With suspensions becoming more and more frequent in the NFL, one question is becoming more prominent. Does a suspension taint a player’s statistics or career regardless of what the suspension is for? It might be because for so long suspensions weren’t a big issue, but they usually don’t tend to taint records in football.
In baseball, suspensions are mainly linked in some way to cheating, typically in the form of performance enhancing drugs. For these players, their statistics are tainted, and many fans cannot let go of what was done and it taints their careers as well.
It is hard to say why this has been an issue for baseball but, in football, it hasn’t been. Maybe it’s because the offseason is so much longer than the time the players actually spend on the field. There’s more time for other, more important worldly events to occupy fans minds. Perhaps it’s because there are less offenders in football.
As previously mentioned, there has been an upswing in suspensions in the NFL recently, and there are some coming down the line still. While the suspensions in baseball tend to be centered around cheating, the ones in football are often related to off-field antics.
While it shouldn’t matter why a player is suspended, it does.
Off-field antics rarely have a correlation to statistics, only impeding them when they lose field time therefore losing the ability to improve their statistics. The only other way a suspension might correlate is that some player who has been suspended plays at a different level after the time off. Yet, it could just be more related to the time.
The test will be when Le’Veon Bell suits up this fall after voluntarily taking a season off. Most fans — particularly those who play fantasy football — end up just wanting the suspension to be over so the player can return to help their team.
At the end of the day, a player’s career and statistics should be based on their performance. Perhaps that’s a naïve way to look at it, but it is how it should be. People are human and make mistakes. Yes, professional players are to be held to a higher standard because they are in the spotlight, but it doesn’t automatically make them perfect.
