Vikings blow the call on Peterson

So the wagons have been circled at Winter Park, and the Minnesota Vikings will have their star running back Sunday in New Orleans. Go team!

The Vikings could have made an important statement about acceptable behavior — like the kind promised when the team's owners released their 77-page "Code of Conduct" in 2005. Instead, the team did what most close observers of the National Football League likely expected, revealing once again where its priorities lie.

Peterson will play just a week after being indicted on a felony charge of injuring a child — because he's the face of the franchise, and a terrific running back whose presence gives his team the best chance of winning.

"This is a difficult path to navigate," Vikings General Manager Rick Spielman said at a Monday news conference. But we all know that doing the right thing in business is not that difficult if the core values of an organization — and those of the people who run it — are clear.

By reinstating Peterson until the "legal process plays out," Spielman and team owners Zygi and Mark Wilf are telling us that winning matters more than any corporate code of conduct or community leadership role the team might hope to play. This from Minnesota's partner in the public-private stadium project. It's also the same team that leads the NFL in player arrests — 44 — since 2000, according to the New York Times.

Of course, in a legal sense, Peterson is presumed innocent. But he has not denied that he whipped his 4-year-old son with a switch, causing injuries to his legs, buttocks, back and scrotum. And what triggered that punishment from the 217-pound professional athlete? Apparently the boy and another child had argued about a video game.

The defense seems to be that Peterson suffered similar abuse as a child in east Texas. In fact, we learned during the wagon-circling on Monday, some of his teammates did as well. Fullback Jerome Felton recalled, "I'm from the South, so I probably got it a little worse than that. I feel like I'm a better person for it. My mother cared for me a lot."

Prosecutors in Texas have a different view. "Obviously, parents are entitled to discipline their children as they see fit, except for when that discipline exceeds what the community would say is reasonable," Montgomery County Assistant District Attorney Phil Grant said last weekend.

Spielman said the decision to reinstate Peterson after a one-game suspension was made by the Vikings organization, not the NFL. The league, fresh off its bungled handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, is reviewing whether Peterson violated its personal conduct policy.

Those all-too-frequently-violated guidelines say the league can discipline players for "conduct that imposes inherent danger to the safety and well-being" of another individual.

Unlike the Rice case, we don't have video evidence of Peterson hitting his son with a tree branch. We have, however, seen purported photos of the boy's injuries — bloody marks and bruises that should not be considered "reasonable" in any community.