Football is by definition a violent sport. Each season, players suffer injuries from minor bumps and bruises, to season ending knee injuries, to life altering head and brain injuries. A player could be in the prime of his career in September, and by February will be mulling whether it is worth it or not. Case in point is now retired San Diego Charger Kris Dielman. A four time Pro Bowl selection and nine year pro, Dielman suffered a second concussion in less than a year and then a Gran Mal seizure. For Dielman, like many others before him and many who will come after him, the risk of further injury was far too much to play another down.
To see the tearful retirement press conference of a player like Dielman, a beloved player whose career was cut short by an accidental forearm to the head, followed a week later by rhetoric being tossed around about the New Orleans Saints’ apparent bounty system truly shows the sad reality that some guys just don’t get it. Among the many players and former players to weigh in on the topic were Mike Golic and Marcellus Wiley, on ESPN Radio’s “Mike & Mike In The Morning”. This morning, the two former NFL players rationalized the validity of such a system to a degree that made me think they needed a lesson in real life.
The crux of the argument that both Golic and Wiley made was that in a game like football, the job of the defensive players is to hit the offensive players, and hit them hard. Whether or not there is a bounty system, the two men mused, has little to no bearing on whether or not someone is injured. In other words, the chances are basically the same for a player to be injured by a bounty hit as by a regular hit. They claimed that for players making 6, 7 or 8 figure salaries, paying an extra $1,000 or $1,500 for injuring a player is not enough motivation to put anything extra on the hits. The only thing wrong with what happened in New Orleans according to these two was that the system was institutionalized, rather than an informal pool among players. They also asserted that although there was a bounty on Brett Favre in the 2009 NFC Championship Game, he wasn’t carted off the field, so no harm no foul. Finally, they claimed that bounty type systems are part of the subculture of football, starting even at the peewee level, and non-players just don’t get it. With all due respect to Golic and Wiley, I must disagree with their arguments.
I agree with the premise that football players are susceptible to injury because it is the nature of the job, so whether a player had a bounty on him or not doesn’t qualify or disqualify him from being injured. My issue, and many peoples’ issue, with the subject is that there is a difference between trying to hit someone hard, and trying to injure them. A receiver coming across the middle of the field is wide open to taking a hit, but when a player has been told that there is extra money on the line, he is much more likely to go after an area of the body that is more prone to result in an injury, i.e. the head or knees. Tackling a player by his midsection or upper legs is just as effective in ending the play and results in fewer injuries. As far as the claim that players don’t care about that kind of money because they make a ton of money, I wonder how the system survived as long as it did if the amounts were inconsequential. Gregg Williams’ teams in Buffalo and Washington both had bounty systems according to reports, and he brought it to New Orleans with him. If, as Golic and Wiley claimed, the players were not motivated by the extra money, there wouldn’t be 50,000 pages of documents involved in the NFL’s investigation. Obviously it made enough of a difference to happen in several different places or a long period of time.
There is much more wrong with a bounty system than the fact that this one was run by a coach and was common knowledge among people in the organization. The fact that players would be rewarded for willfully taking a player out of a game is sickening. These are the same players who kneel in a circle around their colleague when he is carted away, and then talk about how they are a band of brothers and when one is injured, they all feel it. Little do we know that rather than praying, the player who laid the hit may be thinking about where he’ll spend the extra $1,500 that he just “earned.”
In many ways, Golic and Wiley’s takes on this issue points to a larger problem among football players. In recent years, in light of new research on concussions and other head injuries, there has been a surge in player safety related rules. It bothers me to no end to hear players talk about purposely attaining a lower result on a baseline test than they could have, or lying to coaches about sustaining a head injury, or trying to play through a concussion. These things don’t prove how tough you are, they prove how shortsighted you are. This, as players have claimed, is another part of the “subculture of football.” Whether it is playing through a dangerous injury or paying players for injuring their opponents, this is treacherous argument to make. Nobody cares if you were a tough guy when you played if 20 years later you are confined to a wheelchair, or develop memory loss at an early age, or worse yet end up like Dave Duerson, dead by your own hand. All of these are very real possibilities that can result from a head injury. Whether it is a player trying to play through a head injury or purposely injuring another player, this thought that just because it is part of the culture it should be accepted is not right. True, playing football is not like most of the blue collar or white collar jobs the rest of us have. Every time the ball is snapped, there is a chance it will be the last time each of the players steps on a field. Let’s not add any more danger to the situation by playing through a possibly serious injury or worse yet, by trying to cause injury to another player.
Luckily for the league, the results of the New Orleans Saints bounty system haven’t been nearly as bad as they could have been. The league has a responsibility to punish everyone involved, be it players, coaches or front office personnel, and to punish them to level we may not have seen before. There is no other way to put an end to this ugly escapade and stop others from mimicking it. I expect to see some fines upwards of $250,000 for individuals, possibly $1,000,000 for the organization and hopefully several suspensions and forfeited draft picks. In the larger picture, the NFL also needs to continue to crack down on this “tough guy at all costs” culture that has formed. The league cannot allow players to risk life and limb to play a game. Whether that means tougher rules or more benefits for retired players, something must be done to motivate players to put their safety and the safety of others above everything else. While the game of football will never be completely injury free, no matter how many rules are legislated in or how much padding is put in a helmet, the game can be played cleanly, with hard hits and with players who respect themselves, each other and the game. That can be the new “subculture” of the NFL.
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