Brennan: 49ers had no choice but to cut Ray McDonald

As an NFL regular season dominated by domestic violence approaches its conclusion, it is fitting that San Francisco defensive end Ray McDonald is finally gone from the 49ers, and, presumably, the National Football League.

A league that struggled to find its voice on the important issue of domestic violence during a tumultuous autumn has righted itself in December, producing a result that was not only lightning quick, but also entirely proper.

McDonald slipped through the cracks once this season, but couldn't do it a second time.

In August, it was an arrest on suspicion of domestic violence, though prosecutors decided last month not to file charges.

This week, it was being identified as a suspect in a sexual assault investigation.

All things 49ers: Latest San Francisco 49ers news, schedule, roster, stats, injury updates and more.

Had the NFL's new personal conduct policy, announced just last week, been in place over the summer, McDonald conceivably wouldn't have played all fall.

But the policy wasn't there, so the 49ers controversially allowed McDonald to play on -- until Wednesday, when 49ers general manager Trent Baalke cited "a pattern of poor decision making," leaving the team "with no other choice" than to cut McDonald once and for all.

Ironically, it wasn't the much-discussed personal conduct policy that led to McDonald's departure. It was the NFL's new culture of awareness about domestic violence, which is just about as close to zero tolerance as any league or sports entity, nationally or internationally, has ever come.

The NFL is yet to be heard on McDonald's latest serious run-in with the law, but it almost certainly will be.

"We are looking into it," league spokesman Greg Aiello said.

The league will undertake its own investigation by NFL Security and/or independent parties as outlined in the new personal conduct policy. Discipline in cases such as McDonald's can be levied even if he is found not guilty of a crime, according to the new policy.

Police in the Bay Area were alerted Tuesday to a possible victim of a sexual assault, and detectives from the San Jose police sexual assaults and investigation unit later executed a search warrant on McDonald's home.

Not long after news of the search warrant surfaced, the 49ers cut McDonald. Their action in many ways paralleled the punishment of running back Ray Rice just over three months ago. Several hours after the infamous elevator video of Rice's attack on his future wife surfaced on Sept. 8, the Baltimore Ravens released him. Rice also was suspended indefinitely by the NFL, a punishment that was overturned last month in arbitration.

Nonetheless, no team has picked him up, at least in part because of the public relations backlash his presence would undoubtedly trigger.

Even though McDonald's banishment was as swift Wednesday as Rice's was in September, the significant difference was that this time, there was no video. NFL teams apparently don't need that anymore. Nor do we as a culture. The past three months have provided all of us – the NFL, other sports leagues and society at large -- with a tutorial on domestic violence and assault that shouldn't have been necessary, but obviously was. McDonald's departure is part of that lesson learned.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to watch how often other NFL teams – and other leagues and sports organizations that are far behind the NFL in developing their domestic violence policies – act unilaterally as the 49ers did to rid themselves of McDonald. The nation's tolerance for abusers clearly has hit rock bottom, and future decisions are likely to be a manifestation of that lack of patience.

Nonetheless, a cynic might say that were the 49ers not already eliminated from the playoffs, and were McDonald not a 30-year-old in a younger man's game, this sexual assault investigation might have been overlooked – at least until the season was over.

That has the sound of an argument from another era, however. McDonald's dismissal from the 49ers is the perfect coda to this season of all NFL seasons, where second chances are going to become much harder to come by.