NFLPA president Eric Winston: 'Path we're on has hurt the game in a lot of ways'
CINCINNATI — The president of the NFL Players Association took notice of a New England Patriots executive's recent suggestion that it may be time for the league to rethink how it handles discipline to reduce negative attention on the NFL office and keep the public's focus on football.
"I'm glad they're coming around," Eric Winston, the veteran Cincinnati Bengals tackle who was elected union president last year, told USA TODAY Sports on Thursday night. "I'm glad they're starting to see what we've been seeing and what we've been saying."
In his weekly pregame radio interview last Saturday with 98.5 FM The Sports Hub in Boston, as transcribed by ESPN, Patriots president Jonathan Kraft said discipline "probably needs to be rethought for the modern era that we're in and the different things that are coming up that I don't think people anticipated and how the public wants to see them treated."
Kraft said he was speaking generally and not specifically on the Deflategate scandal. Kraft's father, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, has pointedly criticized the league's handling of the matter, which has cost the franchise a $1 million fine, two docked draft picks and potentially quarterback Tom Brady for the season's first four games. The NFL and NFLPA will be in federal court again Monday for another hearing as Brady contests Commissioner Roger Goodell's decision to uphold his suspension.
This all follows a tumultuous 2014 season marked by highly publicized off-field incidents involving Ray Rice, Greg Hardy and Adrian Peterson, who was back in federal court Wednesday as his own case continued with a hearing on a civil contempt motion filed by the union. Rice's indefinite suspension was vacated by former federal judge Barbara S. Jones, and Hardy still could sue after an appeals officer reduced his ban from 10 games to four.
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"I would think that every owner would look at this and say, this is detrimental to the game, that this path we're on has hurt the game in a lot of ways," Winston said.
The NFLPA has spent the past year saying Goodell is abusing his power and arguing for neutral arbitration over all disciplinary matters. But the league and its attorneys have repeatedly cited the commissioner's broad authority to issue discipline under Article 46 of the collective bargaining agreement, which players allowed him to keep in the last labor negotiations in 2011.
"That's my job. It's my responsibility," Goodell said at the NFL meeting earlier this month in suburban Chicago. "I take it seriously. The ownership knows that. We have rules in place to protect the integrity of the game and all 32 teams, and we enforce those."
Asked if he'd fight to keep that responsibility, Goodell said: "There's been no discussion of changing that. The ownership has no inclination."
Jonathan Kraft's remarks could signal a shift to that stance, though owners — with the notable exception of Robert Kraft, who said he "was wrong to put my faith in the league" after Goodell upheld Brady's suspension last month — have roundly expressed support publicly for the commissioner. Despite the off-field troubles, total revenue for the 2014 league year (as calculated for the salary cap) soared past $12.2 billion.
The union's gripes trace to the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal, in which Goodell's predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, who was appointed to hear appeals, vacated the suspensions of four players. U.S. District Judge David S. Doty, who in February vacated appeals officer Harold Henderson's decision to uphold Goodell's suspension of Peterson, took a jab at Goodell during Wednesday's hearing, saying he's "not sure the commissioner understands there is a CBA."
"I don't want to keep pointing fingers at the league office, but that's really what it is in the sense of running these rogue investigations that are clearly against the CBA," Winston said.
"An ex-commissioner has said so. Federal judges have said so. Arbitrators have said so. A lot of people can say, 'Oh, well that's just a partisan union hack.' But don't take my word for it. Take their word for it. Take federal judge David Doty recently questioning whether they know what the CBA says, because it's clear to everybody but them that they're not following it."
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