WhoDat!656

Who dat say dey gonna suspend dem Saints?

I say sue him. Sue Roger Goodell.

Sue the NFL. Sue the guys who made all those "hardest hits" videos for the league. Sue the league whose drug-testing program is a paper tiger.

New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton was only doing the right thing last week by appealing his Goodell-levied suspension in the Bountygate affair.

It's called due process, and you can look it up on Wikipedia. You may need it yourself one day.

Whether Payton thinks Goodell will mitigate his one-year suspension or whether he simply needs extra time to clean out his office, the commissioner's rush to judgment needed to be slowed.

Namely, what are the parameters of Payton's suspension? Can he watch game tapes? Can he talk to quarterback Drew Brees during the week? Can his wife have lunch with the assistant coaches' wives?

More importantly, can the Saints hire Bill Parcells?

Be careful how you answer that question. Your allegiances may be showing.

Like Claude Rains in Casablanca, much of the national media has been acting as if they're "shocked! ...shocked!" to find that big, strong NFL defensive players were actually trying to knock opposing quarterbacks out of the game.

Spare us the self-righteousness. And that includes Commissioner Goodell.

You can't have it both ways. The NFL can't profit from violence and then hand down inflated suspensions for suspicions of it.

Knocking the other team's quarterback out of the game has been a part of game plans and pregame speeches since Red Grange. If you don't believe that, ask your son, the high school football player.

But this is different, the smug moralists are saying. The Saints, they say, were actually trying to hurt people.

If I'm Payton's lawyer, I say prove it. Goodell's own office employs officials on Sundays and deputy commissioners who look at the tapes later and fine players for excessive hits.

If the NFL didn't fine a player after this standard weekly scrutiny, how can the league measure the player's intent months after the fact?


Read more here: It's time for Sean Payton to get tough with the NFL | Dallas Cowboys | Latest news and video ...

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