Refusing to referee games of one team, but still continuing to collect a check is the classic example of having your cake and eating it too. The NFL is an organization made up of its teams. I would have had more respect if he said ‘I’m leaving the NFL – and the check they provide me – because I have an issue with the light stance they take on the abuse of women.’ Or, ‘I’m leaving because I have an issue with the Breast Cancer Awareness activities and how that’s effectively a filter of cash for the NFL itself’ or ‘I’m leaving because of the way in which the NFL has skirted the issue of CTE and chronic brain injury with former players’. He gets is check from the same organization that supports these players, but actively celebrates them. Let’s add another angle – Carey apparently has issues with the NAME of a team, but has no moral outrage in officiating games played by a) drug abusers, b) felons, c) woman beaters, d) vehicular manslaughter guys and e) missing white suit dual murder guys. The NFL was able to handle the Carey situation quietly, but this is a growing problem for the league: There’s a substantial portion of the population that opposes the Washington team’s name, and that includes people who work within the NFL. 'Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity' earned four stars from me, and the commendation that it was interesting, if at that point a bit vague on the particulars, and. “And if you’re respectful of all human beings, you have to decide what you’re going to do and why you’re going to do it.” Mike Carey and Peter Gross continue with their terrific new Vertigo title, 'The Unwritten', in this second volume collecting issues 6 to 12 (rather larger than the first volume). “Human beings take social stances,” he said. “It just became clear to me that to be in the middle of the field, where something disrespectful is happening, was probably not the best thing for me,” Carey said.Īlthough Carey didn’t want to make a big public show of his opposition to the Washington team’s name, he did say that he didn’t feel right about being a part of games that featured a team whose name is a racial slur. “It happened sometime after I refereed their playoff game in 2006, I think.”Ĭarey, who was the first African-American to referee a Super Bowl, said that he decided he had had enough after working that playoff game in January of 2006. “The league respectfully honored my request not to officiate Washington,” Carey told the Washington Post.
Mike Carey, long one of the NFL’s best referees and now a TV analyst, has revealed something that hadn’t previously been disclosed: Over the last several years of his career, he declined to work Redskins games because he was offended by the team’s name.