The NFL suspended San Francisco linebacker Dre Greenlaw one game without pay on Monday for unsportsmanlike conduct during the 49ers’ 32-29 win at Seattle. He is already appealing.
The sequence was ugly and it was fast. Greenlaw drew a flag for a late hit on Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold after Darnold had run out of bounds at the Seattle sideline. Seattle linebacker Ernest Jones IV came over and appeared to push Greenlaw’s facemask. Greenlaw answered by headbutting Jones, who was not wearing a helmet.
He Was Ejected Without a Second Flag
This is the part worth paying attention to. Greenlaw was not thrown out because an official on the field threw a penalty for the headbutt. He was ejected under the league’s new mechanism that lets Art McNally GameDay Central remove a player without a flag, cited for non-football conduct.
It happened in the first half. He watched the rest of a one-score road win from somewhere other than the sideline, and his team won anyway.
That rule has been in place all season and has barely been used. Using it here, on a headbutt delivered to a helmetless opponent, is about as clean a test case as the league was going to get. Hard to argue the mechanism was abused.
The Appeal Is Not a Formality
A source told NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport that Greenlaw is appealing. The hearing will go to one of four officers jointly appointed by the league and the players association: Derrick Brooks, Jordy Nelson, Ron Rivera or James Thrash.
Greenlaw has a real argument available to him, and it is Jones reaching for his facemask first. Whether that argument lands depends entirely on which officer draws the case and how much weight they give to the fact that Jones had no helmet on. Escalating a sideline shove into head contact with an unprotected opponent is the sort of thing appeal officers tend not to wave away.
The Game He Would Miss Actually Matters
If the suspension holds, Greenlaw sits for San Francisco’s Week 6 Monday night game against the Washington Commanders at Levi’s Stadium on Oct. 19.
The 49ers are 5-0 under Kyle Shanahan, one of two unbeaten teams left along with Minnesota. Greenlaw, in his eighth NFL season, has 37 combined tackles, second on the defense behind Fred Warner. Losing him for a prime-time home game against a struggling opponent is survivable. Losing him for free, over a headbutt, in a game San Francisco was winning, is just wasteful.
Worth getting right: Greenlaw is a 49er again. San Francisco signed him as a free agent on March 13 after Denver released him, which means a fair number of people spent Monday reading his name next to the wrong team.
The Larger Point
San Francisco has the best record in football and a defense that has been the reason. It can afford one game without its second-leading tackler. What it cannot afford is a pattern, because the next one will not be one game.
Greenlaw gets to make his case to an appeal officer this week. He should probably spend the rest of it accepting that the league was always going to rule this way.
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.