The NFL is investigating four teams heading into the annual NFL league meetings in Arizona.
With the first two wild rounds of March Madness kicking off on Thursday, the NFL missed a golden opportunity to bury their ongoing investigations in the flood of sports news. Now with the league meetings creeping upon them, the NFL will be inundated with questions.
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From Mike Florio at Pro Football Talk:
"Since the punishments most likely will include the removal and/or reconfiguration of draft picks, decisions must be made and announced before April 30, the first night of the 2015 draft. But those decisions apparently aren’t coming before the annual league meetings begin. Don’t expect them to come before the meetings end, either."
The league has four impending investigations involving teams:
- New York Jets owner Woody Johnson is accused of breaking the league’s Anti-Tampering Policy with regards to questioning the availability of cornerback Darrelle Revis.
- The Cleveland Browns were accused of interference by sending texts between the sidelines and the booth during games.
- The Atlanta Falcons are accuse of illegally pumping crowd noise into the Georgia Dome during home games
- The New England Patriots are accused of having soft balls.
As Florio notes, only the last of these has been unconfirmed by the accused. Essentially, everyone is pleading guilty except for the Patriots; all that needs to be done is doling out the punishments for each of the teams.
Quick resolution is important for the NFL, but effective resolution is even more necessary for a league dogged by scandal and incompetence at the top levels of management and ownership; stemming from issues like player safety issues to domestic violence (and even hazing the previous season. Ideally, the NFL will work to solve many of their issues at the league meetings on top of discussing in-game rule changes.
Some of the issues being discussed at the league meetings include the expansion of the playoffs in the wake of the Carolina Panthers division-winning 7-9 season, and the ability to challenge an review fouls like other plays.
Quickly and effectively doling out punishment for these investigations will not make much literal change in the league. But it would demonstrate that the NFL has the capacity to handle controversy, something the Roger Goodell regime has not shown yet.
[H/T: Pro Football Talk]
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