The four current players implicated last December in the Al Jazeera documentary regarding PED use (Clay Matthews, Julius Peppers, James Harrison, and Mike Neal) have submitted to interviews. So what’s next?
The expectation from the players’ perspective is that all four will be exonerated quickly, in the same way Peyton Manning was. That’s also the way the wind currently is blowing at 345 Park Avenue, where the private message continues to be that this all could have been quickly taken care of in March, if the players had merely agreed to talk.
Will it be quickly taken care of in August? The players, through the NFL Players Association, feared that the NFL secretly had other evidence beyond the claims of former Guyer Institute employee/intern/whatever Charles Sly, or that the league would follow the interviews with a request that the players produce their phones.
For now, there’s no indication that the NFL plans to move in that direction. Given that Sly necessarily was discredited by the finding in the Peyton Manning investigation suggests that Sly will be discredited as to the others, too. If not, the investigation and disciplinary process will hover over the start of the 2016 season, if not beyond.