After sitting out all but one game last season, Greg Hardy will attempt to salvage the majority of his 2015 campaign Thursday in a Washington law office.
The Cowboys defensive end and his high-powered representatives will have their say in an appeal of the 10-game suspension handed down by the NFL last month for "conduct detrimental to the league."
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The script figures to follow those used in recent appeals by Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice — and soon to come by Tom Brady — arguing that commissioner Roger Goodell and the league overstepped their bounds.
Hardy's case breaks down like this:
The player last summer was found guilty in a bench trial in Charlotte of assaulting and threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend Nicole Holder. He played in the Panthers' season opener but sat out the remaining 15 games under an agreement reached among the team, league and players union as domestic violence scandals swirled around the NFL.
In the meantime, Hardy exercised his right under North Carolina law to appeal to a jury trial, but prosecutors in February dropped the charges on the day the proceedings were to begin. They cited a lack of cooperation by Holder, who reached a separate financial settlement with the player.
In March, Hardy signed a one-year deal with the Cowboys that was heavily weighted on his participation, giving the team protection in the event the defensive end faced a lengthy suspension. That discipline came down a month later.
The NFLPA already has indicated that it will make the same argument it did in the Rice and Peterson cases — that the NFL is punishing Hardy under standards that did not exist when the offending incident occurred.
Before last August, a two-game suspension was generally the severe end of the punishment scale for a domestic violence situation. That was the initial penalty handed down to Rice, and the ensuing outcry led to an overhaul in the league's policies. First-time offenders now face a minimum six-game suspension for domestic violence.
Between that new standard and the fact that two games was the maximum penalty at the time, Hardy figures to have a strong case to present to NFL arbitrator Harold Henderson.