Over my two (going on three) years writing this column, I have discussed many social issues relating to sports. From domestic abuse to blatant sexism, the sports world is not perfect. Yet, despite this, America still gathers faithfully around the television to watch sports.

We all know that athletes are often the perpetrators of crimes, yet the NFL still makes $13 billion a year according to Forbes.

Let’s crunch some numbers:

Each year, as this paper’s sports columnist, I write about 7,000 words. I would have to write this column for 1,800 years to write 13 billion words. Each year, The NFL makes the dollar amount of the words in 162,000 of my sports columns.

But I digress. My goal is to try to find who to blame for allowing athletic regulating bodies to make billions while employing people who commit domestic abuse. Imagine the scandal if a top employee at Google beat his wife!

Now that I’ve established a focus, I think I can narrow my search for blame down to three subgroups: players, corporate personnel and fans. Let’s take a look at each.

Let’s start with the players. The ones who get down and dirty… both on the field and off.

According to the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes (NCAVA), “In 1995, while only 8.5 percent of the general population was charged with assault, 36.8 percent of athletes were charged with assault.”

Although, I understand that in a life surrounded by violence, it can be difficult to separate work from reality. But I don’t think this is an excuse for the data listed above.

Let’s take kindergarten teachers as an example. They are surrounded by small children all day and in order to quiet the children down, they offer incentives for good behavior. My teacher used stickers. So now imagine you’re sitting at Noodles one day for lunch and your friend, who is a preschool teacher, gives you a gold star sticker for “sitting nicely.” That’d be ridiculous right?

In our society, there are standards set up to differentiate our behavior at work and in our life. Just because your job requires one type to behavior doesn’t mean you get to blur the lines and allow that behavior to permeate your life.

I think we can agree that the players blurring lines between work and reality is one issue with the sports world. However, let’s examine the legal side of this.

The NCAVA reports that the general population has a conviction rate of 80 percent while the conviction rate for athletes is 38 percent.

This is just plain wrong and I think that the corporate personnel in the sports industry are to blame. You see, they are in a unique position. As the PR people for athletes, they have the job of presenting athletes to the public. A couple weeks ago, I talked with Curt Cavin, the vice president of communications at INDYCAR. Cavin told us that he wants the public to like his athletes because when the public likes an athlete, they will pay money to see them. As a result, corporate personnel are pressured to cover up legal and ethical issues with their athletes for the sake of their job.

While I’d love to blame others for sports’ wrongdoings, we cannot ignore ourselves. Because yes, while we can’t be sitting there telling Ray Rice to stop hitting his wife and Jennifer Capriati to not take drugs, we control these athlete’s exposure. If the general public decided that it wasn’t okay for athletes to be above the law, they would not go to games, they would not buy these athletes’ books, they would not buy their apparel.

However, instead of taking a stand for what’s right, we just plug our nose and continue to give terrible people money.

After examining all three groups of people (the athletes themselves, the corporate personnel and the fans), it is time to decide whose fault is it for the corruption in sports? Unfortunately, I think everyone is to blame. The athletes make their bad decisions, the corporate personnel cover it up and the fans continue to provide money.

We are stuck in a tricky situation with athletic corruption. As much as I wish I could offer a compelling call to action as to how to fix this, I can’t. All I can provide is some food for thought and hopefully start a conversation on a topic that is all too often swept under the rug.