Posts
THE DUAL-ROLE DILEMMA
Post II — The Standard Baseball Already Set
The NFL is currently managing a risk. Major League Baseball already litigated one. Before this series goes any further into what the NFL's restriction policy does and doesn't cover, it's worth looking at what the sport next door did the one time this exact scenario — a person with privileged access to a rival organization's proprietary information — stopped being theoretical.
Ground Control
In December 2011, Cardinals executive Jeff Luhnow left St. Louis to become general manager of the Houston Astros. Standard procedure required him to turn in his Cardinals-owned laptop, along with its password, to the team's director of baseball development, Chris Correa. Correa kept the password. Starting in March 2013, he used variations of it to log into Ground Control — the Astros' internal database of scouting rankings, draft evaluations, medical files, and trade negotiations — and kept doing it for fifteen months, across at least sixty documented logins, before a batch of Houston's trade discussions turned up leaked online in 2014 and the FBI traced it back to him.
Correa pleaded guilty in January 2016 to five federal counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer. He was sentenced that July to 46 months in prison and ordered to pay $279,038 in restitution. This is the case that actually earns the word this series' first draft used too loosely for Brady and Aikman: espionage. Correa's conduct was criminal, prosecuted, and punished as such.
A Penalty Shaped Like the Crime
What happened next is the part that matters here. In January 2017, Commissioner Rob Manfred stripped the Cardinals of their top two picks in that year's draft — the 56th and 75th overall selections — and awarded them to Houston, on top of a $2 million payment. The Cardinals' own internal investigation, which MLB's findings echoed, concluded the hacking was the act of one rogue employee, not a club-directed operation. The organization was fined and stripped of assets anyway.
That detail is the whole argument. Baseball didn't just punish the individual — it held the franchise institutionally liable for what its employee did with access he shouldn't have had, regardless of whether ownership knew. And the remedy wasn't generic. Draft picks were the currency Correa had actually stolen — Ground Control's core value was draft-evaluation data — so the penalty was denominated in the same asset as the theft. The punishment was shaped like the crime.
The Restriction Without a Remedy
Now hold that up against the policy this series has been examining. The NFL's restriction slide — first built for Brady, now extended to Aikman — is entirely preventive. It closes doors in advance: no production meetings, no facility access, no practice viewing. What it doesn't contain, at least in anything reported publicly, is a defined consequence if those doors turn out not to have mattered — if information moved anyway, through the "strictly social communication" the policy explicitly permits, and a team benefited from it.
Baseball's answer to that question already exists: a fine sized to the harm, and a forfeiture drawn from the same pool of value that was put at risk. Football's policy, as constructed, has no equivalent on the books. It assumes the wall holds. It has nothing prepared for the possibility that it doesn't.
Next
That wall has a specific gap in it, and it's written directly into the restriction language itself. Post III looks at the "strictly social communication" carve-out — the exact kind of contact the policy was never designed to touch, and what a quarter-century of production-meeting relationships can carry through it.
