The NFL fined two players for drinking something on camera, spent a week getting torched by its own locker room, and folded completely — both fines rescinded, the whole policy rewritten before the dust even settled.
Adam Schefter broke it for ESPN: the league wiped out the fines on Jake Ferguson, tight end for the Cowboys, and Kyle Juszczyk, fullback for the 49ers. Those are the two guys who got nailed back in Week 2 for celebrations the league decided were secretly about beer.
Roger Goodell’s office played beer cop for a week and lost to a group chat.
Start with the fine that started this whole mess: Dallas got docked $13,611 after the league called Ferguson’s touchdown celebration against Washington an imitation of shotgunning a beer. Juszczyk got hit harder, $14,926, for “imitation of chugging a beer” after a Week 2 win over Miami, under a rule against “offensive demonstration… in poor taste.”
Nobody in that office apparently stopped to check what either celebration actually was.
Juszczyk’s turned out to be a juice box, not a beer. It’s a nod to his longstanding nickname, “Juice,” which is apparently not common knowledge in the NFL’s disciplinary wing despite the guy answering to it for most of his career. He said it himself: “I don’t even drink beer!” Then he went further, pointing to his original hypocrisy complaint about the league running a beer-sponsorship empire while fining players for pretending to drink one: “Even if it was beer, which it wasn’t, I still felt like it wasn’t an infraction.”
Ferguson’s case was worse for the league’s credibility. The “shotgun” gesture that cost him $13,611 was his longstanding Gatorade bit, the same one he’d performed and posted from practice for years before this season ever started. Cowboys compliance supplied the receipts, and the league had no real choice but to back off — the NFL finally admitted it can’t tell beer from Gatorade.
Schefter had the receipts, too.
https://twitter.com/AdamSchefter/status/2107868704994209890
Juszczyk’s reversal got the same documentation treatment.
https://twitter.com/AdamSchefter/status/2107831465681539546
Same day, the NFL and the NFLPA put out a joint statement confirming the beverage-celebration policy just got rewritten. Celebrations imitating drinking something won’t be considered violations or draw discipline going forward. Gray-area stuff gets a warning first. Fines only follow if a player repeats the gesture after that warning. Violence, weapons, gang signs, drugs, and sexual gestures are still banned, for the record.
The NFLPA’s complaint from the jump was procedural: neither the union nor the players got any notice these specific gestures would draw fines, and some guys had been doing the exact same move for years without a problem.
Fans and reporters did not let this one go quietly. Bucs beat writer Rick Stroud summed up the whole week in one line: “Nearly $15k fine because no one paid attention in the league office?”
ESPN’s Nick Wagoner called the reversal “an early morning victory for common sense,” which is a polite way of saying the bar was somewhere underground.
Here’s the part that keeps this from being a clean fan-triumph story. Colts guard Matt Goncalves got fined $8,847 in that same Week 2 wave for a similar gesture, and as of today his fine hasn’t moved an inch. This isn’t blanket amnesty — it’s two specific guys catching a break and a policy fix for next time. Goncalves is still out his money, and nobody’s mentioning that part today.
The next absurd fine survives exactly as long as it takes Schefter to tweet about it, and Goodell’s office knows that now too.
