Bounties in the Big Easy, Part II

The axe has fallen.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the cash rewards offered to any New Orleans Saints player whose defensive play took an opponent out of a game, a “knockout” in the language of their bounty system. (Even better was when the opponent was injured badly enough that he had to be assisted off the field. That’s called a “cartoff”.) Understandably, when the news of the bounty system broke, the National Football League took an interest. It’s against NFL rules to offer any performance bonus outside a player’s contract, let alone a bonus for hurting opponents badly enough to take them out of a game. An investigation ensued.

 This week the axe fell. The NFL announced the results of its investigation and the punishment it was imposing on the Saints organization as well as the coaches who administered, tolerated or hid the bounty system.

• Defensive Coordinator Gregg Williams (now with the St. Louis Rams) was suspended indefinitely.
• Head Coach Sean Payton must sit out the entire 2012 season, without pay.
• General Manager Mickey Loomis is suspended for the first eight games next year.
• The Saints organization loses two second-round draft picks and must cough up a half-million-dollar fine.

To those who expressed shock at the harshness of the penalties, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell responded: “I don’t think you can be too hard on people who put at risk our players’ health and safety.” The axe that has not yet fallen is the one hanging over the heads of the players themselves. That investigation continues, in part because the league wants to hear from the players’ union conducting its own investigation.

Coach Payton attempted an apology earlier this month shortly after the NFL released the results of its investigation. The lukewarm quality of that acceptance of responsibility was the topic of my previous blog post. Yesterday, the coach tried again:

I share and fully support the League’s concerns and goals on player safety. It is, and should be paramount. Respecting our great game and the NFL shield is extremely important to me. Our organization will implement all necessary protections and protocols, and I will be more vigilant going forward. I am sorry for what has happened and as head coach take full responsibility. Finally, I want to thank Mr. Benson, our players and all Saints fans for their overwhelming support.

No one should kick a guy when he’s down. Its close cousin, “piling on”, is a 15-yard penalty in the NFL. Neither of them is a classy move. So, at the risk of costing myself 15 yards, permit me to point out that the coach did not improve his apology on the second try.

• One cannot “take full responsibility” unless one admits the offense for which one is taking responsibility. Neither can one offer a genuine apology unless one admits the offense for which one is expressing sorrow. Simply saying “I am sorry for what has happened” is, to be frank, a coward’s way out. Man up! The NFL claims you knew the bounty system was in place, you were told to stop it, you didn’t and then you misled investigators about it. Is that true? If so, please have the guts to say so.
• And if you’re apologizing, how about apologizing first to the opposing players who were the targets of your bounty system? How about saying you’re sorry to the families whose survival depends on the ability of their husbands and fathers to remain healthy and generate a pro-football paycheck?

Coach, you are the leader of men, many of whom are barely out of their teens. You failed in the opportunity to teach them how to compete and win in a good, clean, sportsmanlike fashion. You now have the opportunity to teach them how to take responsibility for a big mistake, how to be men. But you lost yardage on the first two downs. Third and 10 is coming up. Don’t be forced to punt. Please don’t fail those young men you are leading. Man up.

NFL Commissioner speaks on bounty penalties: http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d827c28ff/article/goodell-sounds-off-on-saints-bounty-penalties

Punishment for players may follow: http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d827c28c2/article/goodell-will-hear-nflpas-recommendations-on-player-discipline

Saints release statement from Head Coach: http://www.neworleanssaints.com/news-and-events/article-1/Statement-from-Saints-HC-Sean-Payton/8e6a10af-a20f-46be-91da-45ada420b591

Bounties in the Big Easy

New Orleans is famous as the place where the Deep South and the Wild West collide.  New Orleans is famous for its jazz, its gumbo and its bourbon. Now, New Orleans is famous for bounties.

The labor contract between the National Football League and its players association prohibits non-contract bonuses based on a player’s performance. A recently completed NFL investigation found that the New Orleans Saints violated this rule over each of the last three seasons. Defensive players contributed money into a pool and then received payments from that pool based on their game-day performance. Normally the report of an investigation like this would be a snoozer that wouldn’t even make it onto page 5 of the sports section. What caused football fanatics to choke on their Gatorade was that defenders received payments from the fund not just for superior plays like interceptions; they also were rewarded with a “bounty” for injuring opponents seriously enough to take them out of a game, what they called “cart-offs” and “knockouts”.

The bounty program was in place during the 2009 NFC championship game between the Saints and the Minnesota Vikings. A Saints defensive player was penalized and later fined for a late hit on 40-year-old Viking quarterback Brett Favre. The Saints went on to win that game and, two weeks later, the Super Bowl. The player  denies that the bounty on Favre had anything at all to do with his late hit that took Favre out of the title game. He denies receiving any money from the bounty fund for his knockout of the opposing QB.

The NFL investigation found that although Saints owner Tom Benson knew nothing about the bounties, both Coach Sean Payton and General Manager Mickey Loomis were aware of the system but took little or no action to stop it. Last week, with the team owner under fire, Payton and Loomis attempted to “man up”:

We acknowledge that the violations disclosed by the N.F.L. during their investigation of our club happened under our watch. We take full responsibility. This has brought undue hardship on Mr. Benson, who had nothing to do with this activity. He has been nothing but supportive and for that we both apologize to him.

Readers will remember that in an attempt to be totally fair and objective, this blog uses a marvel of 21st-Century technology, the Man-Up Meter (pictured below), to measure attempts to accept responsibility. So how does it rate this statement? The fool-proof device took these failures into consideration:

• The word “happened” is a common one in lame apologies. (As in: “I’m sorry for what happened.”) It is a favorite with anyone who really doesn’t want to apologize because it conveniently allows him to avoid identifying the poor choice and admitting that it was him who made that poor choice. “Happened” is also preferred because it has the whiff of accident about it. Using “committed” or “perpetrated” instead would make it clear that these “cart-offs” and “knockouts” were no accident but were the result of a policy condoned by Payton and Loomis.
• One cannot fully accept responsibility for an action unless one admits to that bad action. Taking “full responsibility” for what “happened under our watch” implies that theirs was a failure of supervision, that they did not know what their players were doing and simply failed in their responsibility to ferret out the secret bounty scheme and stop it. These phrases are favorites of non-apologizers because they are accompanied by a whiff not of accident but magnanimity. It’s as if they were saying: “No, I can’t say I did anything wrong, but I’ll step up and take the punishment for whoever did just so we can all move on and put this misunderstanding behind us.” The hoped-for impression: “What a stand-up guy!”
• Worst of all: to whom do the coach and GM direct their apology? To the victims of their bounty conspiracy, the players whose careers could have ended or been cut short by the intentionally inflicted injuries that the bounty scheme encouraged? To the players themselves for failing to be the leaders that Payton and Loomis were paid to be? No, the one person to whom they apologized was the team owner, and apparently the only thing for which an apology was due was the embarrassment suffered by the rich guy who signs their paychecks.

The Man Up Meter was unimpressed with such feeble attempts to “take full responsibility”.  When run through its expertly calibrated mechanism, the machine gave the Payton-Loomis statement only a 3 out of a possible 10. Weak. Pathetic. And unacceptable for those paid big bucks to be the leaders of men.

Text of NFL statement about results of its bounty investigation: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sports/documents/bounty.html

Payton and Loomis “apologize”: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/sports/football/saints-coach-and-gm-acknowledge-bounty-inquiry.html

V for Vengeance?

Hollywood loves a good revenge story. Michael Corleone “settled all family business” in The Godfather’s final scenes, exacting bloody revenge on rival crime families. The title character in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Spoiler Alert!) takes revenge on her rapist in particularly gruesome but creative fashion. And this TV season brought a new series all about a young woman’s search for payback amidst the oceanfront mansions of The Hamptons. Its title? Revenge, of course.

The reason Hollywood loves a good revenge story is because the people to whom they sell tickets love a good revenge story. That would be me. And you. Film producers give us what we want. They give us what will put backsides in those seats at the multiplex. We get a certain raw visceral satisfaction out of seeing the bad guy get what he deserves.

Justice does require that there be appropriate consequences for a bad choice, that the perpetrator suffer some punishment commensurate with the crime he committed. The whole system breaks down if a wrongdoer doesn’t suffer adequate punishment. Those who believe that criminals habitually fail to get what they deserve are tempted to take the law into their own hands, to engage in vigilante “justice”. For this reason many consider retribution to be a legitimate purpose for a criminal sentence; it quenches the public thirst for vengeance.

Sometimes a victim’s motive for wishing pain on her perp is not just revenge; it’s education. My friend Pauline says: “You want the person that wronged you to feel the same pain you feel. To make them understand. Or.maybe just to make them feel something, anything.” If the pain of punishment makes the wrongdoer understand the pain that he inflicted, if it then gives him just an ounce of empathy, maybe he’ll think twice before doing it again.

The world does seem to spin a bit straighter on its axis when the victim gets to give the villain a little taste of his own medicine. Conventional wisdom tells us “closure” is vital and that if a victim wants to move on and achieve the much sought-after closure, some measure of revenge is essential. Unless the perpetrator pays a price—gets a taste of his own medicine—the victim cannot achieve closure and move on with her life.

But conventional wisdom is not always right. (Conventional wisdom told us, after all, that Hillary Clinton was a lock for the 2008 Democratic nomination and would have no trouble beating back the challenge of that young African-American senator from Illinois.) Is the conventional wisdom correct? Is some measure of revenge essential for closure? In this clip from the film The Interpreter, Nicole Kidman’s character argues that revenge does not promote closure; it prevents it.

Is she right? Is “vengeance a lazy form of grief”? Is it counterproductive for one who wants to move past her victimization and not let it be the defining moment of her life? Is forgiveness the only way to bring about closure? My friend Pauline would agree that forgiveness is not for the lazy. Or the cowardly. It takes hard work and courage. She says: “Letting go and honestly forgiving takes time. More than that, it takes opening up parts of yourself to new hurt. Constantly immersing yourself in vengeful anger keeps you from opening up to new love or happiness or even hurt. It keeps you from feeling.”

Is revenge sweet? Or does it leave a bitter aftertaste?

Many thanks to one of my Granger Community Church pastors, Jason Miller, for his February 5 message on the futility of “keeping score” which inspired this post., The message which included the above video clip. I hope he knows that imitation is a sincere form of flattery. Here is a link to his message: http://media.aspireone.com/mediaplayer/gccwired/?

Thanks also go out to my friend Pauline Wolak for the material she provided in this post. She gave me insight based on her own experiences and inspires me with her courage. I am so grateful to her and the many other friends who help me with this blog. Faulty logic, unsupported conclusions, offensive remarks, bad grammar, sloppy syntax and other sins–which number far too many–are mine alone, of course .