NFLPA director DeMaurice Smith asks league to restart New Orleans Saints bounty investigations - NFL News
The National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) which represents the players interests is not satisfied with the NFL’s investigation into the New Orleans Saints bounty programme and wants the league to reopen its investigations.
According to NFLPA executive director, DeMaurice Smith, the NFL’s investigation was incomplete and missed out on a number of factors that he believes the league should re-examine.
Smith has been a vocal critic of commissioner, Roger Goodell, after the commissioner had announced suspensions for four Saints players for their leadership role in the bounty programme.
The NFLPA director has written a letter to the commissioner requesting him to once again open up investigations into the bounty programme.
Speaking to ProFootballTalk Live he said.
“Frankly, I believe that the investigators let the commissioner down,”
He added further.
“Our hope, and certainly it will be a message from me to the league soon, is that given all of the recantations and all of the contradictions and, as exemplified by the video, all of the things that are clearly not clear, shouldn’t we be taking another hard
look about where this investigation failed the commissioner?”
In the letter Smith wrote to Goodell and made public by ProFootballTalk, he said that the league made mischaracterizations from the evidence provided by its investigators that he wants Goodell to once again look into.
He also said that the league’s investigation did not provide full and complete evidence related to the bounty scandal.
“We shouldn’t be in a world where players are being punished for something that is inconclusive and unclear.”
The NFL has also responded to Smith’s letter through the league’s attorney, Jeff Pash.
Pash told ESPN that if Smith had come to the appeal hearings conducted by Goodell last week he would have seen the commissioner allow all suspended players to give a full account of their side of the story as well as the entire evidence that was
put forward by the NFL in relation to the bounty scandal.
More developments on the matter are expected in the coming days and this topic is not going away anytime soon.
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