The NFL Can Punish Josh Jacobs. Getting the Evidence Is Another Matter.

Rapid Response / Legal Alert Update | September 18, 2026

Josh Jacobs walked into a Brown County courtroom on September 10 and pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery and criminal damage to property arising from a May 23 incident involving his then-girlfriend.

On the battery charge, Jacobs was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and court costs. The criminal-damage charge can be dismissed after one year if Jacobs satisfies conditions that include staying out of further trouble, having no contact with the woman, submitting to supervision, completing counseling and paying restitution.

In many contexts, that would mark the beginning of the end.

For the NFL, it may be closer to the beginning of a separate proceeding.

Jacobs remains on the Commissioner’s Exempt List, where he has been since late August. That means he cannot practice or play in games while the league conducts its review, although he continues to be paid.

And the league reportedly wants to see one thing in particular before deciding what comes next:

the video.

Home surveillance footage reportedly captured part of the May incident. According to the criminal complaint, the footage corroborates portions of the woman’s account. The video has not been publicly released.

NFL Network reported September 13 that the league was pursuing “legal maneuvers” in an effort to obtain it.

Then the evidence fight became more complicated.

The evidence was temporarily sealed after Jacobs entered his plea.

On September 15, attorneys representing his former girlfriend asked Judge Marc Hammer to make that protection permanent. Their proposed order argues that disclosure of investigative and discovery materials—including recordings and digital evidence—could impair her privacy, dignity, personal security and emotional well-being. The request invokes protections afforded crime victims under Wisconsin’s Marsy’s Law.

Then came a potentially dramatic headline: Judge rejects request to permanently seal Josh Jacobs evidence.

Technically, he did.

Substantively, not yet.

Brown County has since confirmed that Hammer electronically declined the proposed order because it was submitted in the wrong format. Attorneys refiled it, and the permanent-sealing question remains unresolved. A status conference is scheduled for September 24.

That distinction matters.

This is not yet a ruling that the public interest outweighs the woman’s privacy rights.

It is not yet a ruling that the NFL is entitled to see the footage.

And it is not yet a ruling that the video will become public.

For now, the important development is that the fight remains alive.

Here is where the case becomes a useful sports-law explainer.

The NFL does not need a criminal conviction before it can punish a player.

Its Personal Conduct Policy expressly contemplates league discipline even where conduct does not result in a criminal conviction. The NFL conducts its own investigation and can consider law-enforcement materials, court records and evidence developed independently.

That is why the distinction between the criminal case and the NFL case matters so much.

Criminal prosecutors have to prove a criminal charge within the criminal-justice system. The NFL is determining whether conduct violated a private workplace policy operating through the league’s collective-bargaining framework.

Those are different questions, decided through different processes.

The league also possesses considerable power over Jacobs himself.

Under the Personal Conduct Policy, players must cooperate with league investigations and provide truthful responses to requests for testimony, documents, physical evidence and other relevant information. Failure to cooperate can itself provide grounds for discipline. The policy even expressly states that the Fifth Amendment protection against compelled self-incrimination does not apply to the league’s workplace investigation, allowing the NFL to require a player to cooperate even while related government proceedings are pending.

So the NFL can interview Jacobs.

It can demand his cooperation.

It can develop its own evidence.

And it can ultimately pursue discipline even if a prosecutor never secured the kind of conviction that would be necessary to punish him through the criminal system.

But there is an important limit.

The NFL’s contractual authority runs very far inside professional football.

It does not turn the league into a government agency.

The NFL can require Jacobs to cooperate because Jacobs participates in a league governed by the CBA and Personal Conduct Policy.

The NFL cannot simply issue an NFL directive requiring a Wisconsin judge, the Brown County District Attorney or local police to give it sealed government evidence.

That evidence is controlled by the legal rules governing the criminal proceeding, public records and the rights of the people involved in the case.

And here, the woman involved in the incident is invoking a significant countervailing right: privacy.

Wisconsin’s Constitution gives crime victims rights including dignity, respect, fairness and privacy. Wisconsin guidance also recognizes that Marsy’s Law can add weight to governmental interests favoring nondisclosure when authorities conduct the usual public-records balancing analysis.

That does not automatically mean every requested record must remain sealed.

It means there is a genuine legal question a court has to resolve.

And the NFL’s commercial interest in investigating one of its players does not automatically answer it.

That creates the central tension in the Jacobs case: The NFL may have enough authority to punish Jacobs without having enough authority to obtain every piece of evidence it wants to use against him.

That is a very different kind of power.

Because video can change cases.

The league has documentary evidence, a criminal complaint, the plea disposition and whatever information its own investigators obtain. Jacobs can also be interviewed.

But surveillance footage provides something those materials cannot: an independent visual record of at least part of the incident.

That matters when a disciplinary system has to determine not merely whether some misconduct occurred, but what occurred, how serious it was and what punishment should follow.

The NFL’s Personal Conduct Policy identifies domestic violence and certain assaultive conduct as particularly serious. The policy provides a baseline six-game suspension for specified first violations involving domestic violence and related conduct, subject to adjustment based on aggravating or mitigating circumstances.

Whether that framework ultimately applies to Jacobs—and whether any discipline lands above or below a baseline—will depend on the league’s findings and the disciplinary process required by the CBA.

The NFL therefore has an obvious reason to want the most direct evidence available before making that decision.

But wanting evidence and being legally entitled to it are two different things.

Jacobs is currently being paid while unable to play.

That sometimes creates the impression that the Commissioner’s Exempt List is itself a suspension.

Under the CBA, it is not supposed to function that way.

It is paid administrative leave used before final discipline is determined. And the current CBA specifically addresses what happens if discipline eventually follows: regular-season and postseason games missed on the Commissioner’s Exempt List are credited against an eventual suspension. If that occurs, the player must return salary for the credited games for which he was previously paid.

That makes the calendar important.

Jacobs is already missing games.

If the NFL ultimately imposes a suspension, some or all of that missed time could count toward it, depending on the length of the discipline imposed.

The longer the evidence dispute continues, therefore, the stranger the practical situation becomes.

Jacobs can remain unavailable while the league investigates. The league wants evidence that may sharpen its disciplinary decision. The person whose privacy is directly implicated is asking a state court to keep that evidence sealed.

Meanwhile, every week that passes changes the practical consequences of whatever suspension may eventually arrive.

Professional sports leagues sometimes look like governments.

They write rules.

They investigate misconduct.

They conduct hearings.

They impose fines and suspensions.

They determine who can participate in an enormously valuable industry.

But the Jacobs dispute illustrates the point where that analogy breaks down.

The NFL’s power comes principally from contracts, collective bargaining and participation in the league.

A court’s power comes from law.

The league can tell Jacobs that he must answer questions.

It cannot tell Judge Hammer how to rule.

The league can impose discipline under its Personal Conduct Policy even without a criminal conviction.

It cannot transform sealed government evidence into league evidence merely because seeing it would make its investigation easier.

And that may leave the NFL in an uncomfortable position: broad authority to make the final disciplinary decision, but incomplete authority to build the evidentiary record it would prefer to have before making it.

That is the game behind this particular game.

The date to watch is September 24.

Judge Hammer is scheduled to address the renewed request for permanent protection of the evidence. Because the earlier proposed order was rejected for formatting rather than on the merits, neither side should treat September 17 as a substantive victory.

If the court permits some form of disclosure, attention will immediately shift to whether—and under what restrictions—the NFL can obtain the surveillance footage.

If the evidence remains protected, the league must decide whether to proceed using the information already available to it, pursue some other lawful avenue for access or continue investigating before determining discipline.

Either way, Jacobs’s no-contest plea did not answer the question most relevant to football.

It simply moved that question into a different system.

The criminal court has largely decided what the State of Wisconsin will do with Josh Jacobs.

Now the NFL has to decide what professional football will do with him—and first, it has to figure out what evidence it is actually allowed to see.