Tarkenton: Jail Williams

Former New Orleans Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams remains in NFL exile after being indefinitely suspended for running the team’s pay-for-pain bounty program.

But one Hall of Famer doesn’t think Williams has been punished nearly enough.

“He should be banned forever. He ought to be convicted. He ought to go to prison,” former Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants quarterback Fran Tarkenton said during a recent interview on ESPN Radio in Chicago.

“It’s all wrong. But I don’t blame the (Saints) players because, as players, we are told, and we are brainwashed — not in a bad way — from the time that we started playing football as kids, your coach is your leader. Listen to your coach. . . . You can trust him.

“So if your coach tells you to go out and do all these things . . . you get caught up in the emotion of the time and you do it and say, ‘That’s OK.’ You don’t think about it because we don’t think much when we are in our 20s.”

Tarkenton put the scandal into further perspective. “The players I talked to from my generation are outraged about it. We didn’t play with bounties,” he said. “(Hall of Fame Chicago Bears linebacker) Dick Butkus didn’t have bounties on anybody, or there wouldn’t have been anybody to play because he would’ve killed them all.”

Mcmahon sued: In an attempt to recover $104 million, federal authorities have sued former Bears quarterback Jim Mcmahon and eight others involved in a now-failed bank that was at the center of the campaign for President Obama’s old U.S. Senate seat. Seven former directors, including Mcmahon, and two officers of Broadway Bank ignored federal warnings about how risky some of the bank’s loans were, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. lawsuit filed last month. In all, $104 million in losses from 17 loans were caused by gross negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty by the defendants, the suit says.