Beyond saying the team supports the players, Packers General Manager Ted Thompson didn’t share any thoughts about the league’s threat to suspend linebackers Clay Matthews and Julius Peppers for conduct detrimental to the league if they don’t sit for interviews regarding PED accusations.
Quarterback Aaron Rodgers went quite a bit further during a Wednesday appearance on The Jim Rome Show. Rodgers said he thinks it sets a “bad precedent” if the league gives credit to “any wild accusation” and that it looks bad for the league to press the issue once they’ve already cleared Peyton Manning after he was included in the same Al-Jazeera America report naming his teammates.
None of that is stopping the league from pursuing the matter, something that Rodgers says the players shoulder blame for because they agreed to a Collective Bargaining Agreement that gives NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell disciplinary powers that have been affirmed by two different appeals courts this year.
“If it is the case [that Goodell has too much power], we have nobody to blame but ourselves because we had the opportunity in the CBA to make some legitimate changes to that,” Rodgers said. “I think there’s probably too much pressure to come back to a deal when we had all the power on our side and that was something we should have had negotiated into the CBA, because this shouldn’t be someone who is judge, jury, and executioner.”
The current CBA runs through 2020 and the players will have their chance to make the discipline issue a major talking point during the next round of negotiations. Getting the changes they seek will likely take more resolve than Rodgers feels they showed in the last round of talks, however, and the prospect of missing paychecks is an uncomfortable one for a great many players.
