for the season.

The NFL says it has started an investigation into what happened, and Enemkpali's actions could ultimately be a violation of the code of conduct policy. Smith, who was released from the hospital on Friday after surgery and playing an ill-advised game of catch outside his apartment the next day, could also choose to file criminal charges. For now, however, the fact that the Bills had no problem picking up a player fresh off the punch speaks volumes. The message that the league office is sending directly conflicts with the louder one from the team.

Again, an NFL locker room is not a traditional workplace, and it's not even a consistent workplace. Ryan's standards are very different from Bowles'. Ryan is a coach who has encouraged camp fights, most famously in the 2010 season of "Hard Knocks" when he sent Rob Turner to challenge underperforming first-rounder Vernon Gholston. Bowles assigns sprints to players who get into camp fights on the field. 

Many fans loved that storyline, and it plays into the whole mystique of the professional athlete. Football players get to live faster, play harder, eat more, spend bigger and keep a roster of women -- or at least that's the fantasy plenty of NFL fans want to believe. You may spend your day as a sucker in a cubicle, but you're not quite dead yet if you can still understand the off-the-grid justice in which this all makes sense.

So how to balance these two codes -- the code of the locker room and the written rules the NFL places upon those locker room walls?

Keep in mind that the NFL pays people to go into all 32 team facilities and present a program that insists that an NFL locker room is a workplace, albeit untraditional, but one in which players must respect each other. How can any of those presenters give that message with a straight face given the events in the first weeks of training camp.

Enemkpali's punch isn't the only thing that shows this schism between the message the league sends and the way teams are undercutting it. Suspected beach brawler Junior Galette was dropped by the Saints during an NFL investigation into a video, only to be snapped up by Washington soon after. Last week, a massive fight erupted during a scrimmage between Houston and Washington. A day after Jets defensive lineman Sheldon Richardson apologized for being suspended for the first four games of the season after a violation of the substance abuse policy, an arrest report emerged alleging Richardson drag-raced at 143 mph with a 12-year-old and a loaded gun in the car. He remains practicing with the team.

Teams have appropriated therapeutic terminology when addressing questions about adding questionable players. Bills defensive coordinator Dennis Thurman (who was in that role with the Jets last season) said in a radio interview that Ryan informed his staff that he was bringing in Enemkpali by saying the team would "wrap our arms around him." Cowboys executive vice president Charlotte Jones Anderson said when the team hired once-convicted domestic abuser Greg Hardy that "we don't believe in throwing people away."

It sounds great in a psychology textbook, but make no mistake, an NFL team's purpose is to win, not rehabilitate. Those players who don't have football skills don't get arms wrapped around them for long.

And now the NFL is faced with a choice: either let teams undermine the message the league is trying to send on a host of conduct issues or pick another battle when it comes to Enemkpali and the Bills. This won't win over fans who already feel the league has gotten "soft," but it's a confrontation the league can't shy away from if it hopes to keep the upper hand on player discipline.

For all the talk of workplace respect, Martin is now out of the league. As for Incognito, Miami cut him after all the information came out. This season, however, he'll play Sundays for the Buffalo Bills.