Not to defend Myles Garrett overly much for his outburst/attack last year, but he had several years at Texas A&M where he was pretty much in line with the “Man of the Year” type nominations.
That’s why it was SO out of character for him to react like that, and I have to wonder if there was more to that story than the press or Cleveland let on. It would be like finding out that some notorious asshole secretly gives 1/4 of his income to children’s hospitals, or that Tom Hanks tortures homeless people in his basement dungeon or something.
My only refereeing experience is youth soccer, which strikes me as easier than football. And people were nice to me. But it was really hard. Or maybe I’m just slow, dunno.
Coaches would definitely pull kids who were getting out of hand before a ref needed to do anything. That clearly wasn’t happening here.
Although I see little point in group punishment:
is just a sign of laziness on the part of the people in charge. Holding someone responsible is a choice not necessarily linked to actually being responsible.
Just fyi, in our rugby union (league), there are no substitutions*. If a player is ejected, the team plays one player short for the rest of the game.
Just another example of a team penalized for one player’s actions.
…
*(This rule affected me personally… I caught an opening kickoff, and had an opposing player’s head knock my lower teeth through my mouthguard, through my lower lip, and knock a front tooth out. As I teetered toward the sideline, spouting blood, the ref stopped me and said if I step off the field, the team would play one player short. A kind spectator handed me a pint of beer, I poured it through my perforated lip, and kept playing)
It’s sports. If you don’t penalize the team’s competitive changes then the penalty is meaningless.
“Holding, offense, 10 yard penalty just for the person who did it, everyone else stays where they are…”
If you tell teams that you can run such an undisciplined program that players are putting referees in the hospital, and you can still keep playing and possibly win the title that year, then you’re going to see a LOT more of this behavior especially from the 4th man on the depth chart whose suspension won’t matter.
“You” and “run” being the key words there that have nothing to do with the other players. Want to ban/fire the coach? Fine.
In-game penalties for holding just negate the competitive advantage that holding confers. No player is being prevented from playing by another’s misdeeds there. A forced forfeit would do that. So if you have some actual reason why the players who don’t assault anyone shouldn’t be able to continue to play football, let’s see it.
Because if referees have to step on the field knowing that coaches are willing and able to send their fourth-string cornerback out to pop them in the mouth if they make a call against the team, with no meaningful consequences for the team besides suspending a player who wasn’t going to get off the bench anyway, then you will either have no referees at all or every game will turn into a contest of who is willing to go the furthest in assaulting the officials. And given what we’ve seen from the coaches and parents at Edinburg in reaction to the current incident, as well as their non-reaction to the same player attacking a referee last year, there is no question that programs with deep Texas high school football mentality will go there.
Sorry if it’s “unfair.” You take responsibility for your teammates and you win or lose as a team, that’s how sports works. It’s less unfair than either forcing refs to be cage fighters or cancelling sports entirely, which are the other options in the real world.
Team culture very much plays into this sort of thing. The players see things the coaches don’t. Team captains should be dealing with this and reporting to the coaches.
Community culture also plays a part. If the spectators engage in encouraging this sort of thing, it won’t be controlled.
I already said go after the coach. Our “captains” didn’t do anything other than call coin tosses, so I’ll take your word for it, so maybe pick different captains. But this player already had a known history so it’s not clear whether anything was unreported.
Community and spectators have fuck-all to do with whether Joe “doesn’t assault people” Johnson the kicker should be allowed to play football or not.
And this is all from someone who seriously questions the value of high school sports. Cancel football because it’s not a good use of resources for the school? Fine. But canceling it after a single player attacks someone is just lazy.
This is where community(including the school and league) comes in. if his previous incident was attacking an official, he should have been banned from playing any school sport.
And a “team captain” who’s only function is to call coin tosses, they’re pretty useless as a “captain”.
In the program where I coach, the team captains are voted for by the athletes and are the ones the others look up to and are expected to be leaders.
Community is who decides if coach should be fired for kicking the kid out of sports after the first assault.
Look, I agree with you about questioning the value of sports at all. But that’s because the current system we have is so toxic, so weird, that things like “collective punnishment” and “responsibility to police your teammates” make sense in that context. The other players need to know that if their buddy lunges for a ref, it’s their job to tackle him . . . Or head that shit off earlier, talk him down. It’s crazy making, but that’s because the whole culture of HS sports is crazy. This is nothing like your teacher making the whole class miss prom because some kids planned to spike the punch. A class is not a team. A high school team is It’s own weird thing, and this makes sense in that (toxic) context.
Do you know the fundamental design principle of high school stadiums in TX? Making sure the two sides have no shared spaces, so that they never interact during the game. You can’t cross back and forth. Because it makes perfect sense that preventing riots and fights is the first and most important concern. These are violent events and controlling that violence leads to weird rules.
Having viewed the video, this is not a realistic expectation. No teammates were near the official because the official was behind the other team, and his teammate did chase after him. Regardless, if I decide to hit somebody, exactly zero other people are responsible for that.
So people keep claiming, with little justification and minimal overlap with my own sports experience. Nobody could have stopped me from a sudden attack on an official. And nobody could have stopped some kid from pulling this same stunt on me when I was a (much younger and likely nimbler than this football official) soccer ref.
I went to high school in TX. I agree that (many) people are (to me) very weird about sports in TX. And if ECISD is unable to safely host large gatherings, odd designs or not holding them are certainly options. But we’re not talking about riots and fights here, so that’s neither here nor there.
Again, I don’t really care if this school/district/state/country has football or not, other than that my wife might be unhappy about the last on the list. But his teammates didn’t tackle anyone. They control their bodies, not his. “Holding” non-responsible parties responsible is a do-somethingism sham, although not one that surprises me in the least.
Yeah I was never really sure what the point was. But “expected to be leaders” is a low-content phrase, so I’m still not sure. Especially in context of a sports team. Show up, practice, play, done. Coach told me where he wanted me. Maybe we were too trash for anyone to bother with head games.
Oh yes. I well remember my high school saying “Well guys we fought hard and came close. If Timmy Johnson hadn’t fucked up on the last play, we probably would have won. You did your jobs, it’s all his fault, so the rest of you can take tomorrow off. Timmy, you’ll be here running suicides.”
Coaches spend a HUGE amount of time building a team mentality and team loyalty. All for one and one for all. If one guy screws up, everybody pays the price. Even if the coach didn’t specifically say it. During practices, it was commonplace for all players in a positional group (line, back, wideouts) to accept the punishment of their fellow player. “One guy runs, we all run.”
Why should this be any different? When the ref ejected this kid, his mates should have been on him. Talking to him, calming him down, telling him they’ve got his back and they’ll win it for him, getting between him and the field/referee. Hell, you see that in pro games a guy starts jawing at a ref, one or more of his teammates comes over, gets between them and shoves his guy back away from the confrontation - before it gets out of hand.
FYI, the military, which is life or death unlike HS football, does the same shit. I assume that came first and sports picked it up from there, but who the hell knows.
A coach spewing some pop psy bullshit doesn’t make it true. Let’s stop pretending any of those other players did something wrong until someone can actually show that they have.
For the same reason we don’t eject the entire team for targeting. Also, try making your own argument instead of asking someone else to do the work for you.
This is begging the question. We do eject the entire team (forfeit the game) for targeting if it’s egregious enough - e.g, for targeting the referee as in this case, or, often, for starting a brawl involving multiple players. The number of high school teams who have forfeited games or been disqualified from future games - in some cases even being suspended from the following year’s playoffs - for overt violence, using ineligible players, or other offenses deemed unfixable by simple yardage penalties is so great that I don’t even know where to begin with the citations. It happens all the time!
Even at the professional level, if you abandon your responsibility to provide basic safety for your opponent, the referees, and the crowd to a great enough degree, you may end up forfeiting the game. The referees attempted to forfeit Cleveland over the bottle incident in 2002 though the league office overruled them. The Dodgers lost a game in 1995 because fans would not stop throwing baseballs onto the field. There are many more examples as you go further back in history to where this sort of behavior had not been clearly disincentivized precisely by wielding the “you will cause your team to lose” threat.