New Orleans Saints face steep fines from Bounty-Gate

Football is a physical, tough, bloody, and grueling sport. Within the National Football League players play to win games; playing the game at its highest level possible with their utmost effort.

Incentives (or a bounty system) are also part of the sport as players and coaches can be awarded money for winning games, making playoff appearances, scoring touchdowns, or gaining yards.

Then there are the New Orleans Saints. As the story broke last Friday, the Saints for the last three seasons have had a bounty system in place in which a player will receive monetary rewards for injuring and knocking players on the opposing team out of the game.

Between the team’s then defensive coordinator Gregg Williams and many, potentially upwards of 20 defensive players the Saints have used this system to help motivate players to play overly physical and even dirty to make money and win games.

While it is very possible the Saints are not the lone team with such a system, they are the only team to be caught doing these ethically wrong acts on the football field.

In fact it was in the 2009 NFC (National Football Conference) Championship game between the Saints and the Minnesota Vikings that my dad was upset during the game with the Saints defenders. He felt like they were taking cheap-shot hits on then Vikings quarterback Brett Favre for the sole purpose to hurt him and knock him out of the game.

Then Vikings quarterback Brett Favre was
a main target in the Saints bounty system
during the 2009 NFC Championship game.

As it turns out, last Friday it was reported that in the week leading up to that game, Saints middle linebacker Jonathan Vilma put $10,000 on a table and told his fellow defensive teammates that the player to knock Favre out of the game will receive this money.

What the Saints have done is unprecedented. It has never been seen or heard of before that in the game of football, albeit a sport in which players hit each other as hard as they can, that the intent behind the hit was simply to hurt another individual.

The code of the game is to hit each other as hard or violent as one can as long as the hits are clean and legal rather than cheap and dirty, and for the intent behind these hits to be helping the team win.

As long as an individual plays the game within the guidelines and with the right morals if an opponent gets hurt so be it, it’s part of the game.

But to purposely take the field with the intent to injure other players whether it be a concussion or a broken leg is simply not right.

Above playing for a particular team in the NFL, the league is a union and a brotherhood. Players families depend on the men who play this brutal game to support them. Injuring a player does more damage than just to that specific individual, it emotionally hurts his loved ones and takes a steep hit on one’s pocket book’s for the NFL is a league in which minimal money is guaranteed if a player is unable to suit up and play.

What the Saints have done may have captured them the 2009 Lombardi’s Trophy but they will have to pay for their actions with steep fines, suspensions, and forfeiting of draft picks like never seen before.