Matt Prater’s suspension seems to be the latest example of an NFL executive office with all the disciplinary power in the world and no clue how to wield it.
Matt Prater’s suspension proves the rules shouldn’t be left to robots
After suspending Matt Prater four games for drinking beer and Ray Rice just two for abusing his then-fiancee, the NFL should ask whether its policies are all that helpful toward its goals.
Noah Graham
Prater was suspended four games for violating the NFL’s substance abuse policy, specifically for alcohol abuse. The league had wanted to suspend him for a year. And for what? According to his attorney, all Prater did was drink “a couple beers ... at home while he was on vacation.”
Only a month earlier the NFL suspended Ray Rice for two games after he was videotaped brutally assaulting his then-fiancee. A physically strong person was filmed beating a physically weak person of the opposite sex until she was unconscious, and the NFL suspended him just two games. That is beyond belief.
How did one perfectly normal activity and one heinous crime receive remotely similar punishments? And how did the lesser of the two end up receiving twice as much punishment?
In short, the NFL’s substance abuse required a suspension of a certain length for Prater, while there was nothing in the book governing Rice’s misbehavior, allowing a league that loves to spell out everything in its rule book to make a judgement call.
It shouldn’t be like that.
An explanation of the substance abuse policy
If we actually look at the NFL’s substance abuse policy, rather than taking the word of Prater’s attorney, it seems improbable that what brought Commissioner Roger Goodell’s banhammer down was simply a few beers while he was back in Florida during the offseason.
NFL Discipline
Prater, who has twice been charged with DUI, has been voluntarily in the league’s substance abuse program since his most recent charge in 2011. (That entire policy can be read in this document, and it outlines what sort of violations lead to the penalty Prater got.) Reading between the lines, the NFL alleges a pattern in Prater of ignoring the treatment plan entirely and/or failing tests when they are given.
To reach the year-long suspension with which the NFL initially threatened Prater, someone would have to fail out of Stage 3 of the program by either testing positive or failing to comply with testing, which can occur up to 10 times in a month both in-season and out-of-season. To reach Stage 3, you have to fail out of Stage 2, which requires a combination of two positive tests or failures to comply. To reach Stage 2, you have to fail out of Stage 1, which requires one positive test or failure to comply.
When we talk about a failed test, it’s worth mentioning that alcohol testing is different than testing for drugs like marijuana, which can stay in the system for several weeks. Alcohol metabolizes out of your body at a steady rate, at about one drink per hour. You have to be actively intoxicated to test positive. There are also tests which can detect the presence of alcohol in someone’s body in the last few days, but the NFL’s policy indicates they don’t test for abstinence. Rather, they set the limit at .06 g/dl -- 3/4 of the typical legal limit for a DUI -- so unless Prater had agreed to some sort of additional no-alcohol policy, it seems unlikely they’d use those tests.
A policy designed to be twisted
Because he faced the punishment required of someone who fails out of Stage 3 of the substance abuse program, it’s reasonable to speculate that Matt Prater is a person with a drinking problem, rather than a guy with incredibly bad luck who just wanted to kick back on vacation. It’s also impossible to verify, and worth nothing his father told the Ft. Myers (Fla.) News-Press he does not have a drinking problem.
The NFL can’t refute Prater’s attorney’s claims that he was penalized for merely drinking a few beers in his house. To do so would violate the confidentiality agreement that’s legislated into this policy. If anybody were to actually disclose what Prater has done wrong, that individual could be fined by the league and face a lawsuit by the player.
If Prater needs help, there’s a policy in place that not only affords him the opportunity to get him help, but it also doesn’t publicize the fact that he needs it. This is a good thing. The side effect is that it allows Prater’s attorney to paint him in public as the guy who got unfairly punished for drinking a few beers while using his client’s own privacy protections to do so.
A robotic solution to a human problem
In talking about a relatively good NFL policy, we have to talk about why the NFL is completely terrible at policy-making in the first place: for anything to work, it has to be explicitly legislated. This is a league that needed to change its definition of a touchdown celebration prop because the initial rule didn’t outlaw Jimmy Graham’s goalpost dunks. If it’s not etched on a tablet, the NFL can not properly deal with it. This is not how to properly govern adult human behavior, but that’s the way the league works.
It should be better. The NFL has only 1,694 players, and it makes pretty much all the money in the world. If it wanted to, it has more than enough resources to individually assess the problems and needs of each player. For a million reasons, that will never happen. And we’ll continue to have cookie cutter punishments, and the NFL will always look like a league that thinks drinking a beer is twice as bad as beating a woman to unconsciousness.
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