So the Panthers launched an investigation regarding owner Jerry Richardson after learning that Sports Illustrated was investigating the situation, and now the NFL has launched an investigation that supersedes the team investigation.
The investigation should be happening under the Personal Conduct Policy, given the breadth of the provision. And if it is, a separate problem arises for the Panthers. If the team didn’t report the settlements to the league as potential violations of the Personal Conduct Policy, that may have amounted to a separate violation of the Personal Conduct Policy.
“Clubs and players are obligated to promptly report any matter that comes to their attention (through, for example, victim or witness reports, law enforcement, or media reports) that may constitute a violation of this Policy,” the Personal Conduct Policy mandates. “Failure to report an incident will be grounds for disciplinary action. This obligation to report is broader than simply reporting an arrest; it requires reporting to the league any incident that comes to the club’s or player’s attention which, if the allegations were true, would constitute a violation of the Personal Conduct Policy.”
Unless the NFL will be investigating Richardson under some other policy (and there’s no other policy that would better apply than the Personal Conduct Policy), the mere fact that the league has seen fit to explore the situation means that the situation is something that the league should have been told about before the Panthers tried to launch an investigation into things that they already knew about, in an apparent effort to take some of the sting out of the Sports Illustrated report.
Which raises an intriguing question: How many other teams have negotiated similar settlements in the past without disclosing them to the league? And then this question: How many other teams will be promptly self-reporting those settlements now?
UPDATE 2:24 p.m. ET: The NFL has declined comment on the SI story, and on whether the Panthers had an obligation to disclose the reported settlements to the league.
