The NFL blinked. In a joint statement with the NFL Players Association on Wednesday, the league said celebrations imitating drinking a beverage will no longer be treated as violations or result in discipline.
That reversal came with something more useful attached. When a celebration falls into a gray area, the league says it will now contact the player and tell him where the line is before taking his money. A fine follows only if he keeps doing it.
Twenty Fines, Twenty Appeals
This did not change because the league had a change of heart about taste. It changed because players buried the appeals system.
NFLPA executive director JC Tretter, elected to the role in March, laid the numbers out publicly. “Over Weeks 2 and 3, there were 20 fines for celebrations,” he wrote, calling it an unusual spike. “All 20 fines were appealed and are now before the neutral appeal officers, with some already being overturned.”
Those 20 were part of 88 fines the league had issued through three weeks, with celebration penalties ranging from $8,847 to $14,926. The two cases that turned this into a national argument are already familiar: 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk was docked $14,926 for miming a drink after a Week 2 touchdown, and Cowboys tight end Jake Ferguson was hit for $13,611 after Week 3 for what the league called an imitation of shotgunning a beer. Both were wiped out on appeal.
Tretter’s description of the fix is hard to argue with. “When something falls into a gray area, communication and education should come before punishment,” he said.
What Still Costs You 15 Yards
The joint statement also drew a clearer line around what remains punishable by a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, a fine, or both.
Gestures depicting violence, including guns or other weapons, and gang-related signs are still out. So are gestures depicting smoking or drug use, and anything the league deems sexual in nature. None of that is new, and nobody is fighting it.
What people were fighting was the idea that a grown man pretending to sip something after scoring a touchdown constituted an offensive demonstration worth five figures. Juszczyk’s own appeal argument, that the fine looked hypocritical given how much beer advertising the NFL sells, was the entire case in one sentence.
The League Lost This One
Good. The NFL has spent a decade telling everybody it wants personality on the field, then writing itself checks every time a player showed any. Twenty fines in two weeks for dancing and miming looks less like enforcing a standard and more like a revenue stream with a rulebook stapled to it.
The warn-first procedure matters more than the drinking gesture itself. Players will now be told where the boundary sits before they are billed for crossing it, which is how discipline works in almost every other workplace in America. It should not have taken 20 appeals in 14 days to get there, and the league deserves no credit for arriving late. It deserves credit only for arriving.
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.