Josh Jacobs, the Packers running back playing his season under an open NFL review

Josh Jacobs has always run as if contact were the point of the exercise rather than its price. He finishes carries falling forward, he wants the ball when the Green Bay Packers reach the goal line, and for most of his career that stubbornness was the whole story told about him. It no longer is. The Packers’ lead back is playing again after missing the start of the season on the NFL’s commissioner’s exempt list, and every touchdown he scores now arrives with a league investigation still open behind it.

The football case for him takes a sentence to make. The other case is harder, and it got harder at the end of October, when police records made public in Wisconsin added the accounts of three more women to a file that began with his arrest in the spring. Jacobs denies those accounts through his lawyers. The league says it will review them. Somewhere between those two statements sits the rest of his career.

Joshua Cordell Jacobs grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was born on February 11, 1998, and much of what he became traces back to the years after his parents split. He and his siblings lived with their father, Marty, and for a stretch the family had no home at all, moving between cheap motels and, on some nights, sleeping in Marty’s Chevy Suburban on the streets of Tulsa. Jacobs kept that part of his life private until his junior year at Alabama. After his rookie season in the NFL he told it in a Kia commercial that aired during Super Bowl LIV, and he bought his father a house.

At McLain High School he ran for 5,372 yards and 56 touchdowns, numbers big enough to bring Alabama to Tulsa but not to promise him the ball once he got to Tuscaloosa. He shared the backfield with Damien Harris and Bo Scarbrough, spent most of the 2017 season playing on a broken ankle that nobody outside the program knew about, and in his final year was named MVP of the SEC Championship Game against Georgia after scoring twice. NFL scouts saw a back with fresh legs, because Alabama had used them sparingly.

The Oakland Raiders took him 24th overall in the 2019 draft, with a pick they had acquired from the Chicago Bears in the Khalil Mack trade. He ran for 1,150 yards as a rookie, a franchise record for a first-year player, was named the PFWA Offensive Rookie of the Year and reached the Pro Bowl in his second season. In April 2022 the Raiders declined the fifth-year option on his contract, which was the front office’s way of saying it did not see him as a long-term piece.

He answered with the best season of his career. In 2022 he led the NFL with 1,653 rushing yards, added 400 more as a receiver and became the first Raider since Marcus Allen in 1985 to pass 2,000 yards from scrimmage. The game people remember came against the Seattle Seahawks: 229 rushing yards and an 86-yard touchdown that ended it in overtime. He was a first-team All-Pro and received the first Jim Brown Award at NFL Honors. What Las Vegas gave him in return was the franchise tag, which he did not sign until late August, and a one-year deal worth up to $12 million. A quad injury ended his 2023 season at 805 yards.

Green Bay signed him in March 2024 to a four-year, $48 million contract, and within weeks it looked cheap. He ran for 1,329 yards and a career-high 15 rushing touchdowns, made the Pro Bowl again and gave Jordan Love‘s offense a back who could close out games. In 2025 the yardage fell to 929, but he still scored 13 times on the ground. The shape of his Green Bay years was set early: the yards rise and fall with the blocking in front of him, and the touchdowns keep coming.

Then came the case that his football résumé does not answer. In May 2026 the Hobart-Lawrence Police Department in Brown County, Wisconsin, arrested him after an altercation with his then-girlfriend three days earlier. The NFL placed him on the commissioner’s exempt list on August 30, and on September 10 he pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of battery and criminal damage to property; his lawyers said he accepted responsibility for his actions. He missed the first six games of the season before the league lifted the designation on October 19. The story that made Jacobs easy to cheer, the kid from the Suburban who never stopped running, is the one football coverage still reaches for first. It does not cover that plea, and nothing he does on a Sunday will make it cover it.

On October 30 the police department released its case file in response to a public-records request. Alongside the May investigation, it contained accounts from three other women who contacted police after his arrest, describing incidents they placed in 2021 and 2022. None of them led to charges. Jacobs’ attorneys say he denies all three, call the accounts old, uncorroborated and easily disproven, and point out that the Brown County district attorney had them for months and still charged only two misdemeanors. The NFL said it would review the allegations as part of an investigation it had never closed.

On the field, his return has looked like his career in miniature. In his first two games back, a loss at Detroit and a 27-19 win over the Carolina Panthers at Lambeau Field, he carried 32 times for just 75 yards and still scored three touchdowns, two of them on receptions. Green Bay came out of that week at 5-3, with one of the league’s least productive running games and a back who keeps finding the end zone anyway.

Away from the case, the details he chooses to show are about family. He is of Filipino descent through his paternal grandmother, a native of Angeles City, whose portrait is tattooed on his left hand, and he plays with a Philippine flag on his helmet. His younger brother, Isaiah, played running back at UAB.

The Packers visit the New England Patriots at Gillette Stadium on Sunday, November 8, and the league has announced no change to his status. How much longer he stays in that backfield depends less on Matt LaFleur’s game plan than on what the NFL decides about a file that grew again last week.

Tags: sports, athletes, American football, running backs, Green Bay Packers, Jordan Love, Josh Jacobs, Alabama Crimson Tide, Las Vegas Raiders

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