The NFL’s in-house arbitration process is supposed to be secret. Former Cardinals executive Terry McDonough hasn’t treated it that way. The Cardinals haven’t, either.
The team’s official response to the McDonough grievance has been both filed with the league and leaked, by someone, to the Associated Press.
The primary point amplified by the article based on the team’s filing is that McDonough engaged in “erratic behavior” that “eventually damaged his career.”
The team also contends that McDonough’s latest contract included a waiver of legal claims. Which begs the question of why the Cardinals felt compelled to include a waiver of legal claims in his new employment contract?
The Cardinals also claims that McDonough filed his grievance “in retaliation” for being let go, and that he “launched a publicity campaign, both of which are full of exaggerations and falsehoods about the Cardinals organization and its President.”
Of course, the Cardinals responded to the claim with a lengthy press release that shamefully and gratuitously attacked McDonough’s character on matters unrelated to his employment, in a manner that was (in my opinion) unbecoming to the organization and the league to which it belongs.
“Mr. McDonough’s filing is full of allegations and assertions that, while colorful, are not true and do not state viable legal claims,” the team’s response asserts. “Mr. McDonough has been hanging onto this salacious yet fictitious story since the summer of 2018 and occasionally threatened to make it public.”
So why did they keep him around for so long if that’s what they thought of him? Apparently, former G.M. Steve Keim believed he needed McDonough in order to properly assess players. So the team tolerated whatever concerns it had about McDonough, content to use them as a sword whenever they decided to move on from him, if he chose not to go quietly.
The response from the team details alleged incidents from 2017, 2018, and 2019 that apparently justify the decision to eventually fire him. Again, why weren’t these things an issue at the time they happened? The only logical conclusion is that Keim wanted (or maybe needed) McDonough to be part of the effort to evaluate talent, prompting the team to decide that it would keep him around, at least for as long as Keim was kept around.
This is how it goes in many employment claims. If the former employee dares to attempt to assert his or her legal rights, the employer throws everything possible at the employee, including things that happened long before the eventual separation -- and that didn’t prompt a strong, permanent action at the time.
Through it all, Keim has been making a series of media appearances, in advance of his work with Fox Sports Radio later this week at the NFL draft. He has yet to be asked, as far as we can tell, about McDonough, his claims, or the bright-line, yes-or-no, crystal-clear question of whether owner Michael Bidwill instructed McDonough and former coach Steve Wilks to use burner phones to communicate with Keim as he served a five-week suspension after pleading guilty to extreme DUI in 2018.
At some point, Keim presumably will face those questions. At some point, the truth will come out. Hopefully, the league will be as transparent about its findings as both McDonough and the Cardinals have been regarding the relevant claims and defenses.
That’s really the fair outcome here. Secret proceedings or not, both sides have waived any claim to privacy by putting their positions out there. At this point, the public deserves to know how the league resolves all of this, and whether the claims made by McDonough and the defenses articulated by the team have any merit whatsoever.
