Bell: Richard Sherman won appeal, but he's not squeaky clean

"I won."

That was the tweet of victory from Richard Sherman on Thursday, his four-game suspension for performance-enhancing drugs overturned on appeal. Inside the Seattle Seahawks locker room, they were surely elated with the moment, too.

They will have their shutdown cornerback for the playoffs.

Yet winning in this case does not mean that Sherman is squeaky clean. He won on a technicality, his compelling case demonstrating the bungled collection of his urine sample.

Nowhere in arbitrator Bob Wallace's decision was it stated that Sherman's sample wasn't legit. That sample tested positive, which is proof on another level that Sherman got away with an NFL crime.

Players rarely win these appeals. Sherman played by the rules of the NFL's drug policy, and shifted the burden to the process and the collector, Mark Cook. It's a pillar principle: If you're going to have a reliable drug-testing program, the collection cannot be flawed.

That Cook didn't even note in the paperwork attached to the sample that there was an issue with the collection — urine transferred from one cup to another cup, which already had a broken seal — magnified the sloppiness in this case.

As Sherman's agent, Kevin Poston, told USA TODAY Sports, "You've got the right procedures in place, but you've got to follow that. In this case, it wasn't done correctly."

We saw this happen in baseball last February, when MVP Ryan Braun's 50-game suspension was overturned by egregious handling of samples. I don't know whether Braun was juiced or not, but the stigma of his case did not instantly vanish.

Although Sherman has publicly contended that he's never used PEDs, the cloud of doubt is with him. He was one of the most notable players snubbed with the Pro Bowl selections announced Wednesday, and don't think for a minute that his lingering case was not a factor — with players and coach/GM votes accounting for two-thirds of the equation.

And if Sherman — who had a monster game in the Sunday night blowout of the San Francisco 49ers — wins a playoff game with an interception returned for a touchdown, the outcry undoubtedly will intensify with at least one team's fan base.

The way it stands now, though, he's cleared with an asterisk.

Don't think this will inspire some overhaul of the testing procedures, even though the NFL and NFL Players Association still haven't agreed on a new drug-testing policy and presumably, an HGH testing system, to go with their year-and-a-half old collective bargaining agreement. A sloppy case like Sherman's is an aberration, considering there are more than 20,000 drug tests conducted in the NFL each year.

Still, this case might help clean up the language in the policy as the league tries to rid the sport of cheaters. Sherman got the league on the language, too. Wallace noted the ambiguity in language that prohibits the same "technician" from handling the A and B samples, although the league interpreted that as the same "certifying scientist."

That's another lesson: If there's specific language, then it needs to apply.

Sherman won. But to a larger degree, the league lost on one bad positive test.