Earlier this week, NFLPA president Domonique Foxworth complained about the lack of progress on the HGH testing issue that the players and the league seemingly agreed to already, saying the league was trying to force a test with no appeal on them.
The league quickly denied that charge, and have taken the next step of accusing the union of dragging their feet.
“It has been a stall,” said Adolpho Birch, the NFL’s senior vice president for law and labor policy, via Judy Battista of the New York Times. “I don’t know if it’s a tactic. There is absolutely no reason for this to have taken this long and us not have testing implemented. We should have been more than a year into this by now.”
Birch contended that the NFLPA was using HGH testing as a lever to try to amend other parts of the CBA, specifically Commissioner Roger Goddell’s authority over disciplinary matters, saying: “I do think there is an effort to go back and revisit a lot of things that were agreed to, negotiated on extensively and agreed to.”
NFLPA officials talked about their desire to be able to appeal the science of the test and said the league had refused, but Birch said the league had offered third-party arbitration on drug test appeals, and suggested players would use the appeals process to delay inevitable punishment.
That’s a long way of saying the league and union continue to kick the HGH can down parallel roads, which don’t appear to be intersecting any time soon.
