By Mark Madden
December 6, 2017
George Iloka (43) hits Antonio Brown (84) after Brown's game-tying touchdown catch in the fourth quarter of Monday night's game. (Mandatory Credit: Aaron Doster/USA Today Sports)
JuJu Smith-Schuster got suspended. Cincinnati’s George Iloka didn’t.
Yinzer Nation is tumescent with outrage, but here’s why Smith-Schuster got banned for one game and Iloka didn’t. It involves logic.
The NFL’s brand of logic, that is.
• Smith-Schuster stood over Cincinnati’s Vontaze Burfict and taunted him after flattening him with a block that seemed marginally illegal. (A little high, and a little from the blind side.) The NFL likely holds that Smith-Schuster’s behavior after the hit revealed malicious intent before the hit.
Iloka’s helmet-to-helmet shot on Antonio Brown was much more clearly illegal. But Iloka didn’t taunt Brown. It can thus be more easily argued that Iloka’s hit was just a “football play” gone bad.
NFL VP Troy Vincent said that “taunting was never considered” in Smith-Schuster’s suspension. But in a letter to Smith-Schuster that notified him of the ban, NFL VP Jon Runyan wrote, “Your conduct following the hit fell far below the high standards of sportsmanship expected of an NFL player.”
Typical NFL: The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
• Brown got up and walked away from Iloka’s hit. He kept playing. Burfict was carted off after Smith-Schuster’s block and did not return. If Brown had stayed down and writhed in agony for a few minutes, maybe Iloka gets suspended.
The NFL gave more weight to the damage done than the acts that inflicted the damage.
Flimsy, right? But lawyers have won acquittals with a lot less.
Those who wallowed in the glory of Smith-Schuster’s block because it hurt football’s dirtiest player can’t be blamed. (I’m guilty.)
But the NFL couldn’t take that into account when deciding on discipline for Smith-Schuster. There are no deserving victims in the eyes of justice. Smith-Schuster’s block was not self-defense.
Burfict has ended the seasons of Brown and Le’Veon Bell, gratuitously celebrating after he injured Bell’s knee in 2015. Burfict kicked Roosevelt Nix in the head when the Steelers hosted the Bengals on Oct. 22.
Steelers fans can use all that to rationalize Smith-Schuster’s block. (Brown did: “Karma is karma. Karma is life. You do the wrong things, you get the wrong things out of it.”) The NFL can’t, and didn’t.
When Ben Roethlisberger was asked to assess the damage following Monday night’s game, he was succinct: “AFC North football.”
That didn’t satisfy those given to perpetual self-righteous indignity, but it was good enough for me.
Monday night was a rough and physical game, played within the parameters football used for so many years before we went soft and started believing no one should ever know an unpleasant moment.
The players should be protected, but not at the expense of what makes football popular. No one forces the athletes to play.
The NFL is terrible at discipline, as witnessed by Rob Gronkowski’s felony getting the same punishment as Smith-Schuster’s block while Iloka gets off with a fine. Sanctions are applied haphazardly. No clear standard is set.
If flags, ejections, fines and suspensions bring football into line with how the NFL wants it, that’s OK. It’s their league.
But Monday night’s game was not a national nightmare, as too many say.
On ESPN, Bob Ley and ex-NFL player Louis Riddick acted like the Steelers and Bengals had firebombed an orphanage. After Smith-Schuster’s block, ESPN play-by-play announcer Sean McDonough said, “Shame on him.” McDonough will make a good grandmother someday.
Was Monday night a bad look for the NFL, or was it entertaining?
There’s no finite description beyond calling it “AFC North football.”
Not long ago, the hits perpetrated by Smith-Schuster and Iloka would have been put on a videotape and marketed by the NFL. Or featured on ESPN’s “Jacked Up” segment, which was not hosted by Ley, Riddick or McDonough.
Have we evolved, or gone limp?
Depends on who yells the loudest.
Mark Madden hosts a radio show 3-6 p.m. weekdays on WXDX-FM (105.9).
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