Bounties

I have never played professional sports. I only briefly played sports at the collegiate varsity (baseball) and club (rugby) level. While I played sports all through high school, I never played football. I played basketball, baseball, and soccer. I say this in the interest of full disclosure when it comes to my views and opinions in this post.

I have played sports at a relatively high level. I have had opposing players take what I thought were cheap shots at me and even though I don’t remember specific instances, I’m sure my former opponents would recall instances where they thought I took a cheap shot at them.

The bounty program that Gregg Williams oversaw while defensive coordinator of the New Orleans Saints (and supposedly as coordinator of the Redskins and Bills) was despicable. Furthermore, he should never be allowed to coach in the NFL again and his indefinite suspension was a large step in the right direction from the NFL.

So what makes it so wrong? These guys know the nature of the sport that they played and even if it was never in writing, one could argue that the players had a pretty good idea of what might happen when they strapped on a helmet. Throughout the history of the NFL, this was probably not always the case. Originally, nobody knew much about some of the injuries that are specific to contact sports. Then, allegedly, the NFL knew more than it was telling players, specifically with regards to concussions. This issue is at the heart of many of the hundreds of lawsuits that formers players have filed against the NFL in recent years.

Nowadays, ignorance or a vast cover-up can no longer be blamed for not having this information. Repeated blows to the head of ANY KIND have the potential for serious long-term health issues. The kind of repeated head injuries that Gregg Williams wanted his players to inflict don’t just shorten careers, they shorten lives.

On the offchance that those reasons aren’t good enough for you, what makes this so wrong? Imagine your workplace and now imagine that you want to get ahead in your company or organization. That’s fine, at the end of the day who doesn’t want to get ahead? So how would you go about “getting ahead”? Most people would answer that question by saying they would work hard, show up early, stay late, make sure they do their job better than anyone else could possibly do it. That is what you’re supposed to say. Now, let’s say that your job has a manual labor aspect to it. Let’s say that you and a coworker have been told to move a series of boxes of variable size and weight from one place to another.

Would you overload one of the boxes and ask your coworker to move that one, hoping they injure their back, thus removing themselves from your way on the corporate ladder? This is what Gregg Williams was advocating. He wasn’t talking about winning a game and he wasn’t talking about “lighting somebody up”. That kind of rhetoric has been around all kinds of sports for decades and the vast majority of athletes probably took it the same way I did; hyperbole. Gregg Williams wanted his guys to go out and attempt to injure opposing players. He was the employee overloading that box hoping to make a coworker throw out his back.

THE CODE

Sports have always been a culture that has fascinated me. On one hand you have to be the biggest, strongest, meanest son-of-a-gun on the field or court but at the same time, there is a code. It is a list of rules that changes from year to year or even from game to game and the penalties for breaking a rule can be very severe and in many cases, the punishments are more severe than the original infractions. This creates a system where there are no proportional responses and escalation is inevitable.

In theory, the code it very simple. If you do something that violates a rule or strays into the realm of a “cheap shot”, you can expect one coming back at you. The problem is that’s not how it works in practice. You aren’t always the target of the retaliation and instead of coming after you, the other team goes after one of your teammates.

Let’s take last year’s NFC playoff game between the New Orleans Saints and the San Francisco 49ers. Before the game, Gregg Williams made it abundantly clear what he wanted his players to do and if you haven’t heard the audio yet, go listen to it. Let’s say that a prominent Saints defensive player, Jonathon Vilma perhaps, was successful and laid a shot on 49ers tight end Vernon Davis, blowing out his knee. How will the 49ers react? Will they come after Vilma and do their best to have a 3rd string fullback take out his knees? I would say that you could bet on that happening but what would stop the 49ers from going after Drew Brees? Everyone in the world of the NFL knows that Drew Brees’ right shoulder needed extensive and groundbreaking surgery several years ago. In an impromptu meeting on the 49ers sideline after Davis is taken off with a knee injury, the 49ers defensive coordinator says that if you wrap up Brees, do everything you can to have his right shoulder hit the ground, preferably with you on top of him.

You can argue all day that those reactions would not be justified but I can argue back all day that they are. By singling out a player on the other team and carrying out his plans, a player opens up not only himself but his teammates to retaliation. I can’t speak for the likes of Jonathon Vilma, but there was never anything that I would have done on the field to put a teammate of mine at risk.

CHANGING THE CULTURE

The NFL did not have a choice when it came to Gregg Williams and the New Orleans Saints; they had to make them feel the pain. In a day when the NFL is named in several hundred lawsuits from former players alleging that the NFL knew about health risks and did not inform the players, they had to do something. There is nothing the NFL brass could do about the past but they can change the direction the league is going in. If the NFL ends up on the losing side of some of these lawsuits, I’d imagine they can get a more lenient judgment or a more favorable settlement because they can point to the steps taken with Roger Goodell as commissioner and say that the NFL is indeed taking steps to increase player safety.

For anyone out there who thinks the commissioner drastically overstepped his bounds, you need to remember a few things. First and foremost, any program amongst players and/or coaches that pays for any on-field outcome is a direct violation of the collective bargaining agreement. It was wrong and Williams knew it. Secondly, when the NFL began its investigation, from the reports I’ve read, they told the Saints to cease and desist these bounty programs. Head coach Sean Payton and general manager Mickey Loomis were specifically told by Saints’ owner Tom Benson to stop. Did they? Of course not. Thirdly, during the course of the investigation, Saints officials lied about the existence of this program. Most importantly, we have a league today that is becoming more and more sensitive to the physical toll that playing this sport takes on the human body decades after you stop playing.

To sum up, they broke rules, they lied about it, and then they were insubordinate about ending it all in a climate when it seems this is all the league cares about right now. When you add to that a commissioner who has enormous power and has not been afraid to wield it to protect his league, there’s only one question left to answer; what did you think was going to happen?

The NFL sent a clear message with the punishments handed down to the Saints in the past few weeks. They said that they don’t care if bounty programs have gone on in the past, what’s done is done. They’ve also said that if they catch any team doing it in the future, they will bring the hammer crashing down on the people who did it, the people who allowed it to happen, AND the people who should have known it was going on and should have put a stop to it.

I disagree with the bounty program run by Gregg Williams for moral reasons and I agree with the punishments handed down because of the rules broken and the attempts to get away with it. Having said that, I like to think of myself as open-minded so I’d like to put forth a challenge to anyone reading this out there.

I challenge you to defend Gregg Williams and bounty programs.


No, I won’t be holding my breath.