"Real existence"

Drew Brees has taken time out from turning down offers to be the NFL's highest paid player to have his PR people write us a letter about Bountygate.

There is no place in the National Football League, or any sport played at any level, for players to conspire, to be coerced, or to be incentivized to intentionally injure another player. I did not participate in any Bounty program, nor did I have any knowledge relating to its real existence. I have spent the last several years as an Executive Committee Member of the NFLPA making health and safety a priority and I am proud of the advancements we've made and will continue to make.

Brees had no knowledge about the "real existence" of the bounty program. From this we can reasonably surmise that he must have had some knowledge of it, though. It sounds like Brees is telling us he knew the bounties were being discussed but decided not to ask any questions. Perhaps he was content to pretend it was a make believe rather than a "real" bounty program. It wouldn't be the first time that Brees intentionally turned a blind eye toward atrocity in the interest of keeping up appearances. Recall his naive defense of U.S. treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, for example.

Of course there's even some tortured logic to Brees' position that the bounty pool couldn't have been all that "real." As Moseley points out in this blurb, the bounty "incentives" as they've been reported hardly outweigh the potential costs in fines to players who intentionally injure opponents via illegal hits.

I still don’t understand how $1,500 is enough incentive for a player to risk making an illegal hit that would likely result in a fine from the NFL of $10,000-plus, not to mention a possible game suspension that might cost them hundreds of thousands in salary.

Of course, the bounties, as I understand them, for causing players to be "carted off the field" don't imply that one actually has to commit a fine-able offense in order to accomplish that. So the "incentives" aren't necessarily so misaligned. Moreover, I don't think the players participating in the bounty pool were doing so simply for the financial advantage. Instead they were likely just looking for a device that would grant them individual bragging rights amongst themselves. The amount of money involved really didn't have anything to do with what was essentially a team-building exercise.

Nevertheless, even in the violent context of football, athletes shouldn't be actively encouraging one another to cause serious injury. And that really is the sticking point about all of this for most people. Even those of us who are fully aware of the NFL's hypocritical position regarding the safety of its players and all of the legal questions driving its motivations in this case still would like to see clearly unsportsmanlike behavior discouraged. We aren't quite so enthusiastic to see the Saints scapegoated for what is reported to be an endemic league-wide practice as is certainly happening here but that's the subject of a different post.

What we do know is that the Saints' bounty pool did indeed exist. And now we know the team's presumed "leader" was aware of it but decided to pretend it wasn't something he should be concerned about.