NFL's Roy Miller retires, blames wife for domestic violence controversy
Roy Miller was just hit with a six-game suspension under the NFL’s domestic violence policy.
The suspension comes on top of Miller’s having been released by the Kansas City Chiefs last November after he was arrested on domestic battery charges in Jacksonville. Any team that signed him would have been without his services for those first six games.
And rather than exist in free agent limbo, Miller has decided to simply retire.
All of this is fairly old hat in the modern pro football landscape; players get in trouble, the league drops the discipline bomb, and unless they’re a superstar player (and sometimes even then), their team decides to drop them like a hot potato.
The unique wrinkle in this one is that Miller is blaming his ex-wife — the woman police were able to determine with sufficient evidence to get the district attorney involved had been beaten by her husband — for his professional plight.
On Instagram, Miller wrote, “My ex is trying everything she can to ruin any opportunity for me to work for my kids.”
If escaping an abusive husband and letting the police step in to keep him from coming back and further terrorizing his wife and children is what Miller means by “ruining any opportunity to work,” then sure, we’ll go with that.
In point of fact, this is a truly beyond-the-pale deflection of blame even by professional athlete standards.
Miller continued to invoke the Roman historian Tacitus’ maxim that “Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.”
“This has caused me much pain,” Miller wrote. “Had some interest [from] teams but until the divorce goes through I can’t even contemplate putting a team through the drama.
“The lies not only hurt my chances of working but my children’s opportunities to live normal lives. I have lived my life to try (to) be … respectable and honorable, not only to my family but my communities. I have made mistakes but I am not who this person is playing me out to be. My only intention from this point forward is to try and give my children the best chance at normalcy.”
And the capper, the comment so absurd that Mel Brooks, if you showed it to him after he’d completed the lyrics to “Springtime for Hitler,” would tell you is ridiculous, was one for the ages.
“I am literally in tears as I write this.”
In the words of Dave Barry, “I am not making this up.”
According to TMZ, Miller’s estranged wife Nicole — who is not a large woman unlike her husband who is 6-foot-2 and weighs 310 pounds — filed for an emergency restraining order in June after she said Miller chased her into her SUV and ripped off the door handle in a futile attempt to force entry into the vehicle. She also alleges that her husband is a violent alcoholic.
But from where Roy Miller is sitting, it’s all her fault that no NFL team wants him and Roger Goodell suspended him for six games.
The man is a menace to society, and if the allegations against him prove true, the only way he should ever play football again is if the guards and the inmates at whatever prison he gets sent to decide to re-enact the film “The Longest Yard.”
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