Maybe today. Ok maybe tomorrow. It’s probably going to happen next week. I’m sure it’ll be done sometime in the next month. He’ll be back before the season starts. By midseason?
It never happened. Randy Gregory never returned to the Dallas Cowboys in 2019 from yet another indefinite suspension. The oft-maligned-yet-very-talented defensive end has been suspended for more games than he has appeared in, and is currently still under an indefinite ban. The landscape around Gregory has changed a lot, but as of yet he’s still not on the Cowboys 2020 roster. The 6-foot-5, 255-pound athletic marvel will turn 28 during the season, with only two accrued seasons under his belt.
In the most recent CBA, the league finally caught up to the times and reduced the penalties and testing limits for positive marijuana tests to the point players are no longer in danger of being suspended for it. Gregory’s only issue since the day he announced he was entering the 2015 NFL draft has been a marijuana addiction based on self-medicating his bipolar disorder. League law was league law though, and it saw him miss all but two games in 2016, all of 2017 and all of 2019.
He’s now missed 46 games due to suspension, four due to injury and appeared in 28.
There was a thought at one time that Gregory was going to be on the fast track back to the Cowboys for the 2019 season. After being indefinitely suspended in February, word emerged that it was the result of a New Year’s Eve celebration lapse. There was scuttlebutt the league was already starting to relax their penalties for testing violations for players who were obviously working to stay in good graces but occasionally slipped.
But then April came, and the Cowboys’ brass started making statements about Gregory just wanting “to do things the right way” and the writing was on the wall that he was going back through a rehab process.
The season came and went, and the talk about Gregory’s return faded into background noise until the offseason. And now, six months since Dallas played their last game, Gregory still isn’t back.
He has applied for reinstatement, and there continues to be widespread information being disseminated that he should be available for the 2020 season, but it hasn’t happened yet as the calendar has turned to June.
Gregory’s roller coaster
When Gregory was reinstated for 2018, it came by the hands of a coordinated effort. The front office and his teammates all went to bat for him, an entire binder of character witnesses was turned over to the league offices outlining how Gregory’s only flaw – which in the changing minds of society wasn’t really one outside of breaking his employer’s rules – was his dependency on marijuana to cope with daily life.
You know how when you have a string of bad luck that has followed you around and something good happens, you’re afraid to speak on it and jinx it?
One has to wonder in retrospect that’s how Gregory felt after his “redemption” story was published by ESPN in December of 2018, just a few weeks before the failed test that led to the latest year-long ban.
On December 4, ESPN’s Elizabeth Merrill wrote a long-form profile on Gregory, going into detail what had been his darkest place, that led to the three consecutive suspensions that wiped out 94% of his second and third seasons. We wrote up a synopsis at the time, entitled “The Cavalry Came”, focusing on the intervention that led to his eventual reinstatement for the 2018 season.
His lawyer, Daniel Moskowitz, had been on his case to check into a rehab clinic in Southern California. Moskowitz booked flights, but Gregory resisted. Moskowitz tried the good cop route first, sending texts saying encouraging things like, “You’re better than this, Randy.” But eventually, the words devolved to, “You’re f—ing going!”
Moskowitz watched from a distance when the men in the dark SUVs came for Gregory. Moskowitz will not say who they were. “I made an extreme call,” he says, “and the cavalry came.”
Gregory, a second-round draft pick and player who has still been suspended more games than he has played, needed saving. He was at rock bottom according to Merrill’s story, suspended, high all of the time and utterly along. Cut off from the team, by virtue of the NFL’s nonsensical policy where a banned player cannot be in contact with a billion-dollar organization that has the resources to help, Gregory didn’t know the direction his career, or life, was headed.
That’s when his lawyer said enough was enough, and orchestrated a well-intentioned kidnapping of sorts which led to Gregory’s time in a California rehab facility.
Merrill’s account goes into telling, intricate detail of a childhood of anxiety and panic attacks, as early as the age of 8 or 9. How that led to him smoking weed as a teenager.
The article details how he decided he was going to quit smoking before attending JuCo, before he learned the difficulty of fitting in where he “was too proper for the black kids and too black for the white kids,” a common integration problem for so many Black youth who lived in between the two vastly different societies.
Less than two months later Gregory was back under indefinite suspension for failing to meet the requirements of his previous reinstatement, and that portion of the cycle continues.
Gregory on the field of play
(from C.C. Boorman)
The difference between the 2018 Gregory and what was on display briefly in 2016 was remarkable. He has worked to develop more moves in his rush tool bag and is maturing into a player who could become a high level three-down right defensive end. Where he once was a one-dimensional, speed-around-the-edge threat, last season he was much more effective with his hand use, bend to the pocket and throttling back and regrouping to keep his pressure campaigns alive.
Gregory’s pass rushing skills are now much more well developed, bested only by star DeMarcus Lawrence. If he was partnered with a deeper faster crew pressuring from the inside, which the club hopes it has moved towards with the selection of Hill, it would be a very tough assignment for any offensive line to deal with.
Contract Status
Assuming Gregory does get reinstated before the season, he’ll be 28 with just two accrued seasons under his belt.
I suggested back in 2016 that if one followed the timeline of Gregory’s failed tests, it was pretty apparent the league did Gregory a favor by allowing him to play in the final two games of the regular season. Players who are suspended don’t get paid, and knowing he had a year-long ban facing him, getting him two regular season paychecks was a necessary gift.
Last April, after he was suspended, Dallas gave Gregory a one-year extension that allowed him to get a signing bonus to put a little money in his pocket ahead of his year out of football.
He would have been an exclusive-rights free agent and under team control for 2020 anyway, by virtue of only the two accrued seasons towards free agency, but the $310,000 signing bonus floated him through the suspension year.
Following the 2020 season, assuming he plays, Gregory will be a restricted free agent where Dallas could tender him at the lowest level (original round) and should feel protected no team would risk giving up a second-round pick to steal him away. After the support shown to him by Jerry Jones, it’d be a bit shocking if he entertained other offers to relocate away from his support system anyway.
Current Climate
If and when Gregory returns, the Cowboys will be in a different place. He has some competition for snaps as he’ll try and work his way back into a rotation. Dallas also signed a then-suspended Aldon Smith, with a much longer and diverse rule violation ledger than Gregory. Smith’s includes arrests and non-marijuana discretions.
He’s already been reinstated by Roger Goodell, a function of applying earlier than Gregory.
The club also has two late-round and UDFA rookies from 2019 (Joe Johnson and Jalen Jelks) as well as 2020 fifth-round pick Bradlee Anae.
Returning from injury is the flexible Tyrone Crawford, the elder statesman of the defensive line and the penciled in starter opposite DeMarcus Lawrence. Along with Dorance Armstrong, a 2018 fourth-round pick, there’s plenty of competition for snaps for Gregory.
There’s also may be plenty of cover, as Smith’s addition will likely be a bigger storyline nationally whenever the team can convene for training camp.
Of course, with other famously suspended players getting in trouble for more than just weed, Gregory is the poster boy for the NFL’s new stance. Jones was very public in his support for Gregory’s situation and vowed to work on reforming the league’s policy, which happened.
Now all he has to do is win his appeal, and get back to his sanctuary of playing on the field.
This is part of our Countdown to the Regular Season player profile countdown. With 93 days remaining until the NFL’s first game, up next is defensive tackle Gerald McCoy.
| Antwaun Woods | Tyrone Crawford | Trysten Hill | Jalen Jelks |
| Dontari Poe |
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