The Arizona Cardinals can close the book on the arbitration case for grievances filed against them by former team vice president Terry McDonough. As reported by ESPN’s Tisha Thompson, most of the claims filed against the team were dismissed but they must pay McDonough $3 million for defamatory comments made about him after he filed his grievance.
While the case is now over, we now must wait and see if the Cardinals will face any league discipline for some of the details alleged by McDonough that the arbitrator found to be true.
Part of what stemmed the grievance in the first place is that McDonough felt he was wrongfully terminated and also retaliated against because he was not comfortable with a scheme involving burner phones to communicate with general manager Steve Keim in the summer of 2018 during his team-imposed suspension for an extreme DUI arrest in July that year.
As part of the ruling, arbitrator Jeffrey Mishkin “found that the team did use burner phones.” Now, the Cardinals never denied the existence of those phones. They claimed that when owner Michael Bidwill was made aware of the burner phone scheme to contact Keim during his suspension, it was shut down and the phones were to be collected.
This is where it gets tricky.
The league did not impose any punishment on Keim, accepting what the Cardinals imposed. However, it is possible the league could take action against the team for the burner phone scheme. In many instances, draft picks have been moved or forfeited as punishment.
Most previous draft pick forfeitures have been for salary cap violations, tampering allegations or other violations to league protocol.
With the ruling having come from arbitration and the NFL draft coming at the end of the month, we will see if the Cardinals end up losing any draft picks as a result of all of this.
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