Storyline: The NFL has had a long history of cheaters and cheating in its game. Somehow, the severity of the punishments don’t match the severity of the crime. There are certain players, and coaches, who have stretched this “right” all the way. Written by Craig Helman, Washington, DC. Follow Craig at his blog.
More than any other sport, the NFL constantly updates its rules. Every year, the competition committee meets and discusses the previous season. Usually, there’s at least one noticeable rule change. This year, it was moving extra points back a few yards.
Courtesy: forbes.com
Sometimes, the NFL will also make sure that vague aspects of their rulebook are updated to be clearer and to more closely reflect the modern game. An example of this was after the rise of the read-option. The NFL made sure to cover whether or not the Quarterback would be protected from hits during the fake. These tweaks are usually done as a direct result of something that happened on the field during the previous season.
When considering how frequently the NFL tinkers with its rulebook it becomes easy to ask: does the NFL have to change the rules so much because everyone is always breaking them?
The answer to that question is yes, and it’s probably our fault as fans. The demands for success, and the financial implications of such, are so enormous that “win at all costs” isn’t just a mantra; it’s a required way of life. In a league that boasts incredible parity, close contests, and high variance, the difference between winning and losing can often come down to what some call “gamesmanship” or “cheating”.
Pop Warner, the legendary coach whose name is plastered on so many youth football leagues across the US, was known for sewing football-shaped pads into his players’ jerseys so the defense wouldn’t know who had the ball. He did this to win. Now, obviously, the NFL has a rule against this, but they didn’t explicitly ban football-shaped pads when Warner implemented the strategy. Despite these questionable tactics, Warner is still considered the father of the game and one of the best to ever coach it.
Courtesy: businessinsider.com
Now of course, our modern-day “gamesman” is Bill Belichick, with acts such as taping practices and deflating footballs. Like his predecessor, Warner, he’s widely considered to be the most successful coach of his era.
So we have coaches who are willing to bend the rules to win, and players who are willing to go along with it. We have a rulebook that updates as fast as possible, but only reactively, never proactively. This builds a culture of cheating – an implicit understanding between the NFL and its employees that they are free to read between the lines, to manipulate the system as best they can, and to rarely face punishment for it. They might only be able to get away with it once, but get away with it they will.
This is compounded by the American ideal that success is more important than how you achieved it. We glorify winners and vilify losers, no matter how they got there. Warner is in the hall of fame and Belichick faced almost no criticism for what he did. Mike Tomlin, a man who earns nearly six million dollars a year, is given a measly $100,000 fine for interfering with a punt return as it happened. There’s little doubt Tomlin knew what he was doing when he stepped in front of Jacoby Jones. He was cheating to win, and he knew that the NFL would do almost nothing about it.
The track record of the National Football League is such that we’ve come to accept this as part of the game – we might get irrationally angry when someone gets caught cheating, but if you spend a second actually thinking about the nature of the beast, it becomes easy to realize: we want them to cheat, because we want them to win.
