When people talk about “March Madness,” they’re not usually
referring to the NFL offseason; however, for some strange reason, the sports
gods hate college basketball this year.
An NCAA Tournament with no shortage of upsets (15 Norfolk over 2 Mizzou
AND 15 Lehigh over 2 Duke IN THE FIRST
ROUND) is being overshadowed by moves-on-moves-on-moves by high-profile NFL
players and suspensions-on-suspensions-on-suspensions handed out by Roger
“Don’t Make Me Use My Pimp Hand” Goodell.
Between
Peyton choosing the Broncos, the sacrilegious (pun intended) trade-shopping of
Tebow, and Roger Goodell handing out unprecedented punishments to the Saints’
organization for its bounty system, these three days are competing with the three
days that God created light, dark, and the world for the most exciting collection
of days in history.
This
magnitude of stories is too much for one single blog post to handle. If they are not treated with care, the
stories are likely to snowblog into an entity so big that no blog could contain
it, and it could deblogish the entire blogiverse!
After assessing the gravity of the situation and undergoing
countless hours of careful deliberation, the DJLR staff has come to the
consensus that with this many stories there’s only one rational course of
action to do: break dat bad boy up.
How
do handle a MEGA WEEK in the
NFL? Oh my God, I’m so glad you
asked! Wait, you didn’t ask? … Are you sure? Shit, I always do that. Whatever I’m gonna tell you
anyway. The only way to handle a MEGA WEEK is with a MEGA BLOG, of course!
So, without further ado, here is
the first installment of a three-part MEGA BLOG about the NFL’s MEGA WEEK:
#bountyprblms
Wednesday
March 21, 2012 will go down in NFL history as “the day the Sean Payton got
suspended for a year and the Saints lost all those draft picks” also known as
“the day Saints crossed Roger Goodell.”**
**Sidenote:
I think Goodell has entered the mythological Chuck Norris Zone of people whom
it is socially acceptable to put into Chuck Norris jokes. I don’t know exactly when or how this
transition occurred, but all I know is that he’s there now.
Examples: “Roger Goodell counted to
infinity… twice” or “They once made Roger Goodell toilet paper, but it wouldn’t
take shit from anybody” or finally, “Roger Goodell’s tears cure cancer… too bad
he’s never cried.”**
Remember the scene in The Other Guys when Will Ferrel relapses
into his old pimp ways and yells, “GATOR’S BITCHES BETTER BE USING JIMMIES”
to Eva Mendes? In effect,
that’s exactly what Goodell said with these punishments except the exact words
would have been, “GOODELL’S BITCHES BETTER NOT BE USING BOUNTIES.” (for those of you who are unfamiliar with Gator, here is his inspiring success story)
The punishments (from the top down)
are:
Saints
– $500,000 fine and loss of 2012 and 2013 second round draft picks
Gregg
Williams (Saints ex-defensive coordinator and ringleader of the bounty
system) – suspended indefinitely
Sean
Payton (Saints head coach) – suspended for 2012-13 NFL season (loses $7.5 million in salary money/longest suspension
ever for a head coach)
Micky
Loomis (Saints GM) – suspended for first 8 games of 2012 season
Joe
Vitt (Saints assistant head coach) – suspended for first 6 games of 2012
season
(player suspensions/fines to be announced at
a later date)
Holy shit. You’d think that Williams, Payton,
Loomis, and Vitt were running a prostitution ring inside of the Saints’ locker
room with punishments that steep.
According to Goodell, the reason
why these penalties are so harsh is because “the infractions made were major
infractions,” but in reality there are three major reasons why Goodella the Hun
was forced to come down so hard on the Saints.
1.) Increased Emphasis on Player Safety
Goodell and the NFL are currently facing no less than 60 lawsuits from
ex-players, coaches, mascots, cheerleaders, etc. on the grounds that their
irreversible brain damage is the result of a football career of hard hits to
the head and incompetent medical staff.
Goodell has made it clear that player safety is of the utmost importance
to his administration. The recently
increased precaution taken with concussed players, the crack down on hits to
defenseless players, and moving the kickoff up from the 30 to the 35-yard-line
are all meant to decrease the likelihood of fatal/paralyzing collisions that
could end a player’s career. The Bounty System is literally the living embodiment of everything he has been working so hard to prevent.
2.) The Saints lied to the NFL
The NFL actually investigated the
bounty scandal 2010, and the Saints, along with every other team in the league,
were explicitly told by Goodell that if this was going on to stop it. Payton lied to Goodell and told his
staff members to state false reports while the Saints continued to use the very
system that Goodell explicitly forbid.
It’s like if your mom walks into
your room and tells you that you can’t watch anymore TV for the rest of the
night, and you tell her that you aren’t watching
TV and to leave you alone already because she’s like, suffocating you and
you’re not five years old anymore.
In reality though, once she leaves you turn the TV back on. The only problem is she walks into your
room 20 minutes later because she forgot to kiss you goodnight and BAM! she
sees Girls Gone Wild all over the TV screen. You’re scarred for life and you’re grounded for even longer
than you would have been if she had just caught you watching Girls Gone Wild because
you lied to her. Great job kid.
3.) Bounty Systems Jeopardize the Integrity of
the Game
Look,
I get that football is inherently dangerous, but it’s just not right to go out
with the mentality to injure. It happens all the time in sports, but its root
is almost always spur of the moment anger. In baseball, a pitcher might deliberately throw at a
batter’s head because he was angry that the batter showed off after a previous
homerun. A basketball player might
step on a player’s ankle (or face in Kevin Love’s case) because the other
player has been pulling his jersey the whole game.
The difference is that these players are never encouraged to do this. The
coach is supposed to epitomize what is right and what is wrong, acting as a
sort of moral leader for his players.
If the coach is telling players that it is OK to go out there and try to
injure the opponent then that coach can become a cancer to a team by instilling
in his players a mentality that is harmful to the game as a whole. If everybody tackled to injure nobody
would want to play in the NFL. By
even allowing this system to go on in his locker room, Sean Payton was sending his
players this very message.
Goodell
had to come down hard on the Saints because it effectively ended this system
once and for all. No team will
ever be dumb enough to try this system after seeing how it ravaged the Saints’
organization and everyone who was involved. The preservation of the integrity of the game is the most
important element of this punishment, and it will trickle down from the NFL to
college and below.
Goodell
needed to be this harsh and his pimp hand is as strong as ever.
Shoutout to Ricky Rozzay (doe)
#DJLR
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