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Power-Hungry NFL All Wrong to Demand Players Talk About Recanted Accusations
- Updated: August 17, 2016
What you’re about to read isn’t science fiction. It’s not an alternate universe, football’s equivalent of The Man in the High Castle. It’s something that could now actually happen…
It’s early in the season and training camps are just beginning. In one city, a man decides he wants to wreck the life of a star player on a team he hates.
He contacts a local television station. The man tells the station that he provided the starting quarterback with a variety of PEDs, including anabolic steroids.
The man has no proof—no paper trail, no e-mails, no video. But his story is convincing. The local station goes to the quarterback for his side and the quarterback says it’s not true. Never heard of the guy. Never used PEDs. The station decides to air the interview.
The story is picked up on blogs and trends on Twitter. The union issues a denial on behalf of the quarterback.
The man later alters his story and says he didn’t mean what he said. But it’s too late. The NFL has opened an investigation. It wants to talk to the quarterback. The union says no. You have no proof. The NFL insists. The player insists that the NFL go jump off a bridge.
So the NFL says, Talk or we’ll suspend you. Doesn’t matter that there’s no proof or that the original accuser recanted. Talk or don’t play.
You don’t think this can happen? Well, actually, it basically just did.
The NFL’s desire to be all powerful, to have inexorable and unreasonable domain over its players, has in fact left those players, every one of them, open to blackmail.
This tale gets complicated and you can read about many of those intricacies in an excellent story by SI’s Michael McCann. Yet, while there are many pieces to this puzzle, part of this story remains startlingly clear. My belief, and the belief of many players, is that the NFL is abusing its power.
First, remember the backstory. In December, Al Jazeera reported that a worker at an anti-aging clinic in Indianapolis, while being secretly recorded, said Peyton Manning’s wife, Ashley, received shipments of human growth hormone. Peyton was with the Indianapolis Colts at the time the alleged shipments happened. Also mentioned in the report were other NFL players including James Harrison, Mike Neal, Clay Matthews and Julius Peppers.
That worker, Charles Sly, later recanted his statements.
So this is a good place to pause and reflect. There is no real proof that the players did anything wrong other than the statement/non-statement of Sly.
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My guess: Sly was probably telling some version of the truth but his word—his recanted word—still isn’t proof.
In fact, the NFL’s own investigation showed …
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