The Saints, Bounties, and Violence in Football

I wrote a brief piece about this when it first broke out a month ago to the day.  I return to touch on it again, hopefully in my last football piece for awhile, with such an exciting NHL postseason and MLB season on tap (more on those this weekend). 

Today, some damning audio of Gregg Williams surfaced.  Everyone's all in a tizzy!  He yelled at his guys, told them to target injuries and take guys out.  Everyone's really excited!  He said things like "knock the fuck out of him" and "kill Frank Gore's head" and "[Crabtree] becomes human when we fucking take out his outside ACL" and so on and so forth.  This story is dominating the newsvine right now, but I really have to wonder - why?  Is anyone really surprised by this?  Is anyone shocked or appalled by this, which is coming from a guy who has admitted to running a pay-for-injury bounty program in his defense?  For that matter, is anyone surprised by this in any NFL locker room?

Look, I played a bit of sports in my day.  Not a lot.  I shot hoops and played baseball with friends growing up.  I fenced in college.  I've played beer-league softball.  At any level of sport, with any group of guys, you're gonna get people saying things that sound really messed up out of context.  At any level of sport, though, you are trying to win and you will take advantage of anything you can do so.  If this means you're a CB and your WR has a concussion history, maybe you're extra aggressive with him at the line, try to make him a half-step slower, whatever.  Maybe a guy has had knee surgery, so you hit him low when you do.  Maybe you want a star NHL forward to think twice when he enters the offensive zone, so you land some good hits on him early.  All of the resultant hits from these things could be completely clean and legal and all of them could lack any intent whatsoever to injure.  But if you take them out of context, they might sound like it.  Is there anyone who can imagine a pro locker room in football in which someone yelling "WE NEED TO FUCKING KILL THAT GUY" is out of place or uncommon?  I didn't think so.

I'm not advocating for Williams.  I'm not pardoning him.  I stated a month ago that he should be banned from the NFL for life.  The NFL is a dangerous, violent game.  That will never change; that's the nature of it.  If you want something a little more gentile, a little less violent, then watch baseball.  If you want large men crashing violently into other large men, you watch football.  If you want to watch more average-sized men crash violently into other average-sized men while moving very very fast on ice skates, you watch hockey.  I enjoy all of these sports, personally, for various reasons besides the obvious violence.  But I won't shy away from the reality - some of these sports are inherently violent and I admit to enjoying that regulated violence.

I do not endorse or enjoy, however, the active pursuit of intentional injury.  Does it happen sometimes?  Probably.  If anyone out there thinks the Saints are the only team with a bounty program, they're deluding themselves.  These are violent games played by people indoctrinated into that violence.  It's not abnormal to them.  It's completely ordinary and expected.  Understand that there are different social mores at work.  That yelling "WE NEED TO PUT THAT FUCKER DOWN" means something akin to "Knock him down a few times to make him think twice."  Out of context, yeah, sounds worse.  But without context, I refuse to judge completely.  But having Gregg Williams, in light of the bounty scandal, calling out injuries to target (basically), isn't exactly good for him.  But is it really that surprising?  Really?

Football provides, perhaps, the perfect storm for this sort of thing.  It's so highly regulated that it makes me think of how one child can instigate another and it's always the retaliatory child that gets caught.  There aren't many methods of self-policing in football.  Baseball and basketball aren't that violent in and of themselves.  Hockey is, in my opinion, far more violent than football and dealing with similar concussion problems - however, in hockey, if you do something dirty, there's a whole team with a whole game's worth of opportunities to make you pay for it.  People think fighting should be banned from hockey; I think fighting help keeps players in check and keep the game clean.  You know if you exist too far outside the rules, you're gonna become a target of the dirty play you enact.  It's fair to consider that the same controls don't exist in football; they're in the commissioner's office, not on the field.

Williams should be banned.  What he instigated was egregious and anyone else caught doing the same should face the same penalty.  If Roger Goodell truly wants to make the NFL a safer game, he has to crack down on this with the utmost sincerity and passion - which means he needs to start investigating better helmets for players, he needs to crack down hardest on coaches like Williams and Payton, and he needs to tell the league's television outlets to stop glamorizing hard hits.  This isn't an overnight fix; it's a whole culture change.  Football, like hockey, will always be a fast and violent sport.  And whatever powers-that-be in those sports need to acknowledge that and accept that injuries will happen.  People will get hurt playing these games. 

A line has to be drawn.  Intentional, egregious violence should be punished.  Incidental violence that comes as part of the game should be accepted for what it is.  But until I see these leagues pushing for better equipment and celebrating the violence less, I won't be able to believe their sincerity on the matter.  At the end of the day, the violence of the sport is what brings revenue.  Until Roger Goodell pulls programming celebrating bone-rattling hits, til he stops talking about 18-game seasons, til he starts pushing research or mandates for better (more expensive) helmets and equipment, he'll always seem two-faced on this topic to me: he wants a safer game, yes, but only if it doesn't threaten the revenue pie.  And at the end of the day, sadly, that's all it's about. 

Bounties

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.