Steelers receiver Emmanuel Sanders was fined $15,000 -- and the Steelers themselves were fined $35,000 -- after Sanders appeared to fake an injury during Pittsburgh's late-October matchup against the Bengals. But Sanders is now planning to appeal at least his portion of the fine.
"We are going to appeal it and that's it," Sanders said Saturday following practice.
... Sanders said that he is in talks with his agent Jordan Woy and the NFLPA on they plan to appeal the fine.Sanders met with NFL vice president of football operations at the team facility Nov. 2.Sanders said that he had no indication that a fine was looming from his meeting with Hanks.
Who knows what will happen, but the NFL isn't exactly a paragon of consistency here. The Steelers were recently on the other end of an incident in which Ryan Clark was called for a penalty on a nonexistent hit to the head of the Giants' Victor Cruz, and no one has been fined for that.
Whether Sanders was faking or not is immaterial. The NFL has no right to judge whether players are in "…compliance with the league’s competitive rules" when the NFL won’t hold itself to the same standard; the NFL ref who threw the flag on Ryan Clark was faking an awareness of what truly happened during that play and there has been nothing but silence from the league about it.
In the end, $15,000 isn't a huge penalty, even for a relatively low-salaried player like Sanders, but the Steelers probably feel like the league is after them whenever there's a penalty like this.