On Monday, Rosenthal spelled out the league’s position regarding the placement of Chargers receiver Vincent Jackson on the roster exempt list. As the NFL interprets the relevant provisions of the labor deal, Jackson must report by September 4 to avoid the consecutive application of his three-game suspension for violating the substance-abuse policy and placement on the roster exempt list, which requires any restricted free agent who shows up after the final preseason game to wait three games -- without pay -- before being permitted to play.
In other words, Jackson will miss at a minimum six regular-season games, if he fails to report before the three-week window in which he is banished from the team.
Though the consecutive application of the suspension of Jackson and his placement on the roster exempt list has little relevance to Jackson’s status with the Chargers, the situation becomes more complicated if Jackson is traded after his suspension begins. The league, as Rosenthal explained it, believes that Jackson would miss six games. But the union disagrees.
NFL Players Association General Counsel Richard Berthelsen explained the union’s position to me by phone this afternoon. The NFLPA believes that the roster exempt list has a specific purpose -- to prevent a team from being forced to remove another player from the 53-man roster if a restricted free agent reports and signs his tender offer without prior warning or notice. In such cases, the restricted free agent may be out of shape, or the team may want to get him up to speed regarding the playbook and other strategy before thrusting him into action.
For a team that trades for a player, that team presumably is willing to add the player to the roster at that moment, alleviating the need for protection against the possibility that a restricted free agent will show up out of the blue, forcing the team to pick one of the other 53 players on the spot and remove him from the team.
Thus, Berthelsen explained that the placement of the player on the roster exempt list should not follow him to a new team, if he is traded.
The relevant portion of the Collective Bargaining Agreement seems to support this conclusion. Article XXXII, Section 4(c) specifies the circumstances under which a player “may be placed on the roster exempt list of his Club.” (Emphasis added.) So if the player is placed on the roster exempt list “of his Club” and “his Club” later trades him to a “new Club,” the player logically isn’t on the roster exempt list “of his new Club.”
In the end, the matter likely would be resolved via binding arbitration. And any team trading for Jackson surely would want to resolve that issue before finalizing the deal.
As a practical matter, it’s another moving part that would further complicate what already would be a complicated negotiation.