2014By Matt Yoder on

The NFL has sure had their fair share of crisis-mode press conferences in the last week.  Baltimore Ravens took their turn under the intense spotlight with owner Steve Bisciotti holding what amounted to an open forum with the media to combat the pipebomb dropped by ESPN’s Outside the Lines.

Like Roger Goodell’s press conference before him, the response to Bisciotti was not so kind.  Although he did seem more like an emotional, functioning human being, there were also many moments that left onlookers angry and befuddled.

Bisciotti was truly all over the place, even talking about his franchise wanting to be on the side of the victim in domestic violence situations.  Keep in mind this is the same franchise that promoted Janay Rice taking responsibility for getting knocked unconscious and wrote the ill-fated PR fluff piece “I Like Ray Rice,” which is still on the Ravens website, by the way.

Even after Bisciotti’s press conference, in which he threw everyone but himself and his team under every bus in Baltimore, the franchise has no sense of trust.   Even after releasing a lengthy memo going point by point through the OTL bombshell report, there’s not a lot of faith in the Ravens organization that someone in power there is telling the full truth.

Bisciotti was critical of ESPN throughout the press conference, calling their story “manufactured” and generally dismissing the reporting as people close to Ray Rice having an agenda to get back at the Ravens and get Rice his job back.

Unsurprisingly, after the Ravens came out and tried to play defense publicly against ESPN and OTL, the network had reporter Don Van Natta on the air to stand by his reporting.  They also made a PR push on Twitter to double-down on that message.

Van Natta had this interview with Bob Ley after the Bisciotti presser where he didn’t hold back against Bisciotti saying that his claims about his reporting were simply “not true”…

As ESPN made abundantly clear yesterday, Van Natta is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter who spent a number of years at the New York Times.  As far as ESPN’s journalism outfit goes, he is their ace in the hole.  Van Natta is one of the leading investigative reporters of our generation – he ain’t making stuff up, folks.

That OTL piece wasn’t flimsily put together – Van Natta and co-author Kevin Van Valkenburg talked to 20 sources over 11 days to put the timeline together.

You can rightfully have plenty of questions towards ESPN and their journalistic practices (Lord knows we have over the years), but from the outside the case built by OTL looks solid.  As Patrick Hruby points out, if the all of the allegations and reporting in the pipebomb article were outright lies, wouldn’t the Ravens be suing ESPN instead of merely holding a press conference?

The Ravens are trying to fight this battle with optics instead of the truth.  They’ve been leading from behind since the start of this and trying to play catch-up to whatever public opinion might be.  Their behavior throughout this saga, since well before the release of the TMZ video, has simply been disgraceful.

The team can do whatever they can to try to discredit Outside the Lines, ESPN, and Van Natta, but the reporters appear to be holding all the cards in this case.  And no amount of “he said, she said” is going to take the pressure off of the Ravens and the NFL until someone finally gets to the truth.  As OTL and other investigative units continue to dig into this story, expect this report to only be the beginning.

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