DeAndre Hopkins has turned a long-running NFL discipline story into a fresh accusation, saying in a deleted Instagram reply that Steve Keim set him up and that he lost $13 million because of it. The comment pulled one of the league’s more notorious punishment cases back into the spotlight, this time with a direct accusation aimed at the former Arizona Cardinals general manager.
Hopkins’ original suspension came in the 2022 season, when he was sidelined for the first six games after violating the NFL’s policy on performance-enhancing substances. The suspension was tied to a contaminated supplement finding, but the NFL still enforced the penalty under its strict-liability rule. In Hopkins’ telling, that was not just a failed test. It was a setup that cost him millions.
What Hopkins said
Over the weekend, Hopkins replied to an Instagram post and wrote that he got set up when he played for Keim’s team and lost $13 million. In another deleted comment, he referred to Keim as “Skeme Slime” and called the failed test a “contaminated drug test,” adding, “go figure how that happened.”
Keim responded as well, saying, “It would make no sense to do that to my player,” but both his reply and Hopkins’ comment were deleted by Monday. By Monday afternoon, Keim was on a flight and unavailable, leaving the public exchange to hang without any immediate follow-up.
Why this matters
The accusation matters because it revives a case that already carried a major financial consequence. Hopkins was one of the NFL’s more productive receivers and a five-time Pro Bowl receiver, so a six-game suspension in the 2022 season carried real weight beyond the missed games. It also adds another layer to the public scrutiny around Keim, whose name already surfaced in mid-July when Barron’s reported that he tied himself to Mohamed Coulibaly in connection with an alleged scam.
There is also a larger football point here: even when a player’s explanation points to a contaminated supplement, the league’s strict-liability rule still leaves the punishment in place. That gap between intent and enforcement is what made Hopkins’ case so expensive, and it is why the accusation still resonates now. The release by Keim and the Cardinals in 2023 ended Hopkins’ Arizona run, but the story clearly did not end there.
For Hopkins, the dispute is about more than revisiting an old suspension. It is about the cost of that suspension, the credibility of the people around him, and the lingering damage from a case that still produces consequences long after the final snap in Arizona.
