I put the bulk of the blame on the Dolphins organization. They let Jake Long leave in free agency, and moved Martin over to LT, and Martin simply couldn’t hack it there. No shame in that, LT is a difficult position. But the Dolphins were expected to compete for a playoff spot this season, which isn’t likely to happen if your LT can’t hold down the blind side. Rather than try patience and instruction, the Dolphins opted to order the Code Red. They knew what kind of person Incognito was.
Challenging a man’s pride only works if he’s actually not giving his maximum effort. Nobody has come out and claimed that Martin was half-assing it. Ultimately it was the personality clash, between Martin’s intelligence and reticence and the wild meatheadedness of Incognito, that fueled the escalating bullying, to which Martin seemed to try and ignore until he couldn’t ignore it anymore.
I will preface my opinion that if it had to happen to anyone, I’m glad it was Incognito. That dude is mess both on and off the field. I remember watching Hard Knocks with the Dolphins and I wanted to cringe every time he was on the camera. One moment that comes to mind is when he was brutally insulting a teammate’s fiancee to his face.
That said, Martin didn’t handle this situation maturely. He aired out dirty laundry that should have stayed within the organization, and everyone in the Dolphins is suffering for it. What he should have done is take it up with a team captain, the coach, or the general manager and dealt with the problem within the team instead of giving the media a field day.
I still view this as no different than a corrupt police department justifying payoffs, assaults, and whatever else as just being part of the culture that nobody else outside the department would understand.
At a certain point, the NFL, its players and coaches need to understand that they aren’t as special as they think they are.
I can’t help but think there is more to this story that we don’t know yet. I mean that voicemail is so ridiculously over the top that i really can’t believe it was meant seriously. Don’t get me wrong i think Incognito is a Grade-A D-bag (and he seems to have the track record to prove it), and i also don’t believe Martin should have to put up with verbal abuse in his workplace… but to me this story just doesn’t seem to add up.
Incognito is a member of the team’s player council, and the coaches had to be at least somewhat aware of what was happening. Martin had no reason to think this would have been an option because the team’s management was failing.
They were hazing. Part of the reasons why sports teams haze their new players is because they want to make sure that you can take the heat that the players on the other teams are going to give you. You think everyone’s got a compliment for one another on the field? Hell no, especially in the NFL. You’re playing against other players who literally earn their bread and butter trying to beat you, and they’re going to talk trash and play dirty to try and get in your head.
Also, hazing is big in pro sports because a lot of the rookies are coming out of their colleges as the best player on the team and the big man on campus. As a result, they come in with inflated egos and the vets use hazing to break them down and build them back up again.
Incognito certainly went too far by bringing race into it, but the fact that Martin crumbled so easily means he’s not mentally tough enough for the NFL.
I also think that all the statements about how the NFL is ‘different’ is hogwash. The point isn’t whether or not the rules in an NFL locker room are different or not. The crucial issue is the fact that those rules are bullshit.
Guys talk trash at every level of every sport, and at no level do players take thousands of dollars from opponents and then call their houses to scream at them. So that’s not the purpose of this behavior. In the NFL and elsewhere, hazing is about getting new people to bond with the group and fit in with the prevailing culture. Martin was targeted because people felt he didn’t fit in. It wasn’t to make sure he could stand up to opponents, it was because his teammates and coaches didn’t like him.
If only there were some sort of graduated system wherein the games got tougher and tougher. At each level, teams would be able to select the players that performed the best at the level below. If there was a system like that, by the time a player was chosen to play on an NFL team, you could be pretty sure he had what it took to play pro. I guess until they move away from the current system of just grabbing any heavily muscled guy off the streets, everyone must be hazed.
So if NFL teams didn’t haze, the players would be more arrogant and even larger assholes than they are now? That doesn’t seem possible.
Unless you were there, you’re filling in gaps to make Martin come off as badly as possible when you say he crumbled easily.
Again, if their behavior had been within acceptable grounds, there’d have been no field day and you can’t simply sidestep it by calling it hazing. How does making someone pay 15,000 dollars for a trip they’re not taking help them not get sucked in by trash talk on the field? How does leaving messages saying you want to shit in their mouth make someone better at football?
“There was once this guy who didn’t like that his teammates treated him like garbage and he wasn’t a great person either and he didn’t have a great career,” does absolutely nothing to convince me that Martin was at all in the wrong or that Icognito was in the right.
It also is more an example that hazing doesn’t work than anything else.
Excuse me, but can I see some ID? If you were the real Jesse Pinkman, you’d’ve said
[QUOTE=The Real Jesse Pinkman]
They were hazing, bitches!
[/QUOTE]
Breaking Bad references aside, you present some basic thinking as to how and why hazing might get used in this type of violent team situation. That does NOT make it right, but it speaks to the culture of the situation and how difficult changing it might be.
Ryan Leaf’s problem was that he kept throwing the ball to the other team. Was he also a big jerk? It sounds that way for sure. He had some big personal problems and his life is now a flaming pile of garbage. (He’s now in prison.) But that’s not evidence that hazing works.
Even by NFL standards Richie Incognito is extremely aggressive and violent. I posted earlier that Tony Dungy didn’t want him for the Colts.
Incognito is not anybody I’d want to know or be on a team with. If there is any fault it is with the coach and GM for keeping this guy around. It’s kind of like a careless neighbor keeping a pit bull. Sooner or later it will get out and hurt somebody.
