A DUI arrest on top off all the current mess you’re facing? Gordon and Justin Blackmon have so much talent, yet can’t seem to get out of their own ways. Any chance Gordon had of getting his suspension reduced just went out the window. He may never make it back to the NFL.
Wow this sucks. I drafted him in my league.
Wow. I have to live with the Browns another year without their best player. 
I guarantee they were going to slap him on the wrist too. Man that city must be jinxed.
It’s OK, now you have a good excuse for their failure rather than having to come up with a different one for why they still went 4-12 with him in the lineup.
Of course, this is the third offseason strike. A while back, shortly after he failed his drug test, he was pulled over for speeding and his passenger had doobage on him. Based on that alone Goodell wasn’t going to show him any leniency. How do you get caught anywhere near weed after testing positive for weed? The obvious conclusion is that Josh Gordon has decided that getting high means more to him than millions of dollars. It’s better you and the Browns find that out now rather than later after the whole offense is built around him.
Glad we don’t have to make a decision on Josh Gordon now. He made the decision for the Browns.
Man, Senor Beef is gonna be pissed.
I’m glad that days like this for the Bengals are pretty much over (RIP Chris Henry).
This thread makes the Baby Senor Beef kill a kitten.
So when they do a drug test, they split the sample into two bottles, A, and B. They test the first sample, and it has to be above 15 parts per billion of THC or whatever they’re testing for as a positive result. Anything lower than that is a negative result.
And if the A bottle tests positive, they confirm the test on the B bottle. Now, the B bottle doesn’t need to meet this 15 PPB threshold. It just has to have any detectable amount of the substance to confirm a positive test.
It should also be noted that the NFL is 10 times more strict about drug amounts than the Olympic committee.
So anyway, Gordon’s A bottle came up as about 16 PPB, just barely registering a positive. So they test the B bottle, and it comes up 13 PPB… which doesn’t matter except in that it registers any trace of the substance at all. But if that sample was the A sample, it wouldn’t have triggered the second test, since <15 PPB it’s a negative result.
So… they take the two bottles. They slap an A sticker on one, and a B sticker on the other. Gordon may be suspended for a year. Or… they happen to swap the samples when labeling and they slap the A sample on the other bottle. Now the A sample is 13 PPB and he’s not even in trouble.
Even his positive result would’ve been 1/10th what was needed for an Olympic positive test.
He had a few recent tests that came up negative before the positive one, and if he had been smoking weed since then, the positive would’ve been a much stronger positive. So most likely the NFL is being total fucking hardasses and caught him getting a whiff or second hand smoke. And that might end his career.
He probably should’ve just beat up a dozen women instead.
Using the Goodell/Rice Formula, he only gets to beat up 8 women to get a 16 game suspension.
It occurs to me that when you find yourself looking at a long suspension and perhaps the end of your career if you come up positive for drugs, something negotiated in the CBA and well-known to a multiple offender like Gordon, you probably ought to avoid any sort of drug use like the plague. So one sample was just barely hot and one was just barely not. So what? It should have been zero. Bupkis. Virtually every other player manages to get through their career without ever popping hot. Alas, Gordon values drugs and/or hanging out with other drug users more than his career.
Now, as for the Ray Rice thing, he should have gotten a lot more than 2 games. The whole incident was handled improperly by Goodell. But that’s a separate issue from the drug testing agreed to, in writing, by the NFL and the players union.
I kinda agree with you, but at the same time, weed is so harmless (and on the other hand, helpful for people who’s jobs involve banging into each other repeatedly at high speeds) that at some point the whole drug testing thing becomes more stupid than Gordon. I’d also bet that if he stopped hanging out “with other drug users” he wouldn’t be able to hang out 80% of NFL players.
Lastly, it’s a bit unfair to say that almost every other player manages to get through their career without a positive test. Gordon’s problem was that the testing becomes ridiculously stringent once you test positive once… the reports are saying that Gordon has passed 70 other drug tests. He’s getting tested ten times a month. Other guys who aren’t in the program only get “randomly tested”, and that period is only during four months of the year (late April to early August).
Oh, I agree, he’s an idiot. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up getting secondhand smoke just from spending time and bonding with his teammates, even if he abstained. The NFL’s threshholds are ridiculously low - air traffic controllers, the second most stringent test criteria I’ve come across, allow 5 times more THC in your system to register a positive. And even then, Gordon’s sample’s positive result was so narrow that it was within the error band. The other sample - of the same urine - came out under the limit, because they’re trying to test to such a ridiculous level of precision that the error bars are a significant fraction of the measurement.
The NFL policing for pot is pretty stupid. The NFL policing for pot at such a ridiculous level that they’re 10 times more stringent than the Olympics and 5 times more stringent than Air Traffic Controller drug tests, so that they pick up even secondhand smoke when they know most of the players smoke in the offseason is just obnoxious. Who the fuck even cares for non-performance enhancing drugs? If someone takes drugs and then does stupid shit, then handle it with the personal conduct policy. And even then, it’s the stupid shit that embarrasses the NFL rather than the drugs that are the problem.
It’s also hypocritical that they know the players get their bodies destroyed and allow the teams to inject them with insane levels of painkillers and other drugs to keep their race horses running even when they’re hurt, but god forbid someone smokes some weed to take the edge off with their battered body.
I’d love it if it was found out that marijuana reduced damage from brain injury.
Remember, Gordon was ticketed for speeding back in May (while his suspension was pending), and one of his posse (not a fellow player) claimed the marijuana in the car was his. This isn’t a guy who gets caught in awkward, team-bonding situations, he’s a guy who has made some seriously bad decisions his entire life and continues to hang around with troubling people.
Also remember that his first suspension was cut down from four games to two games, which is indicative of that being his second offense. And back then, he claimed it was for codeine, not pot, and that it was in some prescription cough syrup he took. Now he’s claiming second hand smoke.
Personally, I think Gordon is full of shit and has been making excuses for years for his fuckups. It’s either that, or he’s the unluckiest bastard to walk the face of the Earth. He was suspended in college (while his teammate got kicked off) for weed. Then, he got suspended for another failed drug test.
Then, while this suspension is pending, he gets a DWI. And gets bonded out by a convicted felon who deals drugs, carries guns, and defrauds people.
He’s a fucking moron who continues, just as he had for the last 5 years of his life, to throw away his prodigious talents by making bad decisions, being unable to control his conduct, and hanging around the wrong people. I understand the desire to make his suspension all his hard luck getting busted for second hand smoke while he’s just trying to hang out with teammates, but that narrative completely ignores his entire history.
I read “Jeff” Gordon in the title and nearly jumped out of my seat.
Oh yeah, I already said he’s a dipshit. I’m just saying the policy is ridiculous, with the NFL trying to push to near the edge of the technology to detect the tiniest amounts of THC, and for what? The NFL knows half its players smoke in the offseason and they make it easy for them to avoid getting tested positive for it. So why be 10x bigger sticklers for it than the Olympics?
So yeah, obviously he’s under more scrutiny due to previous fails. Btw, I’m not sure what you’re getting at as far as the previous excuse, but as far as I know, his suspension really was for codeine, that wasn’t a lie. I guess you mean it was purple drank rather than cough syrup or something? I’m not sure - IIRC he had a prescription for it.
He never tested positive for pot in the NFL, and he had 70 clean tests, so it’s possible he’s getting nailed for secondhand smoke and didn’t realize that could happen.
If he were an air traffic controller, he’d have popped way way way under a positive test. But instead, he’s an athlete who gets injected with all sorts of crazy pain drugs anyway under sketchy ethical conditions, so of course we need to try to detect a few nanograms. His test may not even have been a real positive, even under the strict testing policy of the NFL - a nanogram too high is within the margin of error, and the test of the second sample varied by 16%, which just goes to show that there’s a lot of noise at those ridiculous levels. He may have a case just on the technical merits of the test.
and he will still get back into the NFL before Justin Blackmon even gets considered for Jags season tickets.
Best bullet the Rams ever dodged.
Are they always that low, or only when you’re up against the wall on your third strike? Because if that’s the reason for it being so low, I’m all for it. The third strike should be the last one and should be especially stringent for precisely that reason.
Precisely what reason? If you’re smoking weed, and getting tested every 2-4 days, it’s going to register a much bigger positive than the trace amounts he had. What’s the benefit of that additional level of scrutiny? If anything, you might want to test for trace amounts if you suspect he smoked 3 weeks ago. But they test him constantly, 10 times a month, which means that the threshold can be set higher and if he actually smokes, because it would’ve been within the last 3 days, it would show up as more than a trace amount.
They’re basically just testing on the edge of detectability ensuring the error bands are as big as possible.
Also, they do the drug testing contrary to basically how every other drug test works. Basically, the A sample is done with a cheap, quick and dirty test that’s roughly accurate. If they get a positive from the A test, they do a more precise, more thorough test on the B bottle which is basically 100% accurate. But the NFL’s policy is that the A test, the less accurate one, is the one that counts for precise measurement, and the B one, the more accurate one, only has to show any trace amount, regardless of the actual precise measurement. It’s a really stupid procedure. The B bottle should be the final word, just like it is with everyone who drug tests who isn’t the NFL.