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I've never been happier to admit I was wrong. Yesterday, the Redskins and Cowboys dropped their appeals of the NFL's salary cap penalties after being ruled against by rubber-stamp arbitrator Stephen Burbank, and I thought that was the end of it. The bad guys won. But the NFLPA had been saving its secret weapon for just this day. This morning, the players' union filed a lawsuit against the NFL, claiming the league owners had conspired to set a secret $123 million salary cap in 2010, a final "uncapped" year before the CBA expired. More »
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When we last left the Ginger Hammer, he was sending Gregg Williams to the bad corner and proving, once and for all, that violence has no place in football. And today, Roger Goodell has yet taken yet another step in showing the world that HE MEANS GINGER BUSINESS when it comes to player safety. Pending NFLPA approval, the league will now mandate that all players wear leg and thigh pads, something Goodell has long been pushing for. Back in January 2011, he got one of his meat puppets, Chris Mortensen, to frame the initiative precisely as he wanted it phrased: More »
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There's no way that any sensible, thinking person who's not an NFL owner can honestly feel that the league acted justly in penalizing the Cowboys and the Redskins for spending their money and structuring their contracts the way they did during the uncapped 2010 season. But it doesn't matter, because the NFL plays by its own rules and no one else's, and that's the lesson for today. More »
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Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma was suspended one full season for his role in the Saints' bounty scandal, and immediately appealed. Beyond that, the NFLPA argued before independent arbitrator Shyam Das (we've heard his name before) that Roger Goodell didn't have the authority to punish players. More »
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The word came down not so long ago from Roger Goodell's mountaintop: Saints middle linebacker Jonathan Vilma will sit out the whole season, and end Will Smith misses four games. Ex-Saint tackle Anthony Hargrove, now with the Packers, gets eight games, and Scott Fujita, now on the Browns, gets three. According to the NFL's press release, Vilma offered $10,000 bounties for anyone who knocked out either Kurt Warner or Brett Favre in the 2010 NFL playoffs, while Hargrove participated in the pool and later obstructed the NFL's investigation. Fujita and Smith pledged bundles of money to the pool, the NFL says. More »
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NFL commissioner and disciplinary hardass Roger Goodell has ushered in the Draft Day Hug Era, eschewing the usual handshake photo-ops in favor of giving in to those players who want to give him the bro treatment. Goodell has embraced the embrace to such an extent that it's become the norm. Every player in attendance who heard his name called Thursday evening in New York wrapped the commish in his enormous arms. More »
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Let's go on a magical trip to the NFL's fantasy world, where the penalties on the Redskins and Cowboys have anything to do with football. Indulge them when they tell you that two teams spending more than a nonexistent salary cap in the uncapped 2010 season constituted "an unacceptable risk to future competitive balance." Ignore the collusion of the owners and the kowtowing of the NFLPA, and pretend, just for a moment, that the NFL is more concerned with parity than with keeping salaries down across the board. More »
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I'm glad, gosh darn it, that NFL owners voted 29-0 to enforce salary cap penalties against the Redskins and Cowboys for spending a lot of money in the uncapped 2010 season. It's a good thing that the league is coming down hard, $36 million for DC and $10 million for Dallas, on two of the most powerful and high-spending owners in the league for doing absolutely nothing wrong. More »
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Roger Goodell suspended Saints head coach Sean Payton for the entire 2012 season today. Of course he did. After all, what better way to get sportswriter after sportswriter to bow down in AWE of your far-reaching authority than to hand down a wildly severe punishment to someone who dares defy the commissioner's office? Look at all these fucking sheep falling in line. More »
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The NFL was promising to swiftly decide the punishment for the Saints' bounty program, and they were not lying—despite the NFLPA's plea to conduct its own investigation first. Today the league ruled, and the penalties are not crippling, but they are significant. As reported near-simultaneously by Adam Schefter and Pro Football Talk: More »
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The NFL is a dictatorship masquerading as a benevolent dictatorship. In redistributing $46 million in salary cap space from the Redskins and Cowboys to the rest of the league, the NFL is enforcing laws that don't exist, playing Robin Hood with blackmail, and generally continuing a tradition of arbitrary, paternalistic horseshit that in a just world would have antitrust lawyers salivating. More »
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You know that old "nice guys finish last" canard? Totally a canard! More »
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This is an offseason edition of the NFL roundtable, a partnership between Deadspin and Slate. For more roundtable goodness, go back and read every entry from the 2011 season, from the preseason to the Super Bowl. More »
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Today, Gregg Williams has his heart weighed by Anubis. Williams is in New York to meet with Roger Goodell in the NFL's impenetrable Park Avenue fortress, but Goodell isn't alone. He's accompanied by Jeff Miller and Joe Hummel, the heads of the NFL's investigative and security teams, and I don't know what those gentlemen look like, but I'm pretty sure they're hulking men in trenchcoats and fedoras who loom at Goodell's flank, and know 37 ways to break a human kneecap. Even more intimidating, the NFL's top lawyer Jeff Pash will be there, recording every denial or self-incrimination. More »
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I'd like to thank Gregg Williams for inspiring the single stupidest blog post headline of the year, from Frank Bruni of The New York Times. You can tell a sports scandal has reached its wear-out phase if Bruni feels compelled to chime in on it. Anyway, here's the headline: More »
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In a not-so-stunning reversal of policy, Roger Goodell will keep his sticky fingers out of the wallets of NFL Players who are found tweeting during game action tonight. The NFL will actually allow players to tweet from the sidelines during the Pro Bowl and even encourage players to update Facebook. Maybe even Linkedin, depending on their performance. NFL spokesman, Brian McCarthy, said the move is a blatant ratings grab at the expense of the sanctity of The Shield because no one cares about the Pro Bowl. Or something. More »
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Roger Goodell Is Going To Be A Big Baby About This Lockout Until The Very End More »
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We're doing a season-long NFL roundtable with our friends at Slate. Check back here each week as a rotating cast of football watchers discusses the weekend's key plays, coaching decisions, and traumatic brain injuries. More »
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Steelers and Ravens have few things in common other than a strong desire to hit each other very hard, and not have to pay out of pocket to do so. These can be conflicting desires in a league that glorifies AFC North smashmouth football, yet doles out fines to show they're concerned about player safety. So Ray Lewis is out $20,000 for concussing Hines Ward, and Ryan Clark owes $40,000 for what looked like a pretty clean hit on Ed Dickson. More »
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It's been so long since the last asinine NFL fine! But today, Goodell's goons went vigilante on spousal communication and fined Troy Polamalu for calling his wife to let her know he was not bleeding from his ears (yet): More »
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Here's Goodell, just oozing sanctimony: "In my judgment, allowing players to secure their own ineligibility for college play in order to avoid previously determined disciplinary consequences for admitted conduct reflects poorly not on college football—which acted to discipline the transgressor—but on the NFL, by making it into a sanctuary where a player cannot only avoid the consequences of his conduct, but be paid for doing so." [NFL Communications] More »
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We're doing a season-long NFL roundtable with our friends at Slate. Check back here each week as a rotating cast of football watchers discusses the weekend's key plays, coaching decisions, and traumatic brain injuries. More »
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Jim Tressel followed in the footsteps of his protégé Terrelle Pryor by jumping to the NFL, and he's going to suffer silently on the sidelines along with him. Yesterday the Colts announced Tressel will sit out the first six weeks, a penalty that was self-imposed because the Commissioner's office was unusually quiet. Today someone finally asked Roger Goodell about it, and he thinks the Colts made the right decision: More »
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Has there ever been a string of punishments/non-punishments more baffling than Roger Goodell's recent run? Lacking a clear directive but wielding the personal-conduct policy like Zeus's discriminate lightning bolts, no one plays unless the Commish decides he's "ready," and the Commish doesn't have to justify himself to you. By choosing not to suspend Aqib Talib or Kenny Britt for actual crimes, it looked like he was admitting his jurisdiction was limited by the lockout. But by "suspending" Terrelle Pryor, he was emphasizing that his jurisdiction was not limited by the actual boundaries of the NFL. More »
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The NFL announced today it will essentially suspend Terrelle Pryor, a player who isn't in the NFL, for violating rules that aren't the NFL's. This is really incredible, and the most incredible part is that what should happen in a sane and just world—Pryor hires a very good attorney who buries the NFL, and for that matter the NCAA, in a hail of torts—most likely won't. I'm guessing the NFL would argue that the league's power to punish players for breaking the rules of the NCAA, a totally separate organization, falls somewhere under the NFL's non-statutory labor exemption, which is the gift owners received because American jurisprudence couldn't give them Green Lantern's power ring. The NFL would argue that ritual cannibalism falls under the non-statutory labor exemption, and they'd win that case, too. More »
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Roger Goodell said some bullshit yesterday that, I swear, the Serious Football Media would've tsk-tsked as "counterproductive rhetoric" had anything so disingenuous come out of De Smith's mouth. Here's what the commisioner told Tampa Bay season ticketholders in a conference call: More »
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De Smith says the NFL is the "first league in the history of sports that has ever sued to not play their game," which, like a lot of slogans, isn't entirely accurate (the NFL hasn't sued), even if it accurately conveys the sense that the NFL is taking great pains to get its lockout. Mike Florio has some thoughts about this, and his analysis leads me to wonder: Would Florio or Gunga Peter or any of the rest of the Serious Football Media ever write anything so blithely, head-pattingly condescending as this about Roger Goodell's rhetoric? More »
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Here's a tidy summation of how we've managed to get to where we are with the NFL lockout. A few years ago, the players and owners agreed to a new CBA, with only Ralph Wilson and Mike Brown voting against the agreement, in Wilson's case because he's old and easily confused by things. More »
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Both Cam Newton, your #1 pick, and Goodell got heartily booed by the New York crowd. And then The Commish segued into a moment of silence for the tornados in the south. Well played, Rog. More »
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Yesterday we brought you the gripping tales of players showing up to training facilities, only to find nothing going on and heading home. But at least one team grew a pair for a few hours: the Giants not only let DT Chris Canty into the complex to work in the weight room, but he met with Tom Coughlin and other coaches. Then the NFL said: that's enough of everyone being mature. More »
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Roger Goodell recently took to the pulpit to debunk the popularly held notion that an NFL player's career lasts 3.5 years. The truth, Roger says, is that if you make an opening day roster as a rookie, your career will last almost six years; if you get drafted in the first round, it's nine years; and if you make a Pro Bowl, your career will last nearly 12 years. More »
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This is not going to make America's $1 Commissioner very happy: Derrick Mason, Ravens wide receiver and an NFL vet so tenured that he debuted with the Tennessee Oilers, thinks Roger Goodell is a joke. More »
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An anonymous tipster sends along this report: More »
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Your morning roundup for March 18, the day the world braces for the biggest, brightest full moon in a while. More »
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Your morning roundup for March 16, the day we lost frequent Em and Dre collaborator Nate Dogg. More »
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Sure, the NFL lockout may or may not survive a players' injunction seeking to prevent ownership from doing so. Little matter. Little surprise. But today, Commissioner Roger Goodell slashed his salary from $10 million annually with bonuses to $1. Just like he had promised should a lockout be imposed. More »
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Before the initial 24-hour extension was up, the NFL and the NFLPA mutually agreed on a seven-day deadline extension. The negotiations will now end next Friday, March 11 at 5 p.m. President Barack Obama remains totally over it. [EPSN] More »
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SI's Jim Trotter reports that the League has requested a deadline extension of "a week or two" past Friday's midnight deadline and is now awaiting a response from the Players Association. [SI.com] More »
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Because no one reads the newspaper, and SportsCenter's anchors are too perky for this early in the morning, Deadspin combs the best of the broadsheets and internets to bring you everything you need to know to start your day. More »
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What a buzzkill. On the eve of the playoffs, just when fans' excitement in the sport is cresting, Roger Goodell tripped on his shoestrings again, puked all over his keyboard, and then hit "send." More »
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