The NFL will continue to conduct its own investigations regarding player misconduct while on their own time, even though the process necessarily is constrained by the absence of subpoena power and the unwillingness to do whatever it takes to track down video, even when the NFL knows that video exists. But these limitations shouldn’t compel the NFL to otherwise cling to conventions that may apply in other contexts.
As it relates to the Kareem Hunt controversy, the league hadn’t interviewed Hunt before TMZ published video that showed Hunt shoving and kicking a 19-year-old woman in Cleveland nine months ago. On Wednesday, NFL special counsel for conduct Todd Jones defended the league’s deliberate decision to not confront Hunt earlier.
“People in the business sort of understand that you don’t sit down with the suspect until you have a little fuller handle on the facts because you’ve got to be able to ask intelligent questions of them beyond were you there and did you do anything,” Jones told reporters. “I think the sequencing of the interviews was appropriate given the level of information that we had at the time, then.”
It’s easy for Jones to play the “people in the business” card when talking to people who aren’t in the business. But those of us who once were in the business of conducting internal investigations on behalf of employers realize that, despite the limitations that can make it hard if not impossible to get information from people not employed by the company, the employer who is investigating employee misconduct typically has the freedom to talk to the accused as often as it wants.
As previously explained, nothing in the Collective Bargaining Agreement or the Personal Conduct Policy limits the NFL to one bite at the apple, when it comes to questioning players. And so nothing would have stopped the NFL from bringing Hunt to New York and asking him open-ended questions about what happened early in the investigation, and then bringing him back later after the alleged victim decided to cooperate or video became available. For players inclined to lie (as Hunt reportedly was), it actually would have been useful to lock him in to an untrue story before a video contradicting his story emerged.
But here’s the real question, as it relates to the motivation of the NFL’s investigators: What is their motivation? More specifically, are they hoping to find violations of the policy, or are they hoping to simply check enough boxes to provide cover in the event that, for example, TMZ gets the video that the NFL can’t or won’t obtain?
Because the entire NFL investigative process regarding off-the-job behavior flows from P.R. considerations, P.R. continues to be a significant part of the NFL’s in-house system of justice. And the NFL apparently has realized while ping-ponging from too weak of a response in the Ray Rice case to too strong of a response in the Ezekiel Elliott case that the best P.R. is no P.R., and that there’s value in not making something that currently isn’t a big deal into a big deal.
So with Hunt, the NFL knew there was an alleged victim, and the NFL knew there was an actual video. The NFL made an effort to talk to the alleged victim and to view the actual video. The NFL made no effort to talk to Hunt, waiting for evidence that, after the passage of four or five months, the NFL likely knew (and possibly hoped) it was never going to get.
So the Hunt case slipped into the cracks, possibly for good. And the NFL had done everything that it needed to do in order to be able to say “we tried,” in the event TMZ obtained the video. And by not interviewing Hunt, the NFL fully adopted a wait-and-see posture that, but for the release of the video, would have continued indefinitely — which definitely would have been the best possible outcome, from a P.R. perspective.