How to fix the ailing, embarrassed, what-the-hell-did-they-manage-to-do-this-week NFL? It’s simple. Replace one Rice with another.

Ray Rice, of course, was suspended indefinitely after NFL officials, straining credulity, said they saw for the first time a video of Rice beating his then-fiancee, Janay Palmer (now Janay Rice) apparently unconscious, then dragging her, like a garbage bag full of old clothes, out of the elevator. In a particularly crude move, Rice seemed to take some concern for his alleged beloved’s modesty, pushing her legs together with his feet, the way a police officer might do at the scene of the murder of a prostitute. (Actually, the cop would probably show a little more respect.)

What ultimately happens to Ray Rice remains to be seen – after all, convicted dog torturer Michael Vick was initially suspended indefinitely from the league, then let back in by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Goodell is the same person who claims, stunningly, to have not really understood what Ray Rice did until he saw the video, even though it’s astonishing that the league, with its team of former law enforcement enforcers, did not acquire the tape before the celebrity news website TMZ did. It’s worse that Goodell seems not to understand what it means to beat the crap out of your fiancee until he actually saw it happen.

There’s a theme here, with the longer suspensions for drug violations and the suspension (but not, as would have bene more appropriate, a lifetime ban) of coaches who participated in the scheme to pay ”bounties” for the injury of opposing players. The NFL seems to see people as property. So a player damages his own self with drugs? That damages the NFL’s property. Naughty, naughty. But they have no problem shooting all kinds of drugs into players so they can play injured, permanent injuries or concussions be damned. And what was Janay? Just Rice’s property to manhandle and abuse as he saw fit? It’s only the bad PR that made Goodell move. Of course, now Goodell has another headache: Minnesota Viking Adrian Peterson, arrested for child abuse.

It’s time for a new NFL commissioner, and here’s a good candidate: Condoleezza Rice.

Yes, she’s controversial. Yes, she backed an Iraq War that is still damaging U.S. national security today, with the instability in Iraq giving rise to the so-called Islamic State. These are serious questions in foreign policy, but they have nothing to do with football. I have no doubt that Rice would be tough, merciless even, against players and coaches who behaved badly on or off the field. I also believe Rice would give proper attention to the life-threatening and mental-health threatening concussions players have suffered.

And she’s a woman, which in this case, is a real plus, not only for public relations, but for the business of the NFL (which seems to be its main concern). Ignore Rush Limbaugh when he frets hysterically about the “chickifyng” of the NFL. A woman can in many ways be a more powerful authority than a man. For most of us, after all, our mothers were our first authority figures. Ask inmates at a prison where there are male and female corrections officers, and they’ll tell you the female officers have a stronger hand, since there isn’t a battle of testosterone levels, and since the inmates know they’ll really get punished if they start a fight with a female CO. Male NFL commissioners can yell and scream and threaten suspensions, but all Condi Rice would have to say is, "I will turn this bus around!"

And women are football fans. Real football fans, not the cutesy, I-don’t-really-understand-this-terribly-complicated-game, it’s-too-hard-for-my-pretty-little-head-to-handle kind of fan. The league seems to get the fact that women like sports, but – much like a lot of political candidates out there – they have no idea how to deal with it. They assume women could only be fans (or vote, for that matter) through a man’s lens of how women are supposed to behave. This is how we ended up with ads for women’s fan wear – run in women’s magazines, remarkably – that offered for sale such items as tiny T-shirts with a team logo, worn with Daisy Duke short-shorts and heels. The women in these ads didn’t look like the football fans I know.

Having a female commissioner would go a long way in acknowledging that this is not a man’s pastime. It’s an American sport, and it attracts both male and female fans. Condoleezza Rice could help draw more female fans, and for all the right reasons.

Nor can we expect Rice to make herself the story if she were NFL commissioner. She was invited to give a commencement speech at Rutgers earlier this year, but there were student protests over her role on the Iraq War. Rice could have said, "too bad, I was invited, and you have to hear me speak, even if you don’t like what I have to say, or what I have advocated in the past." Instead, Rice graciously bowed out, saying:

Commencement should be a time of joyous celebration for the graduates and their families … Rutgers' invitation to me to speak has become a distraction for the university community at this very special time.

