NFL: Saints Bounty Thread

[JDaveG]

(10-26-2012 03:28 PM)AsylumGuido Wrote:  If it was meant to be literal one would think that there would have been more injuries in Saints games than others, wouldn't you? Numbers have been shown that this is not the case. In fact, someone said that the only two players carted off from a Saints game between 2009 and 2011 were both Saints players.

Not necessarily. One can incentivize something without having necessarily an increase in what is incentivized. It's not easy to hurt someone so bad they leave the game. The human body is pretty resilient. That doesn't mean they weren't planning to pay if someone managed to overcome those odds. And the best evidence of that is the use of the term itself -- it defies all common sense to use the term "cart off" if what you really mean is "they had to leave the game for at least one play."

Quote:But, the fact is that the Saints were punished for supposedly having a bounty program that targeted specific players for intentional injury. The fact that they had a pool that paid for big plays including big hits that could have resulted in incidental injury does not meet that definition. While you, or others, may have a problem with it, what they had going on was not what they were punished for nor was it what they were even accused of doing.

I don't think it's anywhere near that simple, as others have demonstrated. And I think Goodell has made clear that just having such a program is reason enough for punishment, and severe punishment at that. Particularly since they were told to stop and didn't.