Matthews and Peppers are key players for Green Bay’s defense, and Neal is now a free agent who spent the past six seasons with the Packers.
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The NFL’s senior vice president of labor policy and league affairs, Adolpho Birch, sent a letter Monday to the NFL Players Association detailing a plan to indefinitely suspend Harrison and fellow linebackers Clay Matthews, Julius Peppers and Mike Neal if they don’t speak with the league by August 25 as part of its investigation into an alleged link to performance-enhancing drugs.
If the players fail to meet with league officials by August 25, they will be suspended “until further notice”.
A pair of pharmacists in the documentary, Charles Sly and Chad Robertson, claim the other four players were supplied with “steroid-like hormones”.
In any event, this sounds reasonably serious – if you think a suspension of star players next week is serious, anyway. The league recently announced that Manning had been cleared of any wrongdoing, noting he and his wife were “fully cooperative”. Accordingly, the Commissioner has directed that Messrs.
In place of any interviews, the NFLPA sent an affidavit on behalf of each player.
“The statements, however, are wholly devoid of any detail, and we were quickly able to determine that Mr. Neal’s statement includes an assertion that is demonstrably false”, the letter states. That story claimed he was sent a performance-enhancing substance banned by the NFL.
Peppers called the report “nonsense” and said he was letting the union handle the matter.
“I’ll do what I have to do, they’ll do what they have to do and we’ll make that decision when the time comes”, Harrison said.
Harrison said he doesn’t want to be suspended, but he is prepared to take the situation as far as New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady, who fought his four-game “Deflategate” suspension for 18 months – almost to the U.S. Supreme Court – before deciding to no longer proceed with the legal process. “I stand by those statements, and anything other than that, I really don’t have anything to add, other than the PA is handling it from that standpoint”.
Matthews said there was nothing more that he could tell the league than that the report about him is untrue. He then said, “I mean, you know, I guess I’ll just have to deal with that when the time comes”. “We asked the same questions”. It’s annoying, there’s no doubt about that. I think they just want to show they’re covering their bases. “But now I’m – and some of these other guys – are in kind of in a whirlwind of controversy”.
Neal wasn’t re-signed by the Packers after last season and remains a free agent. He also is not interested in talking to National Football League representatives, either.
That left general manager Ted Thompson, who had his scheduled weekly news conference in training camp right after, to speak for the organization in the aftermath of Monday’s bombshell that Matthews and Peppers face suspension by the league.
The NFL eventually won its case against Brady, who was suspended for four games for failure to comply with investigators looking into the deflation of footballs prior to the AFC Championship two years ago.
Harrison’s agent, Bill Parise, believes the league and NFLPA are having this showdown because of the high-profile case involving New England quarterback Tom Brady in Deflategate. The sports giant talked to the NFLPA which didn’t respond to the questions.
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“When it comes down to it, I want to play but (there are) certain rules and things they need to go through that they didn’t even go through just to even start an investigation”.
