{"id":25775,"date":"2024-08-26T21:04:53","date_gmt":"2024-08-26T21:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=25775"},"modified":"2026-03-13T16:58:46","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T16:58:46","slug":"code-of-conduct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2024\/08\/code-of-conduct\/","title":{"rendered":"Code of Conduct"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Chris Herrington ’96 \/ Photo by David J. Turner<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2015, when the National Football League hired B. Todd Jones \u201979 for the newly created job of senior vice president and special counsel for conduct, essentially the organization\u2019s chief disciplinary officer, America\u2019s biggest sports league hired someone whose career r\u00e9sum\u00e9 was well suited to the task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They hired a two-time former US Attorney, who served in the District of Minnesota in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. They hired the nation\u2019s first Black head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. And they hired a football fan, someone who had suffered through hard-luck seasons of his hometown Cincinnati Bengals and adopted home-state Minnesota Vikings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And also four rough seasons while a student football fan at Macalester during the late \u201970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe four years I was there, the football program did not win a game,\u201d says Jones, who maintains a family home in St. Paul with wife Margaret Samanant \u201980.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the NFL also hired someone whose deeper credentials, whose life experiences before those august appointments, perhaps made him temperamentally, intellectually, and socially suited to help the league through what\u2019s been a notable transition\u2014from the domestic violence crisis that led the NFL to create the position through a complicated period of social justice and activism issues and into new challenges spurred by the rise of online sports betting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m very proud of my Macalester experience, particularly at the time that I was there, where social justice issues were at the forefront at a very granular level,\u201d says Jones, whose journey from Macalester to becoming a US Attorney included a law degree from the University of Minnesota, a stint in the Marine Corps, and private practice at several law firms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A political science and history major at Mac, Jones counts history professors Norm and Emily Rosenberg and Peter Weisensel and economics professor Karl Egge as favorites. History professor Mahmoud El-Kati was a particular influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMahmoud was very supportive. He was very active,\u201d says Jones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The late \u201970s was a challenging period for Macalester financially, but Jones credits then President John B. Davis and Dean of Students Earl Bowman for aggressively recruiting Black students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a pretty tight community and Mahmoud was right at the center of it. Given the high school that I went to in Cincinnati was sort of suburbanized, with a small Black student population, Mac is where I got the deep dive into African American history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jones became involved in the Carter-Mondale presidential campaign while on campus and interned in the office of Hubert Humphrey, the former vice president who had then returned to the US Senate and was a visiting professor at Macalester. There, he learned the importance of developing political connections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jones\u2019s political, military, and law enforcement credentials led him to an unexpected opportunity with the NFL. At the time of Jones\u2019s hire, the league was struggling with a series of domestic violence incidents involving star players.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to overseeing the enforcement of league policies for off-field conduct, Jones put more focus on education and prevention, counseling incoming players ahead of the league\u2019s annual rookie draft, balancing discipline with guidance in approaching a league composed entirely of young men, the majority of whom are Black.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat\u2019s always been my view for better or worse,\u201d says Jones. \u201cI was a prosecutor during the \u2018war on drugs\u2019 and you\u2019d see the downstream ramifications of strictly focusing on incarceration and discipline as compared to intervention and prevention.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2016, the league became the center of national controversy, with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem as a form of protest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the protest effectively ending Kaepernick\u2019s career, the NFL found its relationship with its players strained, something underscored a few years later in 2020 when George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis and a group of NFL players posted a video criticizing the league\u2019s commissioner for not speaking out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jones\u2019s law enforcement and military background has garnered him the ear of the NFL\u2019s leadership, but as a Black man comfortable with activism and calls for social justice, he respects the players\u2019 urge to use their public platforms for more than football.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Jones\u2019s office, he keeps a photo of football player Jim Brown, basketball players Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and boxing legend Muhammad Ali together at a press conference related to Ali\u2019s resistance to the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe league is in a completely different space since the Kaepernick experience, on social justice issues and just sort of general broader societal impact,\u201d says Jones. \u201cEverybody has learned over the last six or seven years here at the league that it\u2019s not just about what happens on the field. It\u2019s community. And I think it\u2019s sincere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, a different challenge has become paramount: the increasingly widespread legalization of online sports betting. This spring, baseball and basketball made headlines with gambling scandals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jones and the NFL had already confronted this problem. After ten players were suspended last year for violating the league\u2019s gambling policy, the NFL pivoted into building systems, monitoring, and promoting the game\u2019s integrity, he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Jones started the job, he estimates the NFL was dealing with sixty to seventy off-field incidents a year that resulted in player arrest. Since 2020, he says the number is down to twenty to thirty a year, in a league that employs more than 1,600 players.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps Jones has done his work too well. In May, as he entered his ninth season with the league, he was notified that his position had been eliminated. In September, he\u2019ll return to his old law firm, Robins Kaplan, as a partner, working in their Minneapolis and New York offices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chris Herrington \u201996 is a sports and culture columnist for <\/em>The Daily Memphian.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With a grounding in history and political science, B. Todd Jones \u201979 has navigated high-profile roles in law enforcement, government, and the National Football League.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":875,"featured_media":25903,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[46,22],"class_list":["post-25775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","tag-history","tag-political-science","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25775"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29615,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25775\/revisions\/29615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}