About a decade ago, the almighty National Football League looked like it was headed down a dangerous path. It was turning into a battle of big hits. An exaggeration, yes, but not far from where the league was going. ESPN used to throw together highlight reels of players head hunting, launching their 250-pound bodies at each other with the intent to knock guys out of the game. It is rare to see a sport with a main purpose of hurting the other team, but the NFL was certainly flirting with this notion.
With each new season, it seems as though the players get bigger and faster, not necessarily meaner, although Jack Tatum is hard to show up. And this translates into bigger and faster collisions. The league needed an equally effective member in office to keep these big plays on the field in check.
Enter Roger Goodell. And enter with him his laundry list of iron-fisted new rules and regulations. The most important of these being his concern for the well-being of the players unlike anything the league had ever seen before. Goodell brought with him controversial fines and suspensions for cheap hits that were once praised.
Big hits happen in football—it is a violent game—but with reports coming out of long—term brain damage and debilitating injuries later in players’ lives, change has to happen. The league cannot in good conscience let these athletes brutally attack each other, leaving battered bodies and minds in their wake. To an even greater degree, the public cannot in good conscience celebrate this kind of behavior, putting more money in the paychecks of players who deliberately bring unnecessary harm to others on the field.
Though suspensions are understandably used sparingly due to business reasons, fines do not affect the fan base. The fines that players complain are being handed out like hotcakes are actually not being handed out enough, nor are they large enough. The average salary of an NFL player is $1.9 million, while players are usually only getting fined a few tens of thousands of dollars for bringing brain damage to another human being. A couple weeks ago, Chicago Bear Jay Cutler got rocked by Houston Texan Tim Dobbins, knocking Jay out of the game and into a hospital bed. Dobbins was fined just $30,000, barely 4 percent of his salary.
Players get suspended for marijuana use, which is now legal in two states, but they get relatively minor fines for physically assaulting another man. The league needs to start making players pay up if they want fines to be taken seriously. In order to truly drill the new safety rules into big hitters’ minds, the league needs to start making the players miss out on their sports cars and mansions. Fines need to begin to take the same toll on professional athletes that they would on blue or white-collar criminals if the league truly values the safety of its players.
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