In an effort to promote the NFL game between the New York Giants and Washington that will air on NBC on Thanksgiving, the network aired this commercial:

As a person in the world in 2017, there are many things about Lawrence Taylor that you need to know. The first is that he was arrested in May of 2010 and charged with the solicitation and rape of a 16-year-old runaway who was brought to his hotel room against her will. The age of consent in the state of New York is 17.

According to the police report at the time, the girl known as “C.F.” in court had been provided a place to stay by Rasheed Davis, who served 14 years in prison for first-degree manslaughter before getting paroled in 2008. The report says that when she refused, Davis punched and kicked her and then Taylor sexually assaulted her.

The second thing you should know about Taylor is that he admitted to having sex with the girl and took a plea deal to the lesser misdemeanor charges of sexual misconduct and patronizing a prostitute in order to escape the ramifications of being found guilty to the far more serious charge of rape of a minor. He was inexplicably sentenced to six years probation.

The third thing you should know is that prior to being found guilty of sexual misconduct, which resulted in him having to register as a Level 1 sex offender, Taylor had been arrested twice for buying crack, once for failing to pay child support, once for leaving the scene of an accident and had also pleaded guilty to charges of tax fraud.

The fourth thing you should know is that since being found guilty for sexual misconduct with a 16-year-old minor, he has been arrested for DUI. In September of 2016, Taylor crashed into a stopped police car on the Florida Turnpike and failed a breathalyzer. He was sentenced to 12 months probation, had his license revoked for nine months, was ordered to perform 75 hours of community service and attend DUI school.

The fifth thing you should know is that he abused drugs and alcohol throughout his notorious career in the NFL and had been arrested a handful of times before he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1999.

Way down on the list of important and relevant facts about Taylor in 2017, a year responsible for ushering in a reckoning of sorts for famous and powerful sexual predators, is the fact that he was once a great New York Giants player who accidentally broke Joe Theismann’s leg – effectively ending the 1983 MVP’s career. It is a piece of American sports history that is so far in the past, and so utterly irrelevant in today’s cultural landscape, that NBC’s insistence that they revisit it almost feels like they’re daring people to be outraged.

Now there’s certainly no need to scrub Taylor from the archives of the NFL, nor is it unacceptable to speak about him as a football player when the context is appropriate. However the wholly unnecessary decision to have him star in a fun-loving promotion for the league’s Thanksgiving games is ignorant at best — and outright antagonistic at worst.