The NFL put Josh Jacobs on the commissioner’s exempt list today, and the honest answer to how long he’s actually out is that nobody knows yet, including the league. There’s enough history here to make an educated guess, though, and the shape of it depends less on Jacobs than on a calendar.

The basics: Jacobs was arrested in May after police responded to a domestic dispute at his home. He was initially hit with five charges, including one felony; last week those were reduced to two misdemeanors, battery and criminal damage to property. He denies the allegations. His first court appearance isn’t scheduled until November, which lines up with Week 11 of the season.

The NFL’s personal conduct policy has a stated baseline for domestic violence cases: six games for a first offense, with room to move up or down based on aggravating or mitigating factors. In practice, that baseline has been more of a suggestion.

Ezekiel Elliott got six games in 2017 even though Ohio prosecutors never filed charges at all; the league ran its own year-long investigation and suspended him anyway, the clearest precedent that it doesn’t need a criminal case to finish, or even exist, in order to act. Kareem Hunt got eight, though that involved two separate incidents. On the other end, players whose charges got dropped or knocked down, which is the same trajectory Jacobs is on right now, have generally landed below the baseline: Josh Brown got one game, Junior Galette got two, Jonathan Dwyer got three after pleading down to a lesser charge. Reduced charges have historically meant a reduced number.

Here’s the part that matters more than the exact figure. Under the current CBA, time spent on the exempt list gets credited toward whatever suspension eventually comes down, so it isn’t simply extra punishment stacked on top of a later ban. But nothing requires the league to wait for the legal case to resolve before ruling, and nothing requires it to rule quickly either. If the league’s process moves independently of the courts, the way it did with Elliott, Jacobs could have a number attached and be back before Wisconsin even gets to that November court date. If it doesn’t, he could still be sitting with no ruling at all when that date arrives, which by itself would already be more games missed than several of the suspensions above.

My guess: somewhere in the four-to-eight-game range once a number actually gets attached, with six the single most likely outcome given how closely the current facts track the original baseline case. But the games he actually misses could run past that regardless, not because the league is being unusually harsh, but because the football calendar and the Brown County court calendar aren’t running on the same clock, and only one of them is in a hurry.

Green Bay has been bracing for this since training camp. Whatever number eventually gets attached to it, the more useful fact right now is that nobody involved, not the Packers, not Jacobs, not the league office, actually knows when it arrives.