Jared Allen goes after the elusive Mr. Tebow in 2011. (Getty Images)

Minnesota Vikings defensive end Jared Allen most definitely goes his own way, even as a married and mullet-less family man. In 2011, Allen put up the best season of his eight-year career, doubling his sack total of the year before with 22.0 total, forcing four fumbles, and even grabbing one interception. It was a rare bright spot for a Vikings team in serious rebuilding mode.

Allen spent the offseason unsatisfied and haunted by the sacks he didn't get. He knew that he was just half a sack away from tying the single-season record Michael Strahan got in 2001, and given his hit and hurry totals, he came into 2012 believing that the record was attainable. Allen skipped voluntary OTAs, preferring to train with his own group of people in Arizona, and the Vikings didn't have a problem with that when he returned on Tuesday for mandatory minicamps.

"When he came by my office yesterday afternoon, I gave him a big hug," Vikings head coach Leslie Frazier told the media on Thursday. "It was the first time I've seen him in a while. [OTAs] are voluntary sessions. You can't get around that. Guys have the option to attend them or not, but the fact that he is here is a positive."

"If it's not broke, don't fix it," Allen said. "Coach [Leslie Frazier] understood why. I wanted to keep my routine through the offseason. I have a great team in Arizona. Everything was focused and in the right direction."

And to that end, Allen is thinking about passing even his great 2011 season. He's wondered for a while -- would a 25-sack season be possible?

"Before you're really close, you're not sure if it's obtainable," Allen said of the possible mark on Tuesday. "You think it is, because you think, 'If someone did it, I can do it.' But being right there, and actually leaving some stuff on the field -- they took the one away in Green Bay; they made that a team sack -- and there were a couple where the [quarterbacks] were in the arms, and I didn't get it. It was that close. At the end of the year, I was kinda bummed out, being one or two away [from the record]. But when I started working out, it's just motivation. So, you go back and watch film, and try to correct technique. It's always a personal goal, and if I'm fortunate and blessed enough to break it one day, I'm gonna try to break it again."

Allen was then asked if two sacks per games would be possible for one player.

A brief cease-fire: Roger Goodell and DeMaurice Smith ratify a new CBA. (Getty Images)

One ancillary benefit of, or detriment to, the New Orleans Saints' bounty punishments and the NFL's handling of them, is that there is an increasing sense that the NFL Players' Association either didn't fight hard enough for a hand in the player discipline process, or got duped into believing that the process would be more equitable than it has been. When the league's current collective bargaining agreement was signed on August 5, 2011, it was thought by many that a new era of labor peace was about to begin. Less than a year later, that has proven to be anything but the case.

While the NFL and NFLPA got through the 2011 season with minimal damage, the subsequent bounty investigation was just the headliner in a series of off-season dust-ups between the two parties. More under the radar was the league's decision to punish the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins with serious dings to their salary caps -- $10 million to Dallas and $36 million to Washington -- over the next two years in response to alleged salary cap violations in the uncapped year of 2010.

The two teams, the NFL claimed, used the uncapped year (one effect of the expiration of the old CBA, signed in 2006) to offload large contracts in a way violated the spirit of the rules. In response to the rational argument that there can be no cap violations in an uncapped year, the league pointed to a nebulous violation of competitive balance, and said that teams had been warned about tripping too many wires in their dealing during that time.

The NFLPA didn't see it that way, and filed a collusion claim against the NFL in May, alleging that the league created an illegal and artificial salary cap during that time.

"The NFL never told us that these [punishments] were for 'cap violations,'" NFLPA Lead Outside Counsel Jeff Kessler told me on May 23. "In fact, just the opposite. The NFL, when we were negotiating about the salary cap this year, admitted that there was no salary cap in 2010, and any behavior by the teams would have been entirely lawful and proper. They gave us no clue about any mythical salary cap. We only learned of that after the agreement was signed.  After the agreement was signed, owners and others publicly admitted it to the media."

While Kessler said that the complaint against the NFL was more about the mythical salary cap than what happened specifically to the Cowboys and Redskins, the overarching narrative when talking with Kessler and George Atallah, the NFLPA's Assistant Executive Director of External Affairs, was that the good-faith negotiations between the two sides that led to the new CBA were not so good in retrospect.

"Have you heard the one about the Princess and the Wookie?" (Getty Images)

"The union did not have any role in determining the penalties that were imposed," Kessler said. "What happened is, prior to the time when the union knew anything about there being collusion in 2010, the league conditioned their agreement to a union request as to how to calculate the salary cap in 2012 on the union agreeing to these cap charges against the Cowboys and against the Redskins.

"And the union was not told anything about prior collusion. They were told this is something the league was insisting upon because they believed this was important for competitive balance. And had the union known about prior collusion, the union never would have agreed to these cap reallocations."

When talking to various NFLPA sources in the last month, one gets the sense that the union feels itself on the wrong end of a metaphorical deal between Darth Vader and Lando Calrissian. "I am altering the deal," Vader told Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back. "Pray I don't alter it any further."

And that leads us to the discipline in the New Orleans Saints' bounty investigation. Yahoo! Sports recently spoke to a league source who was integral to the CBA negotiations, and continues to be involved as a player advocate. Some NFL players, and a percentage of the general public, believe that the Players' Association didn't do enough to defend itself in negotiations, which led to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell acting as "Judge, jury, and executioner," in the words of suspended Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma.

Vilma and his attorney, Peter Ginsberg, left the Monday suspension appeal an hour into the process, because they believed they would not receive a fair hearing. Later, linebacker Scott Fujita told the media that there was still no direct evidence of the alleged "pay-to-injure" plays that led to his suspension, and defensive lineman Anthony Hargrove insisted that he was not the one speaking about bounties in a DVD of the 2009 NFC Championship game that the NFL used as evidence against him.

The NFLPA feels that it has been fast-tracked again, and things decided in supposed good faith during CBA negotiations are falling apart very quickly. As a result, additional matters the NFL may push to install during the current agreement, such as HGH testing and an 18-game regular-season schedule, will find more opposition from here on out.

"Now, people understand why the players are being a pain in the neck about HGH testing -- because the players don't want to be in a world where they have to deal with this," the source said. "There has got to be an independent arbitrator with this stuff -- at least on HGH -- before the players agree to it. The players aren't going to trade HGH testing for a fair process."

The Dolphins' QB battle could be going in several different directions. (Getty)

It's an old NFL axiom: If you have two starting quarterbacks, you actually have no starting quarterbacks. And unless your roster has both Joe Montana and Steve Young on it (or Aaron Rodgers and He Who Shall Not Be Named), that axiom is generally true. The quarterback position is hard enough to play at an elite level; never mind what happens when Mr. Head Coach decides to complicate things with a major positional scrap through training camp.

Two NFL teams have decided to throw that thought process by the wayside this season. After swinging and missing on Peyton Manning and Matt Flynn earlier in the year, the Miami Dolphins selected Texas A&M's Ryan Tannehill with the eighth overall pick. But since Tannehill played just a season and a half at quarterback for the Aggies, he's going to need some developmental time before he's ready for the complexities of the NFL -- and yes, this is even true of the Dolphins' offense. So, incumbent Matt Moore and free-agent pickup David Garrard are also in the mix, and there's no clear head man at this point. Tannehill is obviously projected to be the man over time, but what does that do for the Dolphins now?

"I think he's very close," head coach Joe Philbin said of Tannehill, by way of the competition, in early June. "I think it's very close. I think they all bring certain attributes to the table. I will say the room itself, and the quality of individuals in the room, I think is excellent. As you know, Matt Moore was voted as the most valuable player. He played well down the stretch and he's picked up the offense very well. David Garrard when you look at this last season and he was active, but he didn't play last year. ... He played very well in 2010 and he's been working his tail off. Then we've got a young guy who has some familiarity with the offense, but not a lot of familiarity with the NFL game, but he is holding his own very much, so it's been a good competition so far."

Last we saw, it was Garrard (who struggled through back injuries before making a 2012 comeback) who had the top spot, but the common thread with the Dolphins and the Seattle Seahawks, who also have a three-way battle, is that the "starter" can change on a daily basis. Add in new receiver Chad Ochocinco and the fact that their QB battle will be dissected on "Hard Knocks," and it's safe to say the Fins don't lack a storyline or two.

Tarvaris Jackson (7) leads the Seahawks' QB derby, but folks are nipping at his heels. (AP)

Seattle got the quarterback in Matt Flynn that the Dolphins tried to acquire, but signed him to a three-year deal worth $26 million. That's hardly long-term starter commitment money, and as head coach Pete Carroll recently said, the Seahawks will not let salary dictate reps. At last week's three-day mandatory minicamp, Carroll gave each of his quarterbacks -- Flynn, incumbent Tarvaris Jackson and third-round rookie Russell Wilson -- one day of reps with the first team.

If Carroll saw something out of that process that would inform a final decision, he certainly wasn't telling anyone.

Chad Ochocinco gets ready for a pass from David Garrard at Dolphins minicamp. (AP)

Some might say, "Don't ask/Don't tell" in situations like this, but asking the supremely verbose Chad Ochocinco not to tell on any subject seems like a waste of time. Besides, he's usually got something funny to say. So it was when Ocho was made available to the media for the first time as a receiver for the Miami Dolphins. After a workout in which he looked like the best receiver in a very iffy group from most accounts, Ocho held court as only he can.

"The workout was good," Chad told the Miami media. "It's been very good the past couple of days. I'm enjoying the opportunity to come here and play at home, to play with a great organization. There's a lot of changes being made here. Coaching staff, I'm enjoying it.

"I'm developing 'Brokeback Mountain' chemistry with the players. I'm just having fun. It feels good, too, to have a fresh start. I'm gonna do whatever I can not only to improve my game, but to help this organization get back to where they want to be."

"Brokeback Mountain," of course, is the 2005 Ang Lee film about two cowboys who explore an alternative relationship. One of the most awarded pictures in history, it's found enough of a place in pop culture where a receiver felt comfortable throwing it into casual conversation, so there you go.

Chad was a little less certain when asked whether he could be the team's No. 1 receiver sooner than later ("I was never good in math, so I'm not good with numbers"), but he was far more forthcoming when asked about playing for his hometown team after 11 years playing for the Cincinnati Bengals and New England Patriots.

"It's been a childhood dream of mine growing up watching the Marks brothers [receivers Mark Clayton and Mark Duper], watching Dan [Marino], some of those guys. It's awesome. You would think throughout the years; since 1988 I've always played Madden, and I've always used the Dolphins no matter where I was or where I was playing.

"To be able to wear the teal and orange, it's a pretty good feeling. But for me, it's about getting back to the basics, going back to where it all started. Not as far as playing at home in Miami, but as far as the game goes and getting back to who we're all used to seeing and how I became what I am. I think I kind of lost that. I'm looking to go back to Chad Johnson, and just make it live again."

We'll have much more from Chad through the season, to be sure. For now, he was back to work.

Anthony Hargrove says that he's not the man the NFL should be looking for. (Getty Images)

Former New Orleans Saints defensive lineman Anthony Hargrove, one of four players suspended in the Saints' bounty investigation, released the following statement during a press conference in front of the NFL's offices on Tuesday afternoon. Per Jason La Canfora of CBS Sports here's the whole thing:

I have sat back over the past few months and watched as the NFL has spent countless hours painting a picture that has left a lot of people convinced that myself and three other players deserve to be punished, not to mention the coaching staff and Mr. Loomis. I have asked myself a million times: why? Why on earth are they trying to make a mountain out of a molehill? I do not have an absolute answer, but I'm guessing it has something to do with image, power, and money.

The words they have used over the months to capture your hearts and minds have been many, practiced, and calculated. But that does not make them true. It just makes them good at what they do. They are, in my opinion, master politicians. Bill Clinton once said, "I did not have sex with that woman."

Semantics. Politicians are good at it.

There is no way I can reveal to you today the depth of their imagination and determination in painting this picture for you, the public, adroitly using the media as their tools of art. But I will dabble a little. And stay with me, because even though they have somberly made it clear that "The Mona Lisa" is not smiling, if we move in closer we notice that ... just maybe she is.

First of all, I watched in shock as they took my declaration a couple of months ago and made it into something it was not. It left from me as a private explanation of certain specific events and, voila, came out as a confession of crimes. Even I had to blink my eyes real hard to see how they did that one. Do you know they never even asked me what I meant? Just assumed I wanted to confess, I guess.

Semantics.

Or in this case, maybe just lies. They publicly said that I said things that I did not say. Is that not lying? Isn't it? Go back and read for yourselves without assuming that it says what they have made you think, and then re-read their synopsis. Please try to have an open mind.

They also said that I declined to be interviewed a few weeks back. Again, untrue. I know it sounds dubious to the public when they hear that I declined to visit with Mr. Goodell, and that was their intent, I'm guessing. But they were the first to decline. After that, I, too, became dubious.

Yesterday I heard that they have a witness who saw me tell Joe Vitt that I lied? Who is this mystery witness? You may come forward. I won't bite. The truth is that I feel certain I know who this supposed witness is, and if you knew you would understand why this is all so shady. The problem is, since I am only 99% sure who this supposed witness is, I will keep it to myself, because that is what honesty and integrity demand... absolute certainty. And even then, why intentionally drag that person's name through the mud, as the NFL has done mine?

But it did not happen as they say!

Roddy White recently got fired up about the NFL's disciplinary process. (Getty Images)

In any complex negotiation, it's inevitable that each side will have to give up things it desperately wants, and cede things it would rather not have. In the NFL's last collective bargaining agreement, the NFL and the NFLPA each had to bite down on a few major points to get the CBA done in time for the 2011 preseason to go off without a hitch -- were that not the case, and the preseason money was affected, we're looking at a very different 2011 season, and not in a good way.

In the wake of the New Orleans Saints' bounty hearings, appeals, lawsuits, and other goofiness, various NFL players are wondering why the NFLPA didn't do more to have their backs when it was time to negotiate the player discipline process. The question has been asked by many fans as well. Truth is, the Players Association went with a slightly nebulous concession to commisioner Roger Goodell in the player discipline section of the CBA, just as the league ceded its desire for an 18-game schedule and HGH testing.

Players were made aware of the details during the negotiation process, but it's safe to say that nobody on the union side could have seen the Saints disaster coming. The effects of the bounty investigation have a lot of people wondering just how much protection the players have against Goodell's system of justice. Former Houston Texans and current Kansas City Chiefs right tackle Eric Winston recently told USA Today's Nate Davis that he's one of many who are not happy with where things stand.

[Related: Eric Winston on Yahoo! Sports Radio]

"Obviously we don't want Roger Goodell having absolute power," Winston said. "In a lot of this process, it seems like he does. It's unfortunate. It seems like he's running amok with it and deciding to do what he wants and it really doesn't matter what the evidence says. Unfortunately, we don't have an alternative option to appeal to."

And that's the problem. If you don't like the justice handed down by Goodell and Jeff Pash, you can always appeal to ... Roger Goodell and Jeff Pash. If that sounds to you like the Faber student court in "Animal House," you're not alone.

Eric Winston is a bit more understanding about the process. (Getty Images)

"I can't imagine how frustrating it is for those players," Winston said of the Saints players who were seemingly suspended without due process and sufficient individual evidence. "In that CBA bargaining process, you're not going to get everything you want. That's not to say we weren't trying to curb some of that [power]. To say we weren't trying to do something about that is false.

"Just from what's been told to me, there were attempts made. And there's a tradeoff. To do that, we probably looked at sacrificing playing less games, so you always look at the risk and reward. And try to juggle that."

Some other players are less understanding. Atlanta Falcons receiver Roddy White recently went off on the NFLPA, insinuating that he and other players have been sold a bill of goods.

Drew Brees should have stayed away from the Twitter this time. (Getty Images)

Remember Monday, when we told you that the NFL took 12 reporters inside the ice cream factory and showed them a bunch of "explosive" evidence against the New Orleans Saints? Well, Saints quarterback Drew Brees evidently took that description to heart.

@drewbrees

Um ... yeah. Probably not a good idea to compare a process that got a few people suspended from professional football to a process (however flawed it may have been) that started a war which goes on in some iterations a decade later. That said, the point Brees is trying to make is that, just as with the WMD story, a governing body is dropping the hammer with what some would consider to be less than compelling evidence. In retrospect, former President George W. Bush called the "intelligence failure" his biggest regret during his eight years in office.

When the NFL gave 12 reporters access to the evidence used to discipline the Saints players during a meeting after Monday morning's appeal hearings, it became very clear that there was something very fishy going on in New Orleans. But to a man, those who saw the evidence were far more certain that the Saints should be sanctioned for their "pay-for-performance" system ... and far less certain that four players -- Jonathan Vilma, Scott Fujita, Anthony Hargrove and Will Smith -- should be suspended for certain amounts of time.

"To be fair to the players, there was far, far more evidence of the pay-for-performance claims than the bounty claims," SI.com's Peter King wrote. "In fact, the [Saints safety Roman] Harper claim was the only one the league showed that resulted in a payout to a player for knocking a player out of a game. However, the NFL has maintained all along that all it needs is evidence that a bounty program was in place and that money was offered to try to take opponents out of the game -- not that players were actually taken out of the game."

And that's where Fujita had a real leg to stand on when he responded to the process once Monday's hearings were over.

"I have yet to see anything that implicates me in some pay-to-injure scheme, not in the last three months, not in the last three days, not today,'' Fujita said. "And perhaps that's because there is nothing that can implicate me in some pay-to-injure scheme.

"Throughout this process," he continued, "it has become increasingly clear to me that just because someone disagrees with the NFL's interpretation of an incredibly flawed investigation it's assumed that he's lying, and to me that's a shame. I've played 10 years in this league and throughout my career I've done nothing but conduct myself in a positive manner. This has impacted my reputation, this has impacted my ability to provide for my family now and in the future and I have a hard time with that. The NFL has been careless and irresponsible and they have made mistakes. At some point they have to answer questions about that."

NFLPA Lead Outside Counsel Richard Smith, who spoke to Shutdown Corner in early May, continues to insist that the NFL is running a "sloppy investigation." And while the NFL maintains that there is no agenda here, that's not really the point. It's clear, based on the evidence seen, that there's enough to hammer the Saints very hard, and deservedly so. And it's wrong of any Saints player who was involved to insist that there was nothing going on. But there is still no smoking gun, at least not one that has been made public -- nothing seen or heard that would drive any reasonable person to say, "Yeah, Jonathan Vilma needs to be out of the league for a full season."

And that's the problem to date. The NFL's case, as regards the specificity of the players' involvement, is still far spottier than anyone would like.

Roger Goodell may have been waiting all along to play this card. (AP)

The appeal hearing in the NFL's bounty scandal may have gone well in comparison to the Roger Clemens trial, but after Jonathan Vilma left the proceedings early, and Scott Fujita reamed the process to a host of reporters, it seemed that Roger Goodell's standings in the court of public opinion were about to take another hit. If the NFL has such compelling evidence against the Saints, people keep asking, why does the NFL not show the Saints what it has -- and why does it not show or tell the public what it has?

Following the hearing, the NFLPA released a statement, which said that the PowerPoint slides used as a basis for discipline were never shown to the Saints' coaches, nor was any explanation ever given. In addition, the NFLPA charged that the NFL failed to provide players and coaches with all sorts of exculpatory and mitigating evidence.

From the statement, entitled "Information from NFLPA regarding NFL's 'evidence'":

After the Commissioner's three year investigation, which the NFL publicly declared consisted of review of "over 18,000 documents," interviews of several witnesses, and involved a former US Attorney hired to opine that the investigation was "thorough and fair," the League provided the Players Union with less than two hundred pages of documents the Friday before Monday's hearing.

The NFL chose not to identify who created the documents, when they were created, the purpose of creating them, where the documents were obtained, or whether the players had even seen these documents. In addition to denying the Players Union's request for a three-day continuance to learn  the answers to these questions, the Commissioner nonetheless informed the players that the League will not offer any witness at the hearing who created the documents.

After the hearing, the NFL brought in 12 reporters, including Peter King of SI.com, Mike Freeman of CBS Sports and Bob Glauber of Newsday.com. According to several of those reporters, what the league presented was explosive, compelling, and quite damning.

"First, [a] good chunk of the NFL's evidence came from Saints own computer system," Freeman wrote on Twitter. "[Former Saints defensive coordinator] Gregg Williams was clearly the biggest source for NFL but [there's] no question [the] league has many other sources. Owner [Tom] Benson was cooperative with the league granting investigators access to Saints computer system. Saints kept bounty info on [their] computer system. Williams told investigators he was 'rolling the dice with player safety and someone could have been maimed.' Saints used Dog the Bounty Hunter as motivation."

King first revealed that according to the evidence presented, the bounty set on the head of Brett Favre in the 2009 NFC championship game was actually $35,000, not $10,000 as believed at one time.

"NFL just showed reporters evidence in Saints case, incl[uding] allegation of $35k bounty, not just $10k, to knock Favre out of '09 NFC title game," King tweeted. " NFL also showed evidence on ledger that S Roman Harper once was due $1000 for knocking NYG RB Brandon Jacobs from a game. The $35k bounty on Favre, the league claims, included a $5000 pledge from current interim Saints coach Joe Vitt.

"The NFL's charges are explosive, compelling," King continued. "Twelve reporters just heard the league's evidence. To clarify, the 12 reporters were told they were getting the same presentation the players got earlier in the afternoon."