Steelers-Bengals coaches should be punished for letting these games get out of control

The NFL will almost certainly suspend Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster for his despicable helmet-to-helmet hit on Bengals linebacker Vontaze Burfict. He deserves it, and the league has established that precedent already this season.

But that doesn’t go far enough. The kind of headhunting players did in Monday night’s game requires the NFL to go further up the chain of command and punish the coaches and the franchises as well.

On Monday, the league gave Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski a one-game suspension for hitting Bills cornerback Tre’Davious White in the head while he was down on the ground. Earlier in the year, the NFL suspended Bucs receiver Mike Evans for one game after a retaliatory shot on Saints cornerback Marshon Lattimore.

Bears linebacker Danny Trevathan got two games, later reduced to one, for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Packers receiver Davante Adams. That was an objectionable hit that has no place in the game. What Smith-Schuster did was even worse: a hit designed to injure followed by the sight of him taunting a player lying on the field hurt.

Bengals safety George Iloka deserves a suspension too for leading with his helmet on his cheap shot hit on Antonio Brown later in the game.

The whole affair Monday night was out of control. It was the ugliest spectacle we’ve seen in an NFL game in a long, long time.

The Steelers and Bengals have one of the more intense rivalries going in the NFL right now. Heated rivalries can be a lot of fun for fans and make for some great games. Unfortunately, this went beyond a heated rivalry flaring up. This was a game defined more by its malicious nature than by fierce competition.

“That’s not how we play,” Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin said after the game when asked about Smith-Schuster standing over Burfict writhing in pain on the turf.

He’s wrong though. That’s become the norm for Steelers-Bengals games.

When the two teams met back in Week 7, the big story was Burfict kicking a player in the head. He got fined. The Steelers’ win in a January 2016 wild card game against the Bengals was an especially ugly affair that featured Burfict headhunting Brown, a Steelers coach pulling a player’s hair, Ryan Shazier’s helmet-to-helmet hit on Gio Bernard, a scuffle, and fans throwing garbage at an injured Ben Roethlisberger.

Notice a trend here?

Burfict got suspended for three games, and the league collected nearly $100,000 in fines from players on both teams for that playoff game. Given everything that’s happened since, those punishments didn’t prove to be much of a deterrent.

The suspension(s) the league is apt to hand out in the wake of this latest affair won’t do much to make future games between the Steelers and Bengals any less brutal.

Roger Goodell needs to use his wide-ranging, arbitrary disciplinary powers to level some punishment on Tomlin and Bengals coach Marvin Lewis too. A short suspension would remind both coaches that the buck stops with them, and it’s ultimately their responsibility to keep their players from taking head shots, kicking people, etc. EVERY TIME these two teams play each other.

Don’t stop there.

A fine for the organization, or even the loss of a draft pick, would be good reminders to the owners and administrators of both teams that they have some responsibility for the vicious headhunting Bengals-Steelers games inevitably devolve into.

As Alex Kirshner noted earlier, headshots and this level of maliciousness is bad for the game of football. Yes, there’s a certain amount of violence we accept as fans in watching this sport, but this goes above and beyond what can be considered normal or acceptable.

If the NFL cares about player safety (and it says it does) and if it cares about keeping fans watching games (we know it cares about that), its leadership has to put a stop to this. The best route for making that happen is to hit the teams’ leadership ultimately responsible for letting these games get so far out of control.