Keenan Allen, a longtime NFL player who recently signed with the Indianapolis Colts, was arrested early Sunday for operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated, police said.
Page A9From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
Packers star lands paid exempt list after strangulation arrest; two more football players busted same week.
As it ran on the front
Watch the vocabulary. Nobody got 'arrested and released,' nobody got 'charged,' the phrase of the week was Commissioner's Exempt List, which sounds like a wine pairing but means paid time off while the league decides whether the charges matter to the schedule. One player gets a strangulation arrest and a full paycheck. That's the sentence, in that order, and nobody at the podium blinked delivering it.
Same week, a dismissed college safety gets arrested for allegedly attacking a teammate, and a pro running back gets popped for drunk driving. Three separate programs, three separate cities, same seven days, and the only thing connecting them on paper is a shared employer category: professional and semi-professional football. That's not a pattern I'm inventing, that's just what happens when you put three headlines next to each other and read them out loud, which is apparently a radical act now.…
…(cont) Here's the part that should bother you more than it does. None of them lost a paycheck this week. One of them got promoted to a list. The list exists so the league doesn't have to say 'suspended' while the charges are pending, because 'suspended' sounds like a decision and 'exempt' sounds like a formality, and formalities don't need press conferences. That's the whole trick — you build a vocabulary where the bad thing has a name that means the opposite of what happened.
Meanwhile, ask your cousin what happens if he misses a shift at the warehouse because he had a court date. No exempt list for him. No full pay while it gets sorted out. He gets a write-up, maybe a firing, and nobody calls it a personnel formality. The stadium gets the soft landing. The parking lot gets the hard one.
I'm not telling you these three guys are the same story. I'm telling you the institution around them is: it built a landing pad decades ago, kept it mowed, and every time a name goes down, the pad's right there. That's not coincidence, that's maintenance. Somebody keeps that grass cut.
“Three players, three arrest reports, one landing spot: paid leave. That's not a suspension, that's a severance package with the jersey number still on it. Meanwhile the guy at the bar gets fired for missing a shift, not choking anybody.”
“The Exempt List isn't punishment, it's due process — full pay while the league reviews the facts, same as anyone deserves before anything's proven. Three separate cases, three separate cities, nothing systemic here, just three in one week, which is coincidence, leagues have thousands of players.”
The receipts
Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs was reportedly set to hit the Commissioner's Exempt List ahead of the start of the 2026 NFL season.
He is accused of punching his teammate in the locker room earlier this month.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.