The NFL's Drug Policy and the Sad Case of Randy Gregory

There is no NFL Rape Policy. Nor is there an NFL Domestic Violence Policy, or an NFL Assault Weapons Policy. Players are periodically punished for offenses involving those things, but those punishments are dictated by the whims of the commissioner and the direction in which public opinion is pointing at that moment.

What the NFL does have is a Substance Abuse Policy, one that is meticulous and nuanced and regularly enforced to the fullest possible extent. This is how it came to be that Randy Gregory—who has no criminal record, and who is guilty only of smoking marijuana—exited NFL Draft weekend with his name formally registered on a league watch list, while fellow rookies including Dorial Green-Beckham, Frank Clark, and Jameis Winston did not. It's yet another painful reminder that the NFL cares far more about its athletic exhibitions remaining untainted than the safety and well-being of women. But it's also something else entirely.

Anyone exposed to draft coverage has experienced the collective eagerness to saddle every player with a smudge on his background with "baggage." It's a mindless catchall even on its most basic plane; Fendi offers several dozen products with myriad storage capacities at various prices, but the NFL hive mind offers the same busted suitcase for casual smokers and domestic abusers. It only becomes more demented in actual practice. No reasonable person would put dorm room bong hits on par with sexual assault, and it's a fair bet that even the most aggro NFL shield polisher wouldn't die on that hill, either. The idiot genius of "baggage," as it has come to be used, is that they don't have to. Baggage is just baggage, in the same way that "adversity" can refer to actual adversity or a narratively inconvenient criminal record.

This idea of baggage has become so ingrained in the sports lexicon that it's difficult even to notice; it's just another part of draft season's white noise assault. Tacking "baggage" onto a player's resume fundamentally amounts to playing "Pin the tail on the donkey" with identity politics, lumping individuals with wildly varied stories and circumstances into the same control group. The dog whistle does its work, eliciting the desired response for each specific case—rage, concern, top-down moral arbitration, whatever. Some serious sounds are made, and then it's on to the next segment.

But, of course, these players and their adversities are different. This is visible, in the most darkly comic way imaginable, in how Gregory has been lumped in with his new team- and position-mate, Greg Hardy. Sports Illustrated's Peter King was among the more notable offenders in this regard for conflating Gregory's possible mental illness with low moral fiber, but the larger salvo centered on the difficulty Cowboys defensive line coach Rod Marinelli will face having to, in King's words, "ride herd on… two players most teams in the league wouldn't let in the front door of their buildings." Broadly speaking, he played same game as so many others in the local and national media, as well as markets far outside of Dallas. Some opted to couch "baggage" in other rhetoric such as "talented-but-troubled" or any number of modifiers off the word "character"—risk, concerns, issues. But the transmission is obvious every time Gregory's name appears within eyeshot of Hardy's: These men are something like the same, their issues are similar, and it is acceptable to brand them as such.

There should be no need to call for nuance here, no need to draw a line in the sand between Gregory—who has been startlingly open and responsible, and seems quite determined to take every measure possible to curtail his own self-described immaturity—and Hardy, a man who has been utterly remorseless after a judge found him guilty of brutally assaulting his then-girlfriend. And yet here we are, splashing around in a false equivalency that borders on slander.

To be clear, Randy Gregory could smoke every joint from North Dallas to Willie Nelson's ranch in Austin and not come within orbit of Greg Hardy. He could renege on every saccharine word he's said over the last week and still come out ahead, because even giving enough of a shit to feign contrition about something that hardly warrants a batted eyelash in other frontiers of society is more effort than Hardy has made to acknowledge his actions that led a woman to testify under oath that she told him to kill her, because he had already beaten her badly enough that she expected to die.

And, still, in spite of all of this, they will likely be grouped together for as long as they share the same uniform. In fact, their ranks are swelling: The ink had barely dried on La'el Collins' Cowboys contract Thursday before he, too, was pulled into this circle, despite being cleared of involvement in a crime he was never suspected to have committed in the first place; Collins, a consensus first round pick, fell out of the draft entirely simply because police interviewed him. Much of this is the media's fault but it's even more so on the NFL for drawing up such nonsensical terms. The hot takes that ignite public opinion and fuel daily facepalms amount to trickle-down adjudication from a league that has thrown the whole of its legislative might at creating a regimented system to govern whatever substances its players ingest but allows punishment for violent crimes to be meted out through the bumbling, ramshackle justice of its dimwitted commissioner. The football media is doing something stupid when it plays the baggage game, but it is also just taking cues from the league it covers.

Those cues say far more about the league's ultra-botched priorities than Randy Gregory. The NFL has a say in all this, and could work harder to create a system that prioritizes what matters in a way that makes sense for all involved. Thus far, it has not done this. Baggage is only as heavy as what you put in it, but the NFL doesn't have to carry its own.