Why hasn’t Josh Gordon been suspended yet?

No one has ever accused the NFL of being airtight when it comes to being able to hand out discipline, but the way the league has handled Cleveland Browns wide receiver Josh Gordon’s upcoming suspension has been perhaps the biggest head-scratcher of all.

Everyone knows that Gordon is going to be suspended, the only question has been for how long. As a repeat violator of the league’s substance abuse policy, the easy answer should be that Gordon will be gone for the entire season. However, thanks to some minuscule discrepancies –  but discrepancies nonetheless – in his drug tests and a second-hand smoke defense, there has been a snowballing belief that the suspension could be reduced.

And with each passing day, the situation gets murkier. Every late Friday afternoon (since that’s when the NFL likes to dump its unfavorable news), people in Cleveland hold their collective breath for a ruling on Gordon. Not necessarily because they’re fearing a season-long suspension, but because they and the team would like to simply move forward.

In the meantime, it looks like Gordon would rather be anywhere else in the world than practicing on a football field or even playing a preseason game. He was held out at times during camp with an abdominal problem of some kind, but when he’s on the field, Gordon is playing like a guy who knows he won’t be around much longer. But still, the attitude is glaringly obvious. And what happens if somehow he miraculously doesn’t get suspended at all?

It’s not the craziest thing to consider, especially as Gordon’s ruling drags out further and further. Still, the Browns are “fairly certain” that Gordon will be gone, at least for part of the season. But really, what is taking so long for a decision to be made?

Is there some sort of deal being made for Gordon? Will he get a reduced suspension in exchange for a whole host of factors that would require the wide receiver to get help? Is the NFL waiting to release its ruling right before the season starts in some sort of effort to squash backlash? Then again, if the NFL decides to just drop the entire thing against Gordon, doing it as close to the season as possible also works in its favor.

Of course, this entire process has done nothing but hurt the Browns. They’ve been forced to keep Gordon around on the off-chance that he might actually get to play at some point. So the brand-new coaching staff in Cleveland has worked him into the offense, creating packages for him while also having to prepare for a potential world without the league’s leading receiver from last season. It wasn’t necessarily a huge inconvenience at first, but now it’s starting to grow into an albatross.

Throughout training camp, the Browns have had to act like Gordon was going to be on the team all along, and even though they’ve been pretty sure that he would be gone for some period of time, not knowing how long it would actually be might be affecting how the front office is looking at potential replacements to help bolster what might be a tough-to-watch receiving corps that will have to rely on the shaky health of guys like Miles Austin and Nate Burleson.

The Cleveland Browns need Josh Gordon, but what team wouldn’t? Simply put, the suspension — whatever it may be — would have been a lot easier for the team to swallow if it had just been handed down much, much earlier than whenever it might actually be. But the league has essentially handcuffed the Browns into keeping around a disinterested Gordon, who doesn’t really have a ton of incentive to play hard right now if he’s resigned to the fact that he could be gone all year.

It’s a really muddy situation and there’s no good reason why the NFL is taking so long to dish out a punishment on Gordon. The league could be working out a deal of some kind, and it’s possible that Gordon’s suspension could be reduced, because making it a season-long ban right now only poses a whole bunch of new questions.

But none of that is an excuse for why it’s taking so long. Of course, this is player discipline we’re taking about, and for the NFL, this is pretty much par for the course.