Football culture must change
Even by NFL standards, the bash Aldon Smith threw last year at his mountain home in California was a wild one.
By the time the party ended, two people had been shot and the San Francisco 49ers linebacker had been stabbed. Prosecutors would later bring assault weapons charges against Smith, who also faces DUI charges after being arrested in September in a separate incident.
No one was shot in the locker-room of the Miami Dolphins, though there were threats of murder and mayhem. The way Richie Incognito talked was so frightening to teammate Jonathan Martin that he quit his job and left town. That the NFL can be a violent place is no secret. It’s a tough place to make a living because only the tough survive to play. Listen to Incognito defend himself and you have to wonder what world he lives in.
“All this stuff coming out, it speaks to the culture of our locker-room, it speaks to culture of our closeness, it speaks to the culture of our brotherhood,” Incognito said in a weekend interview with Fox Sports.
OK, we get it. They live in a different world. They’re war- riors on a mission for greatness, something those who don’t play the game simply don’t understand. It’s nonsense, of course. The lockerroom mentality of having your teammate’s back is all well and good, but how that translates into racial slurs or texts about killing family members is incomprehensible.
If that’s the culture — and in Miami it certainly seems to have been — then it’s time to change that culture. In a league grappling with a lot of issues, this doesn’t have to be one of them.