I've been meaning to write about more than just the NFL, as I follow all of the major American sports (although that's admittedly less true for basketball than the others, but I still have opinions about Lin-sanity and I'm versed enough in the sport to talk about it), but here we are, the NFL bringing me back to the blog for the moment.
News came out at the end of last week that the Saints were running a bounty program that involved payment for landing big hits and/or injuring players of other teams. Most reports I'm reading make it sound like it was either player-initiated and run or it was run by defensive coordinator Gregg Williams; reports also indicate that head coach Sean Payton and GM Mickey Loomis knew about it without directly participating. News also includes that Loomis lied to the Saints' owner about it and didn't end it when instructed to do so.
Look, the NFL is a violent game. Players run into players. Guys get hit. Guys get hurt. But there's a line between sport and malice, too. What's happening with this probe into New Orleans crosses that line.
Now, I'm on board with believing that Gregg Williams is very much complicit in whatever happened and deserves the brunt of whatever punishment comes down. Williams's attitude has always been brash and brazen with a "we're coming after your guy" attitude. Anyone who's watched a Saints game and paid careful attention to their defense should have trouble disagreeing with these charges. In particular, I recall the 2009 season's NFC Championship game, when the Saints beat the Vikings. As I watched that game, I felt it inevitable that Favre was going to get hurt. They were coming after him. And hey, that's fine, that's strategy, and it got them the win. But if there's a payment behind that, specifically behind hurting a guy? That crosses a line and, having watched the Saints for a few years carefully as they've risen to prominence, I'm honestly not surprised by this. The other thing to note - Williams took off this offseason. There's always a trend of coaches leaving when they smell smoke. I wondered to myself when I heard that - why'd Williams leave a championship-contending team to move to a bottom-5 team in a lateral move (he was defensive coordinator in NO, is in STL)? Just to roll with Jeff Fisher again? That didn't jive with me entirely... but now that this is hitting the fan, well, Mr. Williams must have known things were coming down.
I expect there are bounties across the league on teams. It makes sense. You have guys playing a physical game, they're gonna make bets with each other, they're gonna put up pools. Most guys in male-dominated workplaces run sports gambling pools. It's against the rules. But it breaks up the monotony of the workweek and it's fun. Why wouldn't these guys do similar? The question is what the extent is. If a guy is buying his team dinner if he gets a KR TD, or if someone's winning $100 for an interception or sack, that's one thing. But if the rule is injury - if it's a payment for inflicting deliberate and malicious harm on someone else's body - well, that crosses a line that I find abhorrent. I give the NFL a lot of crap for being the "No Fun League" about some things. I hope they come down as hard as possible about this, though. Enough injury, enough harm, comes to players by virtue of playing the game itself; headhunting should be squelched as much as possible - in any sport, any league.
Kudos to James Harrison, though, for his little piece of input I saw this morning - he's curious to hear what the NFL comes down to on this, remarking that if he'd been complicit in something like this, he'd expect to be kicked out of the league. Given, he's remarking based on his reputation as of the last couple seasons, and while James Harrison does play a very physical, very old-school style of game, I don't think he's a particularly dirty player and was a convenient poster-child for the NFL's crackdown on big hits. I agree with him; I'm very interested to see how the NFL handles this, because it'll set a tone going forward.
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