More year-long bans for weed, more reasons to question NFL policy

Some within the NFL, even some high up the food chain, have been asking for a while if and how the marijuana policy should be tweaked, fixed or overhauled.

What’s going on this offseason, though, should spur them to start asking different questions. And it should get the people they work for — the owners and commissioner Roger Goodell — to ask them, too.

This is one of the biggest weapons the NFL wields. It’s what they handed out to coaches and executives in the Saints bountygate scandal in 2012. Meditate on that for a minute: Darren Waller and Justin Gilbert, the same punishment as Sean Payton and Gregg Williams, for not even nearly the same crime.

That’s how the policy goes, though. Bountygate turned the league upside-down for a while, on several levels, and the repercussions will be felt for a while longer. But if throwing a player out for a year is supposed to have the same deterrent effect, it’s failing, because the numbers are only going up.

And if those growing numbers mean that players are having a harder time adhering to the policy — whether that means passing tests, skipping or missing them, or tampering with them — then it’s fair to raise one of these two questions:

Do they have a much bigger problem that throwing them out for a year isn’t going to solve?

Or, is this even a “problem” at all?

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