Adam Schefter said Monday on Pat McAfee’s show that there’s “a real possibility” Puka Nacua never misses a single game to NFL discipline this season, and the league didn’t need him to say it out loud for that to already be the plan.
A month ago, Schefter described this differently: on Aug. 11 he said it was “within the realm of options” that Nacua would sit out the Los Angeles Rams’ Week 1 trip to Australia. That range of outcomes didn’t tighten toward punishment in the month since. It widened toward nothing at all, and that’s not how conduct-policy cases usually move.
The lawsuit hasn’t gone anywhere in the meantime. A woman alleges in a civil suit that Nacua bit her and a friend during a Dec. 31 dinner and made an unprovoked antisemitic comment. Nacua denies it, and his attorney, Levi McCathern, has called the biting incident “horseplay” and denied the antisemitic remark outright.
The case includes counts of assault, battery, gender violence and negligence, and it isn’t scheduled for trial until March 2028 — a jury won’t hear any of it for another 18 months.
The NFL isn’t waiting on that verdict. It never needed one. The Personal Conduct Policy doesn’t require a finding of guilt or even a filed criminal charge before the league can suspend someone, and Von Miller served a four-game suspension in October 2024 under that same policy months after prosecutors had already closed the underlying criminal case without charging him. The league ran its own process and acted anyway. The mechanism to act on Nacua exists right now, this week, before Thursday’s kickoff.
I read enough legal reporting outside of sports to recognize the shape of this. The fewer hard dates written into a policy, the more room it gives the people enforcing it to wait for a convenient moment.
Thursday is about as inconvenient a moment as the league could invent for itself. Nacua is expected to play against the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL’s first regular-season game in Australia, a stage Sean McVay confirmed Sunday now that Nacua’s psoas injury has cleared. Matthew Stafford’s new $55 million-a-year deal is supposed to buy the Rams a receiver worth targeting on the league’s global broadcast debut, not a suspension replacement. Suspend their best receiver during the Rams-49ers game in Melbourne and the league turns its own showcase into a story about a lawsuit. Let him play, and the discipline question stays exactly where the NFL prefers it: open, unresolved, and nobody’s problem until after the ratings come in.
Nothing about that incentive structure has anything to do with what actually happened at that dinner in December. Whether Nacua did what the lawsuit claims gets decided by a jury in 2028, if it gets that far. The league’s calendar doesn’t wait on that answer, and it isn’t offering one of its own for why it’s waiting anyway.
Two different things keep getting blurred into one, and they shouldn’t be. The antisemitic comment in the lawsuit is a disputed allegation Nacua denies. It is not the same incident as the antisemitic gesture Nacua made on a livestream last year, which he apologized for at the time. The league fined him $25,000 separately, for criticizing officials in a different livestream entirely.
Underdog picked up Schefter’s line and posted it:
https://x.com/UnderdogNFL/status/2097000183590461752
Schefter didn’t break news with that quote. He said the quiet part on a Monday morning show, on the record, and the league let it sit there.
Nobody in that building needs a deadline, just a reason to care.
