Bradley Chubb got hit in the face, on camera, by a player who was supposed to be trading jerseys with him, and I have been waiting since Monday night for the NFL to say one word about it. Nothing. No fine, no suspension announcement, no statement, no sign the league office noticed a grown man threw a punch on the SoFi Stadium turf in front of a national audience. The NFL knows how to move fast. It moved fast for Chubb three weeks ago. It just hasn’t found the same urgency for him now.
The game itself deserved the headlines. Tyler Bass banked a 45-yard field goal with under two minutes left in overtime to give the Buffalo Bills a 37-34 win over the Los Angeles Rams, and Josh Allen picked up his 100th career victory, his first ever in overtime. Worth remembering, because what happened after the final whistle nearly swallowed the whole story.
Rams left tackle Alaric Jackson was out doing the normal postgame ritual, swapping jerseys with Bills lineman Deone Walker, when Chubb said something to him. Jackson walked over. Words got exchanged. Then Jackson threw a right hand that landed on Chubb’s face, and it took tight end Colby Parkinson getting between them to end it. This happened in the open, on the field, with cameras rolling. There’s no ambiguity about what occurred.
https://x.com/espn/status/2109867479191134376
Chubb, to his credit, tried to wave it off. He told ESPN, “It’s just emotions, you know what I mean? Emotional game. It was a close game. And, you know, they always catch the second guy.” Pressed again: “Like I said, it was emotional game. Tempers got flared. But it is what it is.” Asked if he was smiling about it: “I’m just ready for next week… You see, I’m smiling, I’m with my team.”
That’s a man trying not to make this worse for anyone, and good for him. It doesn’t erase what happened. Somebody hit him in the face, and the league staying quiet about it is bullshit. Bills safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson, who clearly isn’t worried about diplomacy, posted afterward: “So what we gone do about dude hitting Chub!” He noticed. Millions of people watching live noticed. The league apparently did not.
The silence is infuriating for a specific reason, and it’s the whole spine of this piece: Chubb has already been on the business end of the NFL’s quick-trigger discipline this season. Three weeks ago, the league fined him $17,911 for a late hit on Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert, thrown on the Chargers’ first offensive snap of the game. That fine got processed and announced within days. Clean, efficient, no drama. So the league can absolutely move with speed when a quarterback’s body is involved. It just hasn’t managed the same speed for the body of the guy it already fined for touching a quarterback. Chubb’s own face, it turns out, doesn’t rate the same institutional concern as Justin Herbert’s ribs.
The fine schedule lists striking, kicking, tripping and kneeing as fineable up to $12,537 for a first offense, and if the league classifies this as fighting rather than a simple strike, that number jumps to $41,907. Jackson isn’t a first-time visitor to the discipline office, either. He served a two-game suspension in 2024 for an unrelated personal conduct violation. None of that history has produced so much as a press release this time.
We know the league has a playbook for exactly this situation, too. Last season, Lions safety Brian Branch got suspended one game by the league office for instigating a postgame brawl. One game, for starting something. Jackson threw a punch that connected, and the response so far has been a shrug.
This is the same league that once fined a guy for drinking a beer on the sideline and fined Azeez Al-Shaair for having a heartbeat near a quarterback. It finds the speed and the outrage when the violation is small and doesn’t require anyone upstairs to think hard about what actually counts as violence. A punch to a player’s face, thrown by an opponent, on national television, apparently needs more deliberation than a beer.
Maybe a fine shows up eventually, some number that reads like a parking ticket next to Jackson’s contract, timed for a news cycle nobody’s watching anymore. Maybe nothing gets announced at all, and this becomes one more thing that happened and then quietly didn’t. Either way, this was never really about Jackson. It’s about which players the league decides are worth protecting fast, and which ones can wait. Chubb already knows the answer. He’s the one who got fined for touching somebody else’s quarterback, and the one left holding an ice pack while the league takes its time.
