“No Fun League” has become a useful sobriquet for the NFL since Roger Goodell’s ascension a decade ago. You can apply it to almost any haphazard public relations tweak the commissioner’s office has made over the years, from an expanding set of rules that benefit receivers to cracking down on Tony Romo’s fantasy football conventions.
The NFL’s war on fun has cost players $340,302 so far this season
From trash talking to twerking, the NFL is cracking down on fun, and it’s costing players a lot of money.
Photo by Rob Carr/Getty Images
This season has been a particularly challenging one for players enjoying themselves while playing a game that takes years off their life. It hasn’t been especially easy for us fans who appreciate being entertained.
The latest offense, from Week 7, was Giants defensive end Owamagbe Odighizuwa getting fined $12,154 for pretending to take a picture after Landon Collins’ pick six.
How did we get here?
The roots of this year’s crackdown go back to 2009, when owners took a stand to protect The Shield from merriment on touchdown celebrations. In 2014, they banned celebrations involving the goalpost and made “verbal abuse” an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. That’s fine in some cases, but it also included friendly trash talk between players. There was no gray area.
In 2015, the NFL redoubled it’s efforts to eliminate trash talk, and also made it a penalty for players to pull other players out of the pile during a fight.
There was no rule change regarding taunting this year or celebrations, but it has been a point of emphasis. Owners approved an automatic ejection for players with two unsportsmanlike conduct penalties this year. It injected even more subjectivity with the wording. Penalties for both taunting and unsportsmanlike conduct, which include the very kind of celebrations that we love, are up this season.
Fallout
The optics of it are especially dumb. Taunting penalties like spinning the ball after a catch get penalized the same as dangerous helmet-to-helmet hits. These penalties are changing the outcome of games, and worse, players get fined for those things while an admitted wife beater like Josh Brown still draws his game checks, as Torrey Smith pointed out.
Asked to reconcile that disparity on UK television this week, Goodell essentially said the fans are just too dumb to get it.
That came after Goodell expressed concern for the children who might see fun and dare to try having fun themselves.
“We do believe that our players are role models and others look at that at the youth level. So that’s important for us to hold that standard up. And it’s part of being a professional. So that’s one element of it.”
Okay then!
Fighting back in the war on fun
We here at SB Nation are decidedly pro fun. And we’re going to stay on top of the NFL’s war on it.
So far, through six weeks of the season, players have been fined a total of $340,302 for crimes against pleasure like taunting, celebrations, uniform violations and others.
The list below is every fine from those categories. We’ll keep this chart updated as the season goes on, because if this the flags and fines keep coming at this rate, it’s going to get awfully expensive for players. And it’s going to really suck for us fans.
A few notes about the data. I didn’t include every unsportsmanlike conduct fine, leaving stuff like helmet-to-helmet hits off the list. There’s no clear line for what gets fined and what doesn’t; some ball flips cost you, some don’t.
Finally, let’s make this a crowdsourced effort. If you see things I left off the list or things you think that deserve to be on there, let me know.
See More:
