Posted by Ryan WilsonTitans cornerback Cortland Finnegan is annually considered one of the league's dirtiest players. In 2010, he was fined $40,000 for various forms of unnecessary roughness, including $25,000 after he and Texans wide receiver Andre Johnson staged an impromptu, mid-game throwdown.
Finnegan seems to do most of his talking -- both within the rules and well outside them -- on the field. So maybe it isn't a surprise that he doesn't think Roger Goodell is well-positioned to make decisions regarding player punishments since the commissioner doesn't regularly settle his disputes by going all Neo on adversaries,
Specifically, Finnegan tells The Tennessean's Jim Wyatt that Goodell is “A guy who has never played the game.” He said that Goodell doesn't understand the impact of the latest rules on illegal hits.
“You have milliseconds — not even seconds — and it’s not like you try to do it. It just so happens in that split-second you have a chance to tackle a guy and sometimes it happens to be that way,” Finnegan told Wyatt. “Last year having to dive at guys’ knees because you’re not sure … If they duck, and you’re still helmet-to-helmet with them, then it is your fine, it is a penalty on you.
“It has sort of taken the edge of the players who really like the physical play. But I’m not surprised. It’s crazy.”
The "You've never played the game!" talking point is typically the last refuge of the meathead. But whatever you think of Finnegan's style of play (and I think we can all agree any description will be prefaced with synonyms for "dirty"), he has a point. It's the same point Steelers linebacker James Harrison made recently, although he took it a step further than accusing Goodell of never playing football -- he just called the rule makers "idiots."
This probably won't make Finnegan feel any better, but Goodell doesn't make these decisions alone. NFL VP Ray Anderson and former 49ers defensive back Merton Hanks play some part in all this, as does former NFL coach-turned "appeals officer" Ted Cottrell.
Whoever is contributing their two cents to these conversations, the current players are right to question the NFL's motives as well as the rules' effectiveness. The conspiracy theory regarding the former is that the league is making a PR push to show the game is safer so at some point in the future they can argue for an 18-game season. ("We've addressed concussions, now we can play more games. More fun for everybody!")
As for the latter, here's a question no one is asking: does the NFL have the data to support their claim that all these rule changes will increase player safety? Because arbitrarily meting out punishments doesn't magically mean that offending behaviors disappear. If it did, the United States prison system wouldn't be full of small-time drug dealers incarcerated under the mandatory minimum sentences introduced in the 1980s. The law was intended to curb the drug problem and all it did was clog up cells with mostly non-violent offenders. And illegal drugs are still pervasive in this country.
Put differently: it's important to know what effects -- intended and otherwise -- a policy change will have before you implement it. We're all for player safety, it's just not clear if Goodell knows the best way to achieve it.
via PFT
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