7:30pm: Gordon was notified in writing about his lateness on multiple occasions, a league source tells Mary Kay Cabot of The Plain Dealer (on Twitter). The NFLPA grievance claims that he wasn’t notified or fined for it.
9:11am: The NFL Players Association has filed a non-injury grievance vs. the Browns, challenging the one-game suspension the team handed out to Josh Gordon at the end of the 2014 season, reports Adam Schefter of ESPN.com (via Twitter). The ban, which happened prior to Week 17, came from the team, and is separate from the year-long suspension the wideout later received from the league.
This grievance had been anticipated, since suspending Gordon for the final game of the 2014 campaign ensured that he only played in five games, one short of the six he would require for an accrued season. While the discipline may have been warranted, it looked like it also could have been a ploy by the Browns to push the 23-year-old’s eligibility for unrestricted free agency back by a year.
Regardless of whether or not Gordon’s suspension from the team is upheld by an arbitrator, the wideout’s unrestricted free agency will still be delayed by at least one year due to his more recent ban from the league, since a player doesn’t receive an accrued season when he spends the year on the reserve/suspended list. A player is eligible to be a UFA after four accrued seasons, but if both of Gordon’s suspensions stand, he’ll only have two accrued seasons by 2016, which is when he originally would’ve been set to hit the open market.