The Rams lost a 37-34 overtime game to the Bills on Monday night, the kind of loss that stings for a week. Alaric Jackson turned it into something that will stretch across three.
The NFL announced Tuesday that Jackson, the Rams’ left tackle, has been suspended two games without pay. The reason is simple. After the final whistle, Jackson punched Bills linebacker Bradley Chubb in the face with his right hand.
It happened at midfield during a jersey exchange with Bills defensive lineman Deone Walker. Chubb appeared to say something to Jackson. Jackson swung. Rams tight end Colby Parkinson pulled him away before it went any further.
Two games Jackson cannot get back
The suspension covers the Cardinals and the Raiders. Those are two games the Rams have to win, and Jackson had started all five this season. He missed one game all of last year. His availability has been something the Rams could stop thinking about, and now they cannot.
Jackson can appeal, and per Sean McVay he plans to. The hearing would go to one of four appeals officers: Derrick Brooks, Jordy Nelson, Ron Rivera, or James Thrash. NFL.com’s disciplinary roundup filed the incident under unsportsmanlike conduct.
The appeal has a problem, and it is the facts. The ball was dead. The game was over. Jackson was not finishing a play late or pulling a teammate out of a pile. He was standing at midfield trading jerseys with an opponent, and he threw a punch at another man’s face. There is no reading of that sequence that makes two games look harsh.
Chubb called it emotions. The league does not grade on emotion.
Chubb’s own description afterward was “just emotions,” which is about as generous as an aggrieved party gets. He is right about the cause. Monday night in Los Angeles was four quarters plus overtime of a 37-34 game, and nobody walks off that field calm.
But the league does not weigh what provoked a postgame punch. It weighs the punch. Chubb saying something, whatever it was, does not move the number down, and the handshake line is the one place on a football field where the rules are not complicated. Everything before it is contact the sport pays for. Everything after it is just a fight.
That is the part worth sitting with if you root for the Rams. Jackson did not cost himself these games with a play. He cost himself these games roughly ten seconds after the only part of the night that counted had already ended.
A left tackle is the one position on offense where a drop-off shows up immediately and visibly. The Rams spent the week after an overtime loss answering for a suspension instead of fixing what happened in the game, and they go into the Cardinals and the Raiders with their line reshuffled for reasons that have nothing to do with football.
Appeal it if you want. Brooks, Nelson, Rivera and Thrash have all played or coached in games that ended badly, and one of them might shave something off. The honest expectation is that Jackson sits twice, comes back for whatever the Rams’ season looks like by then, and has to live with having handed two of them away over a sentence he could have walked past.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.