Packers Have One More Chance to Be the Adult in the Room and Cut Josh Jacobs

Back in my day, teams bent morality only when there was a pretty good chance we’d forget about it afterward. We didn’t love it back then. We didn’t condone it. We didn’t digest it all that well, either. But when you saw how sad and desperate some of these NFL owners, general managers and coaches were to save their own hides and win football games, you could at least arrive at the series of mental gymnastics that could cause someone to try and short-circuit building with integrity and paint over all those men of character signs in the facility they hung up when they got the job.

Remember four years ago during the Browns’ Deshaun Watson gamble, for example? At the time, it was one of the great experiments in public sentiment, with the theory being that Watson would play so well—as he had largely had until the moment he was signed—that, much like fellow AFC North quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, his sins would become a smaller and smaller paragraph as the story continued to be written. The 40-minute press conference to introduce him, which had to begin with a five-minute preamble from the general manager acknowledging how distressing this signing was to many people, in addition to countless questions about Watson’s bold assertion that he never even disrespected a woman in his entire life, feels like a relic of a bygone era. Hell, Andy Reid got about three minutes-plus last week on signing Justin Tucker—who was accused of sexual misconduct from 16 different massage therapists from eight different spas and served a 10-game suspension last year—to the freaking practice squad.

Andy Reid on the signing of kicker Justin Tucker:

“We had a practice squad position open, and so for security, we brought him [Justin Tucker] in and put him in that spot that we had open.”

Adds: “Butker gets it. He knows that that's part of this business. He's struggled a… pic.twitter.com/wdNvhXc3Sb
— KC Sports Network (@KCSportsNetwork) October 28, 2026

And while Cleveland’s experiment seems to have backfired (even though it is still widely recognized as one of the worst trades in NFL history and Watson is still in the bottom tier of NFL quarterbacks in terms of EPA per play this season despite Cleveland being in first place), it did provide teams with a valuable bit of information about this day and age: Outrage is incredibly selective and is almost entirely based on performance and record. No matter what, there will be sufficient victim-blaming to even out the comments and present an accuser as a money-grabbing enemy of The Team and The Player. Browns fans were ready to Molotov-cocktail the stadium after a 34–10 loss to the Jaguars to start the season, with the replies to X posts about Hispanic Heritage Month flooded with messages of disapproval about the quarterback (again, five years into his contract, but it’s never too late). After three consecutive victories, the fan base was incensed when I even suggested a more competent upgrade for Watson’s backup, given his history of injury and erratic play.

It’s this kind of forcefield that teams like Kansas City are hiding behind for even the most marginal roster upgrade. We are now flagrantly sacrificing our morals for a possible upgrade at backup kicker position, or a running back gaining all of 2.2 yards per carry. Speaking of which, that’s why we’re all here this time.

On Friday, NBC26 in Green Bay, Wis., got a handful of previously unreleased documents on the Josh Jacobs case. While the police were investigating his arrest from the summer—the one that placed Jacobs on the commissioner’s exempt list after Jacobs pled no contest to misdemeanor battery and criminal property damage in September—they heard from three other women who said that Jacobs had also abused them.

You can read a summary of those allegations here. They include Jacobs slapping a woman, throwing her on the floor, spitting on her and pinning her onto a bed. Another said that Jacobs pushed her against a wall, and tossed her personal belongings out of a window. For the crowd presuming this is just an elaborate witch hunt, one of the victims was a noncitizen, and Jacobs allegedly made it clear that she could be deported if she reported him. None of the women went to lawyers, either. They went to police.

Jacobs presumably knew all this when he appeared to pantomime a handcuff celebration after scoring a touchdown on Thursday, which he blamed both the NFL media and Amazon Prime for mischaracterizing, noting, without a hint of irony, that this was some reference to a gospel song (which, even if true, is, in the absolute best-case scenario, the most tone-deaf decision he could have possibly made in the moment).

Josh Jacobs is catching a ton of heat for this celebration which appeared to be mocking “handcuffs” …

In the postgame Jacobs was really ticked off and said if you watched the entire celebration, it was coordinated and in reference to “Break(ing) the Chains”, it’s a gospel song. pic.twitter.com/Z3ZYx32v2m
— uSTADIUM (@uSTADIUM) October 30, 2026

And, whether Green Bay knew about these previous allegations, they most certainly do now.

Back in my day, teams also cut the player at this stage; the one where it becomes clear there is more information out there. Embarrassing themselves once was usually enough, but as a slow flood of allegations paints what appears to be a sharpened picture of the person they’re daily twisting themselves into a pretzel for, it seems less worth it. The Browns motored through additional Watson allegations, and now Green Bay faces a similar opportunity.

And as they mull it over, I hope they know that we can see right through the glass house now. Coaches and teams aren’t even feigning performative concern anymore, and we all get it. These press conferences from coaches and general managers in the aftermath of signing someone with a history of abuse against women are a putrid potpourri of forgiveness, redemption and legalese. But Watson, for example, still hasn’t even acknowledged a lick of wrongdoing. Tucker, it seems, is still warring against the allegations as well. Jacobs, when asked what he learned from his September arrest said, “It’s always better to just exclude yourself from a situation, take time to think about it, and kind of move from there," which, if even an ounce of the three unsealed allegations are true, makes Jacobs’s conclusion a meaningless puddle of expired word smoothie.

When the Lions cut Terrion Arnold for allegations of orchestrating a kidnapping and beating of people he believed (incorrectly) stole his property, it was one of the more stunning occurrences in recent NFL history because it happened. The further we drift from even a more socially acceptable form of selective justice (and, I think it deserves mentioning, given my tongue-in-cheek introduction that even what we had a while back was abhorrently gross), the more the rot continues to fester and metastasize at the core of it all.

The Packers have one more chance to be the adult in the room before becoming responsible by association for what happens without one. Not after they trade for Jonathan Taylor and don’t need to hedge their bets anymore (because, if they believed Jacobs to be legitimately innocent, why consider paying a second-round pick for another running back?). Right now. The decision is theirs.

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