Report: Greg Hardy to Exempt: Commissioner’s Permission List
The Ray Rice situation may well have a lot of bearing on Greg Hardy’s future, but his present is being driven by the reaction of the Minnesota Vikings to the Adrian Peterson alleged child abuse situation. If you weren’t paying attention, the Vikings deactivated Peterson for last week’s game at the Patriots. It was then and only then that the Panthers responded in kind by deactivating Hardy for the Lions game. Previously the Panthers had been holding to the due process line on Hardy.
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With Peterson not playing, Hardy would have drawn scrutiny every time he was on the field. There would have been constant comparison between the two in the broadcast. Don’t believe me? How often did Ray McDonald come up in the Bears-49ers game? The Vikings’ initial handling of Peterson forced the Panthers’ hand. They did not want to take more flak over Hardy.
When the Vikings talked of reinstating Peterson for the coming week, the Panthers quietly broached the same possibility with Hardy. When that blew up in the Vikings’ face and sponsors started to pull out, the Vikings quickly moved to put Peterson on the Commissioner’s exempt list. That meant that Peterson was inactive and the team would have to ask the commissioner for permission to get him back. It also means that they get the roster spot back. The Vikings knew they were in trouble when they were being decried for moral failings by the Anheuser-Busch Company.
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Now, the Bleacher Report’s Jason Cole reports that the Panthers are about to do the same thing to Hardy, which would effectively make him unavailable until his legal process is finished. The Panthers and Hardy supposedly met this morning to discuss this option and what it would mean.
The long and short of it is that Greg Hardy will most likely not play the rest of this season. Whatever the Panthers do from here on out, they will have to do without him.