Code of Conduct

By Chris Herrington ’96 / Photo by David J. Turner

In 2015, when the National Football League hired B. Todd Jones ’79 for the newly created job of senior vice president and special counsel for conduct, essentially the organization’s chief disciplinary officer, America’s biggest sports league hired someone whose career résumé was well suited to the task.

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’s 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.

And also four rough seasons while a student football fan at Macalester during the late ’70s.

“The four years I was there, the football program did not win a game,” says Jones, who maintains a family home in St. Paul with wife Margaret Samanant ’80.

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’s been a notable transition—from 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.

“I’m 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,” 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.

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.

“Mahmoud was very supportive. He was very active,” says Jones.

The late ’70s 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.

“It 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.”

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.

Jones’s political, military, and law enforcement credentials led him to an unexpected opportunity with the NFL. At the time of Jones’s hire, the league was struggling with a series of domestic violence incidents involving star players.

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’s annual rookie draft, balancing discipline with guidance in approaching a league composed entirely of young men, the majority of whom are Black.

“That’s always been my view for better or worse,” says Jones. “I was a prosecutor during the ‘war on drugs’ and you’d see the downstream ramifications of strictly focusing on incarceration and discipline as compared to intervention and prevention.”

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.

With the protest effectively ending Kaepernick’s 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’s commissioner for not speaking out.

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

In Jones’s 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’s resistance to the Vietnam War.

“The league is in a completely different space since the Kaepernick experience, on social justice issues and just sort of general broader societal impact,” says Jones. “Everybody has learned over the last six or seven years here at the league that it’s not just about what happens on the field. It’s community. And I think it’s sincere.”

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.

Jones and the NFL had already confronted this problem. After ten players were suspended last year for violating the league’s gambling policy, the NFL pivoted into building systems, monitoring, and promoting the game’s integrity, he says.

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.

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’ll return to his old law firm, Robins Kaplan, as a partner, working in their Minneapolis and New York offices.

Chris Herrington ’96 is a sports and culture columnist for The Daily Memphian.