I don't remember how old I was when I watched my first football game; under the age of five, certainly. It was, throughout my youth, the activity that made sympathy with the male members of my family possible: three hours of peace on a weekend otherwise dominated by door-slamming fights with my dad; an easy topic of conversation at Christmas with my gruff, raspy-voiced grandfather.

Nor do I remember the moment when it became clear to me that my working knowledge of the rules of the sport could be used to impress men outside my family, could be used to gain entrance to their world.

I do remember sneaking away from a Sunday afternoon cast party for a winter holiday community theater revue; we had rented the back room at a pub-style restaurant, and the game was on in the front. I sat next to a boy a year or two older than me—the son of one of the adult cast members—who had also abandoned the group; I was twelve, maybe, and had a timid crush on him. We sat in silence until a pass, caught on the sideline, was ruled incomplete. "But both feet were in before they pushed him out of bounds!" I exclaimed. "Wow." He turned to look at me, a move so seductive and surprising I ducked my head, embarrassed. "You know a lot about football."

I did, and I do, and right now, I sort of wish I didn't. In July, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Ray Rice for two games after it emerged that he had knocked his then-fiancée, now-wife, Janay Palmer, now Janay Rice, unconscious in a casino elevator earlier this year. Goodell, who suspended Cleveland Browns wide receiver Josh Gordon for the entire 2014 season after he tested positive for marijuana a second time, was sharply criticized for being too lenient. But Goodell is an honorable man; last week, he apologized in a letter to team owners. He "didn't get it right," he admitted.

Few facts, in this case, are seemingly in dispute—it's clear that someone on the NFL's end is obfuscating the truth, at the very least. A law enforcement official confirmed to the AP that the tape of the assault, obtained by TMZ and released on Monday, was sent to league executives before Goodell announced Rice's punishment, though Goodell continues to deny that he personally saw it. The NFL has, belatedly, hired ex-FBI director Robert S. Mueller III to investigate its own handling of the case, and the process will be overseen by longtime Goodell cronies Art Rooney and John Mara. Congress has called on Goodell to explain himself. America demands answers.

But let's, just for a moment, forget about Ray Rice. Let's rewind to, say, New Year's, when we reveled in ignorance and Janay Rice, then Janay Palmer, had not yet—to our knowledge—been punched by the father of her child. Friends, Americans, fellow football fans, even then, Roger Goodell deserved to be fired: because NFL players are arrested for domestic violence at 55.4% of the national average, much higher than would be anticipated based on their income levels; because the 56 players have been arrested on domestic abuse charges since Goodell became commissioner in 2006 have been (Rice excepted) suspended for thirteen games total; because Ben Roethlisberger still plays for the Pittsburgh Steelers; because Clay Matthews still plays for the Green Bay Packers.

If NFL players were all nonviolent (off the field, of course) celibate heterosexuals, Roger Goodell would deserve to be fired. Because of CTE. Because he earned over $44 million in 2012, while the minimum wage for the players he oversees, who risk their lives weekly during a 16-game season that he keeps trying to extend, is $375,000.

I have loved football for more than two decades. I have loved it for the essential, insoluble contradiction at its heart: the fact that it is a game whose beauty and complexity are highlighted by and inextricably intertwined with its brutality. But there are other, no less essential insoluble contradictions I, increasingly, cannot abide: Roger Goodell's salary, versus his talk of "economic realities" and "tough choices" during negotiations with the players' union in 2011; the fact that 66 percent of players in the NFL are African-American, only five out of 32 starting quarterbacks are.

I have also loved football because knowing the game was like knowing a foreign language, one native to many human men I would otherwise have been unable to communicate with. This morning, sitting on the bus, I noticed the teenaged boy next to me texting a friend about his fantasy QB, Ryan Tannehill of the Miami Dolphins. I wondered what he thought about Ray Rice. I wondered if he thought about Janay Rice. I wondered what it was, exactly, that he was learning to say in this language I have been so proud to speak.

The problem, of course, isn't just Goodell. Yes, go ahead, fire him, absolutely; it might help. It might send a message. (From whom? To whom?) The problem isn't even the NFL. The problem is me, and you, and everyone we know who watches football. Because Goodell and the NFL executives who made the decision to suspend Ray Rice for two games after seeing a video in which he dragged Janay Rice unconscious from an elevator and only reversed themselves after the video in which he caused her to become unconscious by punching her in the head became public didn't make a mistake; they made a calculation. They chose potential negative publicity over potential financial loss. They chose Ray Rice's legs over Janay Rice's head. So far, they haven't suffered for that choice.

My plan here was to write about NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's firing—the necessity of—in the style of Marc Antony's speech at Caesar's funeral in Julius Caesar: Friends, Americans, fellow football fans. Lend me your eyes. I come not to praise Roger Goodell, but to call for his firing. But Marc Antony, of course, has come to praise Caesar; it's Brutus he's after.

This summer, my friend Gabe announced that he would not be rejoining the fantasy football league we both played in. He would not, in fact, be watching football at all. And while none of us donned togas and stabbed him, we did mock him. We did name our league "No Gabes Allowed." Not that we support domestic abusers; after all, we are honorable men (and women). Pretty witty ones too.

(Meanwhile, I'd rather not think about what analogies might be drawn between Caesar's body and the body of Janay Rice, unconscious on an elevator floor. In part because Caesar was an old white man who at least got to head up the Roman Empire before he was assassinated, while Janay Rice, was not, did not.)

The Shakespearian conceit is in part an attempt at distancing. Julius Caesar was written a long time ago, about something that happened even longer ago. Hence, distance. Distance from the elevator in New Jersey where Ray Rice knocked Janay Rice out with a punch to the head.

But I'm not in Elizabethan England or Imperial Rome or with a book in a chair. I'm a woman in the twenty-first century with a brain and a wifi connection, who got an email yesterday reminding her to lock in her fantasy football roster before the start of tonight's game. O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason. Or, maybe, Et tu, Brute?

Yes, me too.

Miranda Popkey is on the editorial staff of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The New Republic, The New York Observer, and The Morning News.

[Image by Jim Cooke]