News broke last month that Patriots receiver and Tom Brady favorite Julian Edelman was facing a four-game suspension at the start of the 2018 season for violating the NFL’s performance-enhancing drug policy.
Now, in a patented NFL news dump in the evening before a national holiday, the league announced Edelman has lost his appeal, and will indeed serve the suspension in its entirety.
Julian Edelman will officially miss the first four games of the 2018 season.
The New England Patriots wide receiver’s appeal of his four-game suspension was denied Tuesday, NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport reported. Edelman’s ban stems from a violation of the NFL’s performance-enhancing substances policy.
Edelman will miss the Patriots’ first four regular-season games against the Texans, Jaguars, Lions and Dolphins.
Edelman missed time last year recovering from an ACL tear, but he’d reportedly been on track to start the season healthy. Now it looks like New England will have to make do without him for the first quarter of the season. Of course, last year they went to the Super Bowl without him, and they’ll only have one divisional game in that stretch. (Though the Jacksonville game is an AFC Championship game rematch.)
The Patriots will probably be fine, because they’re the Patriots; Tom Brady once missed the first four games of a season, after all, and they still won the Super Bowl. But it is a nice bit of schadenfreude for the rest of the league.
[NFL]
