Brace yourself for player suspensions next. This thing just gets bigger and bigger.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/peter_king/03/21/saints.discipline/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
I think these punishments are way out of line. Player incentives are nothing new. If the league wants them stopped they don’t have lop off heads like this. A four game suspension and fines for the coaches is ample punishment for a first offense.
If they get caught a second time, then throw the book at them.
Then why offer the payments if the players would accomplish the same goals without the offer of payment? Obviously, the players and management who offered financial incentives wanted the players (other players) to do something that wasn’t being done otherwise.
The penalty was always going to be stiff, but you have to keep in mind here that the Saints compounded matters by lying about everything when the NFL made its first investigation into this issue two years ago. Not only did they lie to the league, they kept running the bounty scheme. That is remarkably brazen. I figure the coverup and the fact that they didn’t even stop the bounties accounts for at least half the punishments.
Anyway if the league wants this stuff stopped, it has to make sure the cost of being caught is high enough that people won’t do it. I think that’s probably been done on the coaching and executive end. I doubt Williams will coach again, certainly not as a defensive coordinator, and if Loomis and Payton hadn’t won a Super Bowl and run a very successful team the last six years, they might’ve been fired already. So I would say this tells NFL coaches and executives that they have to tell their players that this stuff cannot happen, and if you find out it’s happening on your team, you shut it down immediately and don’t cover it up. The players are going to get shorter suspensions, I think, because they don’t have as much responsibility and I assume they’re not responsible for the lying. But a bunch of guys will pay some money and miss some games.
They looked the commissioner in the face and flat-out lied. They instructed subordinates to lie. They repeated these lies over several rounds of investigation, over a period of years.
Given that the league, not just individual team, is the one legally liable for player safety issues, it is imperative that the league know what the hell is going on. The lying alone warranted the suspension.
A CEO who lies to his chief safety officer about an issue where the firm faces legal exposure is (in a well-run firm) shitcanned by the board post-haste. It’s a big deal.
All of my question were on-topic and relevant. You won’t answer them because you know your argument holds no water. The Saints are being punished for allowing non-contract bonuses, not for anything else. Even if you assume that Williams explicitly asked players to hurt Farve or anyone else, that is not what they are being punished for. So if the money doesn’t matter in your opinion, then how can you justify what the NFL is doing?
My logic? First, if you do not understand why players are not upset by the bounty programs but were when Suh stomped a guy on the ground after a play, then you don’t understand football or sports in general. There is a pretty clear code of what is sporting and what is not. The players understand this, hence their reaction. You seem to be the only one having a hard time grasping this.
It matters because if the instructions were implicit or explicitly, hurt Farve at all costs, then you would likely see an uptick in illegal hits. It’s unclear whether that happened.
Right. A guy who was actually there, and actually plays football, is a dupe because he doesn’t agree with all these losers on the internet who feel they know what happened because they read a article. You don’t need to take his word for it. Here is another player commenting:
Also note the article says the following:
But yeah, I am sure they were both brainwashed, and just didn’t understand what Williams said or implied. :dubious:
First, it’s not even clear Williams actively administered the programs. Second, even if he did, why do you assume players assumed he was telling them they could break the rules when at least two players have said that was not the case at all?
Listen to this Mike and Mike audio with Marcellus Wiley. Maybe you will get it then.
Just to backtrack a little, you can find the more applicable penalty stats on this (defensive Roughness, Roughing, and Unsportsmanlike Conduct) here, courtesy of FO:
Interesting. That article also states that the bounties violated the salary cap as they constituted off-the-books financial compensation.
So if they start suspending players involved, but those players aren’t with the Saints anymore, how the heck is that supposed to work? Doesn’t seem fair to the team that signed the dirty player if they didn’t know anything about it.
Exactly. In listening to the coverage of this on NFL Network last night, it definitely sounds like that’s the part that really pissed Goodell off. It was one thing to conduct an illegal bounty program (and that would probably have led to 2- to 4-game suspensions for people, I think). But, the commissioner seems to be really steamed that they lied to him about it, and then continued to run it for two more seasons.
They’ll still do it. They suspended Gregg Williams indefinitely, and he’s now the defensive co-ordinator of the Rams.
Oh right.
So I’m guessing the Saints have been radioactive since this story broke and no one has been trading with them recently?
It’s not fair, but you can’t let violators off because of circumstance. That wouldn’t be fair either. Perhaps the league would compensate the new team in some way, like giving them the Saints’ lost draft picks, or a portion of the fines.
There are no defensive players who have left the Saints for other teams in the last couple years that are really all that good. How much would anyone give in trade for six games worth of Scott Fujita? Half a seventh-round pick?
OK, imagine you and I are bowling. We both make a comfortable $50,000 a year and we decide to wager a little money on the game. $100.
Along comes the beer frame. I knock down 9 pins and you pick up 8, nicking the ninth but it doesn’t fall over.
You think I’m not turning to you and saying “suck it bitch!”? You think I’m not going to overly enjoy my beer saying “boy oh boy, this tastes good.”?
Why would I do that? Did that single frame got me any closer to my larger goal of winning the $100? Barely. And why would a $5 beer incentivize me to beat you when I could afford 10,000 such beers at my current salary? It’s a drop in the bucket.
The money isn’t the issue. There could have been no money involved at all. Gregg Williams could have printed out a certificate he cobbled together from Powerpoint that said “Player X is the badass of the game! The destroyer of limbs! The superstar punisher!” Framed it up real nice with something bought from Wal-Mart. Let the players hang it above their lockers. The result would have been the same. The penalties when it was discovered would have been the same.
In point of fact, most NFL teams do have just these sort of awards: someone gets to carry around a sledgehammer or a baseball bat or something for a week because they made the games biggest hit. By all accounts, they are big, big points of pride. Adding cash just makes it bigger.
Does a beer frame mean I have to buy you a beer? Sorry I don’t bowl. If that is the case, I don’t think you would be incentivized to try any harder in the beer frame as opposed to any other frame based solely on the likelihood you might win a beer. I would imagine gloating would likely happen every frame.
That said, I think you are ignoring that these are professional athletes for whom the marginal utility of a few thousand dollars is even less than $100 for a normal person. They almost to a man give 100% all the time. If you don’t you get cut. This isn’t like some sports where your future is secure and your salary is guaranteed. If you stop trying your best, you are gonna be cut. Period. So the idea that a small amount of extra money is going to be further inducement to not only play harder, but to break the rules, and most people’s moral codes, is pretty laughable.
So in your analogy, it would be like if we were both professional bowlers, who only earned money by wining tournaments, who decided to put an extra wager of a nominal amount of money in addition to the prize amount. Do you really think I would try harder than I otherwise would? Would I stoop to breaking the rules solely because of the wager you and I had?
But it is the issue as far as the punishment is concerned. The rule they broke was financial rewarding in-game play. But, they are being punished for embarrassing the NFL, and undermining their public position that they care deeply about the health of the players. That’s what bothers me about this whole charade. The NFL could do all sorts of things to make the game safer, but they don’t because it would hurt the product. They take their blood money, then they act surprised when the people they hire to play a barbaric game act like barbarians. Sorry, but the whole righteous indignation thing bothers me. the Saints lied and technically they broke the rules, so they deserve a punishment, but don’t act as though this is some egregious ethical violation. Big hits are their bread and butter.
No, they likely would not have. That’s the problem I have with this. The money was basically the equivalent of stickers on college helmets. If no money exchanged hands, we are not having this discussion. If the real issue was player safety and the repugnance of targeting players, then punish them for that. Don’t give some BS about in-game financial rewards.
And if it were stickers on helmets, the players would have tried for the stickers and they would have been proud to have more than any other player. I’ll say it again, the money was never the issue. You can quibble about this and point to contract language and salary cap issues and, yes, I’ll concede that for those specific points money was an issue. But not for the larger issue of incentivizing players to hurt other players. This is what we’re talking about, this is what the Saints attempted to hide for years from the NFL, and this is what did happen. Players were incentivized. Not from a “piddly” $1,500 but for what it represented and the status that it conveyed amongst their teammates.
I can guarantee you that if it were “just” stickers on a helmet as a reward, the NFL would have come down just as harshly. The NFL has a huge liability hanging over them with this Saints situation. You can call it cynical that the NFL organization really only cares about any legal fallout and not in protecting the players if you want. That’s fine. But the fact is that anything being used as an incentive towards purposely maiming other players needed swift and harsh punishment.
Oh, and yes, a beer frame is one where the lowest scorer in that frame has to buy a beer for the rest of the group.
Yes, they would try for them, but they would try to excel in the same ways regardless, as that is what allows them to continue playing in the NFL. Listen to the audio interview I linked to above. Mike Golic and Wiley both say they gave 100% all the time. Giving stickers, money, or whatever would not make the try any harder because they could not try any harder if they wanted to. They were internally motivated, and bound by contracts that essentially punished them for a lack of effort far more than then might be induced to try harder by a sticker or a payment.
And I will tell you again to look at the rule violation cited by the NFL. The money WAS the issue.
There are inherent incentives to play the type of hard football that results in these injuries. The existence of a bounty does not add or detract form that in any way, shape, or form. We have already heard from players who have stated that Williams never advocated dirty play.
Under what rule? You say that with confidence, yet if that were the case, the NFL would be punishing them now based on those arguments, not in-game payment violations. This is like an Al Capone tax evasion type situation, except that, unlike the government in the case of Al Capone, the NFL is complicit in, and profits from the real crime.
How about this, if the NFL cares so much about injuries, why did they just attempt to increase the number of games played? If they care so much, just fine anyone who participates in a play where someone is injured. Mandate rugby style tackling, and ban anyone who plays dirty. Do you honestly think any of those things will happen?
Ignorance fought. Thanks. That said, do you try especially hard to win that particular frame as a result of having the chance to get a free beer?
Whatever you say. I’m still not playing your game.
I understand it perfectly. Do you actually not grasp that I was talking about a problem with your argument? You said “players want to hurt each other,” and I pointed out that when guys hurt each other with cheap shots, the players don’t like that at all. The Saints put a bounty on Favre and then made a series of illegal hits and late hits on him.
Williams was in charge of the defense, knew about the program, and put money in the pool on a few occasions, so he certainly endorsed it. I don’t care enough about this to get into an argument about what you mean by “actively administering.”
I already explained this: the bounty program made no distinctions between legal and illegal play. You got money if you knocked a player out on a completely legal hit, and you got money if you knocked him out but got flagged for a personal foul. The two actions were rewarded the same way, which means it’s an encouragement to get the job done by any means necessary.
Back-of-the-envelope calculations put that at about 3 standard deviations. So yes, definitely statistically significant. Can’t say that the bounty program was the cause of the change, but there’s less than a quarter-percent chance that it was random variation …
You’ve said this several times and I feel like we’re talking past one another here. Yes. Players get paid to play. Yes, that’s an incentive for them to win. Saints players (in particular but probably not exclusively), were paid to hurt other players. It was an incentive for them to hurt other players. A player can attempt to both be good at the game AND hurt another player. These two areas are not mutually exclusive.
Under whatever rule. Any rule they could find to use they’d have used. If money weren’t at issue they’d have found some other rule to go after the Saints because it’s about limited the NFL’s legal liability.
They don’t. They don’t care so much at all. I’ve already conceded this point. In fact, I’ll go a step further and say the NFL, throughout history, has done a pretty shitty job about protecting players on the field and a thoroughly shitty job of helping players who were injured when they’re off the field.
This isn’t about the NFL protecting players. This is about the NFL protecting its own ass and to that end, they’ll throw whatever rule they have to at the Saints to show they’re serious about this issue because if they don’t it will be used against them in lots of lawsuits currently pending.
Harder? Probably. But the beer tastes sweeter knowing you won it. It’s possibly a bad example because winning the beer frame is part of your overall goal: winning the whole game. It’s just a subsection of it.
Here’s a better example. The beer card! It’s used in friendly bridge games and it’s a silly rule that if you win your last card with the seven of diamonds (when diamonds aren’t trump) your partner has to buy you a beer.
Now, you’d be stupid (and a bad partner) to sacrifice your game just to win the beer card. But if you know you’re going to win the hand anyway, it’s alter your play just enough to be able to score that beer card.
Just like the injury incentive. You’d be a fool to not try your hardest to win the game. But, if it costs you nothing to also try to hurt another player to get that bounty, hey, go ahead and do it!