Is the NFL going to punish this behavior? Of course not. It’s a brutal, inhuman game for people who love that sort of thing:
The Giants’ win over the 49ers in a magnificent throwback conference championship game at Candlestick Park yesterday turned on two fumbles by 49ers punt returner Kyle Williams, an obscure second-year player. That made Kyle Williams personally responsible for ten points in a game that ended 20-17. And the Giants, interviewed in the happy haze of the winning locker room, casually noted a provocative element of their game plan: They’d targeted Williams for extra violence because they knew he had suffered several concussions in the past, and they think it worked.
After the game, reporters crowded around the locker of Jacquian Williams, who’d forced the second fumble, hoping for an angle: Had the Giants noticed something about Kyle Williams’s technique, some weakness in the 49ers punt-return scheme? “Nah,” Williams said. “The thing is, we knew he had four concussions, so that was our biggest thing, was to take him outta the game.”
Nice! And I’m sure at least some players thanked Jesus for letting them successfully damage his brain. Hey, maybe they even ended his career! Woo hoo!
Devin Thomas, the reserve wide receiver who recovered both of Kyle Williams’s fumbles, was even more explicit. “He’s had a lot of concussions,” Thomas told the Star-Ledger columnist Steve Politi. “We were just like, ‘We gotta put a hit on that guy.’ … [Giants reserve safety Tyler] Sash did a great job hitting him early and he looked kind of dazed when he got up. I feel like that made a difference and he coughed it up.”
This weekend I watched Everybody’s All American again. Such a sad movie I can’t watch it too often. But it does a good job of giving one a feel for what it feels like to actually be in the NFL. Doesn’t seem like fun.
Football is a very tough game, especially at the professional level. It’s entertainment for those who get paid to engage in it, and for those who pay to watch the slaughter. Nothing new here: Christians v. Lions, and so it goes…………
Sounds criminal to me.
And I’m really still sad, even more sad reading about this cold-blooded violence in their approach to the game, that the Giants beat the Packers.
With all the violence and all the commercials, football is definitely America’s national sport.