Sports

La'el Collins Sues NFL, Roger Goodell

Collins will likely seek immediate injunctive action.

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Dallas Cowboys offensive tackle La’el Collins is suing the National Football League and its commissioner Roger Goodell to overturn a five-game suspension as well as reimburse Collins for lost wages for the games he has already missed and will miss unless an immediate injunction is granted. The case has been removed from state court to the federal court sitting in the Eastern District of Texas on the grounds that Collins’s complaint presents a federal question based, in part, on Section 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) due to an alleged breach of the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement.

Collins has two major claims against the NFL and Goodell. First, he says that they failed to follow the NFL’s 2020 Policy and Program on Substances of Abuse. Second, Collins alleges that the Defendants made material representations to an arbitrator who upheld the five-game suspension.

Collins Claims NFL And Goodell Failed To Follow Their Policy

The suspension levied against Collins was based on him failing to appear for testing under the Substances of Abuse policy. Collins, in his complaint, points out that his failure to appear cannot result in suspension and banishment as forms of discipline. The discipline set forth in the policy for unexcused failure to appear for testing begins with a $20,000 monetary fine and is escalated from there based on the number of violations, but it does not make any mention of suspension or banishment unless there have been more than seven violations for failure to cooperate with testing or clinical care.

There is a lingering dispute over how to classify Collins’s transgressions. Collins claims that he merely failed to appear for testing, while the defendants’ position has been that “multiple failures to appear for testing equate to a failure to cooperate for testing.” Under the policy, these appear to be completely separate categories that require disparate punishment.

Collins Says The Defendants Lied In Prior Testimony

Collins previously appealed the five-game suspension and a hearing was held on August 31. A transcript from the hearing is attached to Collins’s complaint, which shows that, on two separate occasions, the NFL told the arbitrator that Collins had previously received a four-game suspension from the NFL.

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The NFL’s opening statement included, “Mr. Collins was written up for a four-game suspension. And Mr. Collins was warned that any future failures to cooperate would result in a suspension. So here we are again with another failure to cooperate, and the NFL has suspended [Mr. Collins] for five games. That is progressive discipline, four to five.” The arbitrator ruled in favor of keeping the five-game suspension in place and wrote in the award that “Mr. Collins previously had received a four-game suspension based on prior conduct, and the discipline imposed, a five-game suspension, is ‘additional’ to that and is the next logical progression from prior discipline. It is proportional and reasonable.”

However, according to Collins, he has never been previously suspended by the NFL for any reason.

What’s Next For Collins?

Judge Amos L. Mazzant III has been assigned to oversee the case that was just recently removed to federal court. Collins will likely seek immediate injunctive action so he can potentially return to play for at least one of the games that he is still suspended for pursuant to the prior arbitration ruling.

Thus far, Collins has been forced to sit out three games and lost more than $270,000 in base salary due to the suspension. A few weeks ago it was reported that Collins was suspended after trying to bribe a drug-test collector. Obviously, that was omitted from Collins’s filing.

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Darren Heitner is the founder of Heitner Legal. He is the author of How to Play the Game: What Every Sports Attorney Needs to Know, published by the American Bar Association, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. You can reach him by email at heitner@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter at @DarrenHeitner.

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