NFL Puts Three Players On Paid Leave

Three NFL players went onto the commissioner's exempt list over the weekend: Terrion Arnold of the Seahawks, Jonathon Cooper of the Broncos, and Josh Jacobs of the Packers. All three continue to be paid. None of them will play.

The charges

They are distinct cases and all three are serious. Jacobs faces misdemeanor battery and property damage counts over a May 23 altercation with his girlfriend in Hobart, Wisconsin. Cooper faces domestic violence charges including felony strangulation from a June incident, plus a second arrest for allegedly contacting the same woman in violation of a protective order.

Arnold faces four counts each of kidnapping and armed robbery over an alleged orchestrated attack in Florida. Detroit cut him. Seattle signed him. Seattle has now shelved him, which is a three-step sequence worth pausing on: the allegations were public at every stage.

What the exempt list actually is

The mechanism deserves to be understood on its own terms. It has existed since 2014 and became the league's standard instrument after the public reaction to the Ray Rice case, when the NFL discovered that its previous approach — a short suspension, quietly negotiated — could generate a genuine crisis.

The list allows the commissioner to remove a player from the field indefinitely, with full pay, pending investigation. There is no fixed end date. There is no finding of fact required to put someone on it, and none produced when they come off.

Useful, and conveniently vague

That ambiguity is the design rather than a defect in it. The league gets to demonstrate that it acted without ever having to state what it concluded. The player receives his game checks, which blunts the union's objection. The club gets the roster spot managed. And the criminal cases proceed somewhere else entirely, on their own timeline, with no obligation to coordinate.

Every party at the table prefers a mechanism that pauses the problem to one that resolves it. Resolution requires somebody to make a determination and defend it, and determinations create precedent, appeals, and grievances.

Where the actual answers come from

So the exempt list is where the NFL puts the things it has decided not to decide. Whatever accountability arrives in these three cases will arrive from Wisconsin, Colorado, and Florida courtrooms, on schedules the league does not control and in proceedings where the complainants have standing that no NFL process gives them.

The league's role, in the meantime, is to make sure none of it happens on a Sunday afternoon in front of a camera. Measured against that objective, the system works extremely well.