Redskins cornerback DeAngelo Hall was fined $30,000 for screaming at an official during an October 28 game against the Steelers. Now Hall says the official falsely told the NFL that Hall had threatened to kill him during their heated exchange.
Hall told the Washington Post that head linesman Dana McKenzie told the league office that the reason he ejected Hall from the game was that Hall issued a death threat. Hall says that’s simply not true.
“Yeah, he said that’s what threw the flag for the ejection,” Hall said. “And so, you know, that didn’t happen. That should have never happened, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There’s just a lot of things that are unresolved with that case that have to be resolved.”
Hall said that in the process of appealing his fine, he began to believe that the NFL Players Association never should have accepted the Collective Bargaining Agreement that ended the lockout last year. According to Hall, the players gave the league office far too much authority to discipline them.
“Any time you’ve got one person that’s the judge, jury and executioner — he makes the fine, then he hears the appeal, then he decides the amount — it’s just tough. It’s just tough,” Hall said. “The CBA we agreed on probably wasn’t in the best interests of the players, from my viewpoint.”
Although Hall stopped short of criticizing the union, he said that he now wishes he had immediately hired his own lawyer when the NFL fined him, instead of relying on help from the Players Association, which is what he has done so far.
“I should have took a step back and got independent counsel, figured the right, I guess, path to go on,” Hall said. “That’s kind of what we’re trying to do now, I mean, because what happened shouldn’t have happened. He shouldn’t have came at me like he did. I shouldn’t have came back at him. But it happened. But after that, I was told that I said I was going to ‘[profanity] kill him,’ which didn’t happen.”
If there’s still a dispute about exactly what Hall said to McKenzie, that suggests that no audio of the exchange exists, and we’ll likely never know who’s telling the truth. But a $30,000 fine obviously means the NFL thinks Hall said something that went way too far.