3:56pm: Once the player reps vote within the next hour, the names of those reinstated players will be made public, tweets Chris Mortensen of ESPN.com. That tally should be in the double digits, but is not expected to exceed 20.
3:28pm: Under the new policy, Gordon’s suspension will be 10 games, a source tells Mary Kay Cabot of The Plain Dealer (on Twitter). The new policy calls for a 10-game suspension for a fourth violation.
2:23pm: A source with knowledge of the situation gave Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk a detailed rundown of what the new policy will look like if it is approved by the NFLPA. The NFL and NFLPA will jointly select, approve, and pay for a pool of three-to-five independent arbitrators to deal with appeals. Also, testing for HGH will also get underway this year without a population study.
9:20am: When a new drug policy is approved as early as this afternoon, Josh Gordon‘s suspension is expected to be reduced to eight games, a source tells Adam Schefter of ESPN.com (on Twitter). As expected, the new policy would also mean the reinstatement of Wes Welker, Orlando Scandrick, Dion Jordan, and others, as Ian Rapoport of NFL Network tweets.
If the new policy is finally approved today, it will bring weeks of back-and-forth negotiations and outside speculation to a close. According to a report frm Rapoport and Albert Breer last night, the new deal will have two-game suspensions for DUI convictions but won’t include the mandatory one-game suspension for a DUI arrest that the league was looking for. Additionally, the THC threshold is expected to move from 15 nanograms/milliliter to 35 ng/ml, which is still less than the standards of MLB (50 ng/ml) or the Olympics (150 ng/ml), but a significant change nonetheless. Had Gordon been tested with the new threshold in mind, he would have passed comfortably.
An eight game suspension for Gordon would be a split-down-the-middle compromise between the two sides as he was initially slated to miss the entire 2014 season. Welker, Scandrick, and Jordan all failed their tests inside of the 2014 league year while Gordon’s came before the official start on March 11th.