It's not often that NFLPA leadership agrees on anything with NFL owners, but players union president Eric Winston expressed some support for an idea laid out by Patriots president Jonathan Kraft last week.
During an interview with 98.5 The Sports Hub before the Patriots played the Saints, Kraft explained why he thinks the league's policy on player discipline needs to be adjusted.
"The personal conduct policy and how discipline would be handled by the commissioner started under [former commissioner] Paul [Tagliabue] and was strengthened under Roger," Kraft said. "You have to look back to the middle part of the last decade when the real premise of how it's done was created.
"I think the world has changed and the complexity of some of the situations -- things that I don't think we ever thought we would be dealing with, we're dealing with."
He added: “There probably needs to be a rethinking so that the league office and the Commissioner aren’t put in a spotlight in a way that detracts from the league’s image and the game, even if the league office is doing the right thing, or the wrong thing, or whatever you think. It 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.”
Winston, not surprisingly, agreed with Kraft that the league could benefit from an alteration to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell's duties as they relate to player discipline.
“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 told USA Today. “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.”
