Noone denies this. But theres a difference between telling your team to try and hurt the other team and offering money to your team to hurt someone.

People don't watch football to see players trying to end each others' careers.

Difference between legal hard hits and purposely taking out star players any way possible.... and getting paid extra to do it.

says you. they sure watch it for the hard hits. or did they take away that 'jacked up' segment on espn?

I watch espn all the time and i vaguely even remember them running this skit.


Hard hits don't cause people to want to tune into games. them wanting the QB to throw 50yard bombs do. watching 1 handed catches, watching guys make 1on1 plays, watching kick and punt returns...

hard hits wont even crack the top 10 reasons fans watch the games.

lol okay. i'm sure people would love to tune in to watch flag football.

BIG difference between hard hits and dirty hits

so you'd still watch the nfl if the players were trying to end each others' careers every single play?

And the things that screw the saints is no matter how much they claim the hits were legal and in the spirit of the game, The fact it is know money was offered to hurt players will lead everyone to believe the hits were made with the intent to injure and claim the bounty.

They did take it away.

That's why dirty hits are policed by the NFL and are punished with fines ranging from $10-50K or so. That's why the Saints' players would have to be ******ed to employ dirty hits to collect $1,500-$10,000 in bounties. The bounty system was wrong and I think ineffective to boot. NOBODY IS SAYING THAT DIRTY HITS ARE A GOOD THING!

shawne merriman furious people only care NOW. says jeff fisher "put out a hit" on him when he took vince young out of a game.

different than actual cash bounties, sure, but the greater point is true: absolutely no chance the saints are the only team that does this

ib4 racer dies in a crash and triumph shows up in the thread saying ppl only watch racing for crashes

Judd Zulgad from 1500ESPN hit in on the head with this:

Judd Zulgad ‏ @1500ESPNJudd
Favre wouldn't do it, but the NFL's findings are grounds for a lawsuit by a QB who was targeted. It's that simple. Suit vs. team and league.

Judd Zulgad ‏ @1500
What is to stop any targeted QB from suing the team, league and Gregg Williams? U can't target human beings.

i would agree with this except i would tend to think either man would be blackballed from the NFL and, more importantly, any network the NFL associates itself with whether they win or lose the suit

Punishment should be super stiff. Big lol at anyone taking the "this happens all the time, people watch football for big hits line." They are part of the game, but people aren't watching to see late dirty hits or plays designed to injure players. I also think its a huge lol how many dumb ex players accept bounties as part of the game and not understanding that times are changing now and them doing it wasn't ok in the first place.

I remember chris carter laughing on espn about how buddy ryan put a bounty on the opposing kicker and they ended up knocking him out of the game and injuring him. And he was just laughing about it like it was no big deal. Well see if he still thinks the same way when half the people he played with have dimensia in 20 years.

The Saints' personnel are lucky Jim Garrison is no longer District Attorney in New Orleans.

dirtydiana73,

Is your argument than players rarely hit with the intent to injure and only do so when there is a bounty in place? Because my argument is that the QB is targeted with the intent to injure just about every time that a rusher comes in untouched and undetected by the QB regardless if there is a bounty in place or not. If a DE is coming in undetected from the backside he is planning to smash the QB with all his might injuries be damned. The bounty only comes into play in that it gives the defensive player incentive to employ dirty tactics, but that will result in a negative financial impact for the offender due to the fines being greater than the reported bounties. Bounties are wrong and illegal, I get it. But the bounties would have to be greater than the fines for them to be effective on rational players. I will grant you that NFL players probably don't always act rationally.

This.

Giving someone a good clean pop they'll remember is football and players seem to accept that. When you're making a conscious effort to actually injure someone though it's just more likely that you will, and this affects way how and where you might hit a person, encourage you to throw in a few more late hits, etc. I know that's not the old school of thinking but giving players incentives to ruin careers isn't needed to make football awesome.

Stop some dude in his backfield and I'll be plenty happy, you don't have to end his season or career too. It's like shooting a guy where an ass kicking would have done fine.

As i stated before i agree with the your thoughts on the situation in that the bounty system doesnt really have an award.

But imagine you see a DE come in from the blindside make a hard hit on the QB and injure him. You think that its a great play by the DE. Then after the game you hear that there was a bounty on the QB and other players. Now that play by the DE you have no idea if it was clean or dirty. Intent to hurt or injure can be clean or dirty. But the aim to claim the bounty is only dirty.

And that is where the seperation lies. And no matter who says what or whatever arguement is put forward. For the period that this bounty system was in place people are just gonna assume that all tackles were made in order to earn a bounty.

Orlando Brown sued the NFL and continued to play after the lawsuit so this point is flawed.

There is a bit of a difference between individual players trying to light people up and an organization setting a system that financially rewards players for knocking players out or having them carted off the field. We all get that there are risks in playing football. But players are accepting the risk that they can get randomly injured, not that they can be specifically targeted for dirty hits that could jeopardize their career longevity for a trivial cash payment.

I don't know if I would, but people seemed to enjoy football in the 70s and 80s.

The Saints will pay heavily for this, and there absolutely should never be a bounty system. But lol @ in the article linked in the OP adrian peterson mentioning the saints going after his bum leg - that is, like it or not, a part of the game and always will be.

some ppl are so naive

There are players who play the game clean, they love it, they want to win fair and square

There are players who play like animals, they have no off button and they play with reckless abandon

There are players who play with hate, it is their fuel. They play with a warrior mentality vs. the guy opposite him, whatever it takes to win



All these guys are somehow influenced by their coaching staffs. The coaching staffs share similar mentalities to the above players, as most of them were players at some point. The only difference is that they are in charge of direction. In the end they are all people. Just because this is the highest level of football does not change the fact that they are people. Some of them are good, some of them are animals, and some of them are just ****ty from the inside out. Add in all the kinds of shades of grey and anything is possible depending on the type of coach. This is the way it has been, is now, and always will be.

Then there is the management. They have an insanely lucrative product. Its in their best interest to always keep that product going. Penalizing every team that does this stuff is bad, the reputation of teams and the sport goes downhill, money is lost, there is no telling how the general mass will respond. It becomes all about damage control. Make no mistake; the NFL has known about this all along, perhaps for decades

Just so lol the way casual fans are so oblivious until the media tells them something. I'm loling at my past self for having believed certain things back then

So Favre has nothing to lose!