Put Down the Pitchforks

There are two things that we "know" about the Saints' and Greg Williams' pay-for-injury scandal.

1. It happened, both in New Orleans and in Washington.

2. Roger Goodell is going to come down like a ton of bricks on both the team and the coach.

But is it just me (unpopular opinion alert) or is this whole thing more stupid and poorly thought out than patently offensive?

My first problem with this idea of incentivized injuries is that it rewards a player for an outcome that might have nothing to do with an intentional action, which is totally counter-intuitive. The reality is a defender could do everything WRONG on a play and end up hurting the opponent by accident. Reinforcing that behavior with cash is just stupid. What happens on the next play if he goes out and makes the same mistake but gets burned for a touchdown instead of causing injury? Does he get a cookie?

Now don't get me wrong, in this era of the NFL you simply cannot be seen to be encouraging your players to be intentionally injurious. At the same time, I think the preachy nature of the response to this scandal has been over the top. In my opinion it represents bad coaching rather than repugnant violence and headhunting.

Consider the consequence of many injury-causing plays in today's NFL. I don't have any stats to back this up (nor am I going to look any up, this isn't a newspaper) but I'd be willing to bet there were more 15 yard penalties called in 2011-12 than any other season in history. Is this really the time to be paying your players to perpetrate dirty and illegal hits?

Of course not, but that's the problem with the way this issue is being viewed. Nobody has said that Greg Williams paid his players to commit illegal hits. There wasn't a helmet-to-helmet slush fund, a defenseless receiver payout, or a face mask twisting performance bonus. When pundits and columnists hear, "...pay for injury," they think dirty and illegal hits. Sure dirty and illegal hits can cause injury but so can clean legal hits.

Which only furthers my point that this is dumb and overblown. If the idea was to encourage players to illegally target opponents don't you think the payouts would have been far greater than $1,000 or $1,500? James Harrison has been fined well over $100,000 in the past few years for obviously dirty hits. Has he knocked over 100 players out of games so that if he played in such a system he would be able to make his money back? No chance. And again, it incentivizes something that makes no sense.

Go out and make a hit that costs you $50,000 and I'll give you $1,000... What?

Go out and make a bad decision or an incorrect play where someone gets hurt and I'll give you $1,000... What?

I'm sure it sounds like I'm defending the system but I assure you that I'm not. I just think it's sillier and more idiotic than it is evil and worthy of our unequivocal condemnation.

And it proves one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt. Greg Williams is a moron.

But it may also prove that the world of football is more reactionary and less logical than ever.