According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the league has yet to implement the four-games StarCaps suspensions of Saints defensive ends Charles Grant and Will Smith.
According to a league source, there’s a sense that the NFL might ultimately allow Grant and Smith to serve the suspensions consecutively, so that the Saints won’t be without both players for 25 percent of the season.
Grant and Smith were poised, were told, to join the Jay Glazer/Randy Couture MMA training regimen for the extent of their four-game suspensions when the Saints learned that they were not yet required to send the players to the reserve-suspended list.
The problem for the Saints (and, possibly, the Vikings) is that they had to cut players who might have replaced the suspended players, and that the replacements might be snatched up by someone else before the suspensions become effective.
The suspensions have been delayed by the coming decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. In that appeal, the league is challenging the decision to permit Vikings defensive tackles Pat and Kevin Williams to pursue legal theories under Minnesota law (and thus block their suspensions) -- and the four players are challenging the decision that the suspensions are valid under the labor agreement between the NFL and the players union, based in part on the notion that the league knew StarCaps had been spiked with a banned substance but failed to specifically warn the players.
But while the league has been prevented from suspending the Vikings players until the pending state-court action is resolved or mooted, the league is not prohibited from suspending Grant and Smith. So the league’s decision not to promptly force them to the reserve/suspended list seems to bolster the notion that an alternative approach might be used in order to prevent an unfair outcome to the team.
That approach likely would be used for the Vikings, too -- if they prefer eight games without half of the Williams Wall as opposed to four games with none of it.
