"Bounties," injuries and suspensions

[caraher]

Listening to a discussion of the Saints situation, I'm reminded again of an idea of mine that seems too obvious not to have occurred to someone. The basic principle is this: if you injure someone (particularly with intent) you should miss at least as much time as the player you knocked out.

I realize that in its simplest form there are still gray areas and opportunities for abuse. But in the most egregious cases in any sport, if you deal a career-ending injury you should be done, period.

Now sometimes a severe injury occurs in part not through malicious intent but shitty luck. A hard rule that "if he's out, you're out" may seem unfair, but the effect of the injury is hardest on the injured party. Under such a rule, each player bears part of the risk for all injuries, and I suspect the downside of someone sharing in another's misfortune would be more than compensated by more responsible behavior reducing overall injuries.

[trumad]

1. Q the everybody does it crowd.

[Auggie]

2. I like this in theory, but how do you prove intent?

As you say, it's a big gray area.

[Upton]

3. Ridiculous..

How in the hell are you going to tell if an injury happens by accident or not? And with such a rule, players would be pulling up on hits, further softening an NFL that every year moves closer to flag football..

[madinmaryland]

4. That sounds like a perfectly good rule for bowling or tennis, but

in a game that is based on contact and hard contact, there is no way enforce a rule like that.

[caraher]

5. I know the devil is in the details...

but these judgments happen every time a player is suspended in any sport for a dirty play, and this could serve as a guideline for suspension duration. In football it is complicated by the number of strange ways injuries happen - who "caused" the injury if there's a pileup of 3-4 players?

As far as players "pulling up," that's really the whole point. Liken it to flag football if you want, but there's plenty of room for a physical game without it being all about players blasting each other in ways that would be physically impossible without hard shell helmets and the rest of the armor.

Yes, it would change the game to take trying to hurt the other player out of the picture (which has certainly long been a part of the NFL game). Especially with the growing awareness of head injuries, the collision sports seem to face the choice between finding ways to make the games safer and just flat-out embracing the gladiator mentality (which would mean not penalizing things like the informal bounties). Maybe some fans would not still watch without the "blood sport" element; while I do appreciate hard but clean hits, outright thuggery is a turn-off for me and I'd imagine many other fans and potential fans.

The concussion problem is extremely challenging, and the two main problems I see with current measures to protect players are that they tend to come after the fact and they actually create more incentives to attempt to injure. How many times have we seen players on the sidelines with "concussion-like symptoms" as a precaution who would have still been playing in years past? That's arguably a kind of progress for player welfare, but the flip side of this is that every player on the field knows that if you can just find a way to ring the bell of the other team's star players, they're going to have to come out of the game. I'd like to see some clear-cut disincentive to this...