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It is extremely difficult to grasp why the NFL issues certain punishments. When Josh Brown, someone who admittedly committed acts of domestic violence, is suspended one game and Tom Brady, someone who may have been generally aware of less air being in footballs, is suspended four games, well, people are understandably confused and upset.

In an interview with Richard Conway of BBC Sport ahead of Sunday's Rams-Giants game in London, Roger Goodell was asked about the disparity between the punishments and suggested that the "public's misunderstanding" was to blame.

Here is the full exchange of the question:

Conway: The criticism that comes back to you is that people see punishments for touchdown celebrations but then only one game for a domestic violence incident. It must be very difficult to balance those things and explain them?

Goodell: They are. I understand the public's misunderstanding of those things and how that can be difficult for them to understand how we get to those positions. But those are things that we have to do. I think it's a lot deeper and a lot more complicated than it appears but it gets a lot of focus.

There are obviously huge differences between the touchdown celebrations and domestic violence, on a punishment level. There is a schedule that the NFL uses to mete out these fines. If you celebrate and break the rules you can be fined based on the schedule. There is no debate about whether someone celebrated. It was filmed.

The off-field behavior is difficult because the entirety of the information isn't always available to the NFL. That was Goodell's primary talking point in his discussion with Conway:

Goodell: The issue that you want is ... that's why we'd like to speak to the people involved whether it's the victim or the people involved that may have information, including law enforcement. But we understand that in certain cases they may not be permitted to talk to us or want to talk to us and we don't make judgments on people where they do that. What we want to do is get the facts and when we get the facts, we're going to aggressively pursue that, and we'll apply our policy.

But in terms of domestic violence, there is a clear policy for suspending a player six games. This was created following the Ray Rice situation in 2014, in order to improve the NFL's stance on the matter.

The problem is that everyone else, including multiple media outlets, were able to secure information about Brown's case and about Brown's history, including documents where Brown admitted to committing acts of abuse against his ex-wife, Molly Brown.

The NFL claims it couldn't obtain these documents, yet the King County sheriff disputes the notion that the NFL was diligent in seeking the information. In fact, the sheriff said he would have cautioned the NFL to take it slow in the investigation.

"Since it was a hot button item and since it's the NFL, we probably would have told them orally a little bit more about we had," sheriff John Urquhart said. "We would have told [the NFL investigator], or I would have told him, 'Be careful, NFL. Don't rush into this. This case is blossoming way more than what happened on May 22 of 2015. We are getting more information.'

"We wouldn't have gotten into specifics, but we would have cautioned the NFL to be careful with what they were going to do."

So you have a situation where Goodell thinks the fans are at fault for failing to understand the difference between why an off-field incident isn't treated as aggressively as on-field issues. And yet fans look at what's happened with these investigations, and they can't help but wonder just how diligent the process for looking into domestic violence really is.

So often it feels to many like reactionary lip service than it does the NFL doing its full duty to try and find out everything about a particular case.