When the NFL announced a four-game suspension for Jets wide receiver Quincy Enunwa over an alleged episode of domestic violence in a New Jersey hotel room, the most unusual thing about it might be what didn't happen next.
There was no appeal from the NFL Players Association. There were no attorneys charged with drawing up a filing, no guarded words about fairness. And that's because, for the first time since the NFL passed a new code of conduct last year, the league and its union worked together, according to sources on both sides of the issue.
"That's how we hope it will eventually work," said one league front-office source with knowledge of how the process worked.
The Enunwa decision is a landmark in a few ways. He was the first player disciplined for a domestic violence arrest after the new code of conduct policy was put in place, so the union can't argue that the league imposed standards that weren't known to players. The league also did an independent investigation of Enunwa's case and reduced his suspension from six games to four based on the timing of the suspension (he was arrested in August 2014), his cooperation, and the fact that he showed remorse about the events.
The process played out like this: The results of the NFL's investigation were sent to the union. As commissioner Roger Goodell deliberated the case in an NFL conference room, he explained the reasons he thought those mitigating factors should lessen Enunwa's penalty, said a league source. All in the room agreed. When the union was informed of the penalty, it signed off before the league made the announcement on Monday.
Ever since the NFL revoked a two-game suspension for former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for punching his then-fiancee in an Atlantic City elevator, the league and its union have been locked in a standoff over player conduct. Last fall, under intense fire for the way it handled the Rice case, the NFL came out with a new player-conduct policy to strengthen discipline in the case of personal violence. When it tried to apply those standards to incidents that occurred before they were put in place, the union appealed each one.
With Rice and with Adrian Peterson, who was accused of beating his 4-year-old son, the union took the league to court. It appealed to an arbiter in the case of Greg Hardy, who was accused of assaulting an ex-girlfriend. Each time, the suspension was reduced. (The union is appealing the decision against Tom Brady in Deflategate as well, but the alleged conduct there doesn't involve an act of violence.)
The union's success in fighting the league's penalties has meant a stalemate of sorts when it comes to effecting actual change. When Hardy's suspension was reduced from 10 games to four by arbiter Harold Henderson, the Cowboys defensive lineman wound up sitting for just two more games than Rice was initially given. It hardly made the NFL look like it was able to be tougher on the few players who commit acts of violence. The fact that Hardy found an enthusiastic home with Jerry Jones and the Cowboys only reinforced the perception that the NFL had merely weathered a public relations storm rather than truly cracked down on misconduct. And all of this comes as the union awaits a decision on the grievance it filed against the league over the code of conduct policy early this year.
Union sources say they would be happy to cooperate on conduct -- they just want to open the collective bargaining agreement. The league has been reluctant to do that, but so many losses in court have undercut the strength of the policy.
Neither side wants the process to be used to unfairly target players, but there are still some fundamental disagreements about what's fair. The union does not want players disciplined in cases where a court doesn't find guilt, sources say, and it disagrees with the use of a commissioner's list to keep players off the field in the wake of arrests. But the league, having gone through a crash course on domestic violence in the months since the Rice incident, has learned how interpersonal violence is different from other crimes. Women and men who have been victimized can be further traumatized by the process that leads to a trial, or, as in the case of Hardy's alleged victim, accept a settlement rather than go through a second trial.
For now, the two sides appear to have forged an uneasy truce in the matter -- and have kept Quincy Enunwa's name from being the next headline-grabbing point of contention in an ongoing dispute.
