PunkAssBlog.com

I love football. I’m a diehard Texas Longhorns fan, and I spend huge chunks of time attempting to divine things like which 4th string NFL wideout has the best chance of having a breakout year. I even cover NFL draft prospect workouts for the internets.

This doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge the sport’s shortcomings. In many ways, it leans closer to boxing than basketball or soccer; the celebrated brutality makes many a socially conscious liberal cringe. And I get that. I can’t defend it. Like eating meat, using cell phones, shopping at Target, or watching TV, I applaud those who abstain but can’t count myself among them. Judge away.

What I will say is there’s a big difference between being a football fan and unconditionally endorsing excessive violence. Most football fans I know grasp the difference between a player who plays under control and within the rules and one who uses the sport as an excuse to commit assault.

Whether or not some fans dislike the latter, though, the NFL doesn’t do a very good job of rooting out those ticking timebombs (or helping those who’ve already exploded). Oh, sure, if a player gets in trouble for any kind of assault, he’s ordered into a few weeks of counseling and the like, but the league immediately hauls him back out on the field to lay waste to other people while thousands cheer. For those with a bit of an addiction to violence, this doesn’t seem like the best idea.

The NFL’s current bad boy poster child is Sean Taylor. He hails from the “the U,” a.k.a. The University of Miami, and he plays safety. It’s barely an oversimplification of his role to say that Sean Taylor’s job is to freelance-roam the field and hit whoever has the ball as hard as he can.

Taylor is one of the best athletes I’ve ever watched in any sport. His combination of size, speed, and game instincts are among the best ever at his position. Unfortunately, this criminology major and son of a police chief has also demonstrated a taste for too much physical activity off the field.

Today, ESPN.com ran a feature on Taylor, and in it Michael Smith recounted some of Taylor’s lowlights:

Taylor, 23, nearly threw away his career and his life last year when he allegedly took his bully act too far in the real world. In June 2005, he was arrested and charged with two felony counts of aggravated assault with a firearm and a misdemeanor count of simple battery for allegedly brandishing a gun and assaulting a man who Taylor believed stole two vehicles from him.

He’s also had plenty of trouble keeping his cool during games:

He’s reportedly been fined seven times for on-field infractions, including $17,500 for acts of unnecessary roughness.

During last year’s playoffs, he also spit in the face of an opponent (a huge sports no-no) and was immediately ejected. While I’ll never exactly understand why it’s more acceptable to yank or twist another man’s balls in a tackle pile than spit in his face, presumably someone like Taylor, who’s spent his life living and breathing the football code of ethics, knows what a mortal sin this is. But he did it anyway, and he did it in the middle of the biggest game of his career.

Technically, Taylor has been reprimanded. Along with the fines, he has had to speak at 10 Miami-area schools about the dangers of violence and donate money to each. But make no mistake, he’s hardly being reigned in. To do so might compromise what might be the nastiest hitting machine in the NFL.

The league and his team don’t seem to be in a hurry to do that. Just listen to how players and coaches talk about Taylor:

Redskins outside linebacker Marcus Washington has dubbed Taylor “Meast,” as in, half-man, half-beast. Asked about his teammate in the secondary, the one who took him and not the intended receiver out in a practice Wednesday night, Skins cornerback Shawn Springs simply shakes his head and utters the word “animal.” Taylor is even rough with teammates when the team is practicing in pads and shorts. Assistant head coach/defensive coordinator Gregg Williams calls Taylor “a train wreck playing football.”
[...]
Williams has been in the NFL for going on two decades and says Taylor is “the best football player I’ve ever coached — by far.”
[...]
“If he stays healthy and really learns to play within the defense,” Williams says, “he can be the best that ever played the position.” Says Springs: “When he adds that aspect of being a pro and listening to the staff we have, he’ll be unreal.”

Teammates even break out the “he’s just a big, misunderstood softie” trope:

“Sean’s something of a misunderstood person and player,” Williams says. “They don’t know how good a person and teammate he is behind the scenes. The players love him and the staff enjoys every aspect of him as a person and football player. I like the kid. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a teammate that doesn’t like him.”

“I see a whole different side,” Randle El says. “Something happened to bring out that other guy, but it’s not him.”

Some of them even defend him with the “back you up in an alley” nonsense:

“He’s a helluva guy,” Washington says. “If you knew him and hung around him every day, some of the off-field stuff, you’d be like, ‘Say what? Sean did that?’ It would be shocking. He’s soft-spoken. Everything is ‘Thank you.’ He’s got great manners.

“But if you’re going down a dark alley and three guys are waiting for you, you’d definitely want him with you. When he’s with you, he’s with you.

“He’s just a guy that’s not going to take any stuff, especially on the football field.”

Unfortunately, there’s a problem with that. In life, sometimes you have to take some “stuff.” And it won’t always be in a dark alley against some fictional thugs.

If Sean Taylor weren’t famous, he would probably be in jail already. Even Smith notes:

If convicted, he could have faced up to 46 years in prison. After seven trial postponements, Taylor reached a plea agreement: He pleaded no contest to simple misdemeanor assault and battery counts and received 18 months probation.

Now, I’m on record as saying our penal system does no good for the inmates or the rest of society. I don’t think Sean Taylor would get any help behind bars. But if he were just some regular guy who badly assaulted someone with a firearm, Taylor would already be out of chances to straighten himself out.

But he has that chance, and with his financial assets, Taylor could get the best help possible. Then again, all he knows is football, and from where he’s sitting, his viciousness probably seems like the only reason he has that money in the first place. I can understand why Sean Taylor can’t always control himself and isn’t inclined to learn how.

The NFL makes a lot of money off of Sean Taylor and players like him. They also make it almost impossible for him to get better by rushing him right back into the moneymaking machine after he crosses the line.

If the NFL had any guts, they’d try to find a way to help players like Taylor save themselves.

I’m hardly an expert, but my initial suggestion would be something like this:
Suspend a player for a year for any assault conviction. Provide him a living stipend and insist that if he wants to play football ever again, he will need to undergo extensive, possibly full-time, counseling during that entire year And it would be provided by the league. At the end of that year, the player would be thoroughly evaluated. If he was still incapable of drawing the proper distinctions between what is and isn’t acceptable, he’d have one more year to repeat the process. If he still couldn’t cut it, he’d receive a portion of his remaining contract and be prevented from playing football.

At the very least, lifetime counseling should be available to all players. When 32 billionaires make many more billions off the violence of men they’ve trained to be rough-and-tumble, those billionaires owe it to everyone to do everything they can to help any player who needs it assimilate peaceably into society.

It’d make a it a lot easier to root for the NFL.