Of course, the 49ers don’t play the Cardinals until Week 9.
On Thursday some rather unexpected news hit for the Arizona Cardinals. Cornerback Patrick Peterson has been suspended six games for a PED violation. The suspension not only entails the aforementioned violation, but per Ian Rapoport, it also involves a masking agent. Rapoport pointed out it could have been a four-game suspension, but because of the masking agent, it’s six.
The Arizona Cardinals need help anywhere they can get. They had a decent draft but are still hurting for consistent playmakers on both sides of the ball. Given the age of Larry Fitzgerald, it could be argued that Peterson is the best player on that Arizona Cardinals squad.
As far as impacting the San Francisco 49ers, the 49ers won’t meet up with the Cardinals until Week 9. Those of you hoping to face a Peterson-less Cardinals squad are going to be disappointed. The Seattle Seahawks are the only team in the NFC West to take advantage of this power play.
It’s rather interesting how this suspension went down. We’ve seen PED suspensions aplenty in the NFL, but rarely are masking agents involved. This indicates that Peterson not only was using PEDs, but was also trying to cover up his drug tests for doing so. We don’t know what the drug was that Peterson tested positive for so it will be interesting if anything leaks on that front.
While the NFL has been able to slap suspensions on players for using PEDs, many of the suspensions have had appeals and players admitting they didn’t know a banned substance was in what they were taking. The fact Peterson’s masking agent failed to cover-up whatever he was taking now begs the question on if there were drug tests he successfully passed using a masking agent in the past. Going one step further, who else in the NFL has been doing this to success?
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