Of Bread and Circuses: The Story of Bountygate

I look forward to your report on the full book once you finish it.

It's being made clear to me this was clearly a PR move. There was no evidence of a pay to injure program. The NFL withdrew alot of the claims it had in the first memo. Specifically that there was written evidence of bounties for QBs kurt warner, aaron rodgers, and Cam Newton.

One of the biggest pieces of evidence: the "Kill the head" speech by Greg Williams didnt even come out until months after the announcement. There wasnt a single a personal foul in the game following that speech fyi. The NFL was also completely hypocrital to use that as evidence. That same year a player admitted that the Giants targeted a player because he had been concussed four times already. An NFL spokesman said that players are accountable for their actions on the field not the words that they say when they're off it in response to that incident.

They didnt hold us to that same standard because it didnt fit their narrative.

*200 pages later*
From what I gathered this is what happened:

-The NFL launched an investigation into the saints because of claims from mike cerullo. They pulled the trigger way too early on announcing to the public. They had no evidence. (despite claiming a possession of 60,000 documents. They would go on to release only 200 documents months later.)

-Because of this, Goodell was forced to handle this situation the way he did (horribly) by refusing to present evidence to those accused and by refusing to give them a fair and impartial trial.

-All saints employees and players remained consistent with their statements. Many admitted to a pay for performance system, but all denied a bounty program including Greg Williams.

-The NFL lied about testimonies and evidence multiple times (buy the book, too much to talk about on here.)
Example: They said that Jimmy Kennedy (vikings player) told them that Hargrove admitted there was a bounty on farve. He publicly says that is a lie and he never even met with NFL officials

-To this day, the NFL has never provided evidence that an opposing player was targeted and then injured, and that a saints' defender was subsequently rewarded for inflicting the injury. The fact is that not even one instance of this alleged target-injure reward sequence was ever uncovered by the NFL.

-The only shred of proof the NFL had on the issue was the testimonies made by Mike Cerullo and Greg Williams. Williams never admitted to a bounty program, but he did admit that Vilma did once offer a bounty of 10k for farve (way after the fact like 6 or 7 months after the investigation started with his career in the NFL on the line). Both Cerullo and Williams have made inconsistent and contradictory statements throughout the entire process and neither of them ever testified under oath. Multiple saints' players and coaches testified under oath.

I would argue absolutely none of the evidence would have been admissable in a legitimate court hearing. Their testimonies were by far the strongest evidence the NFL had, and I think their testimonies would have been thrown out because they changed what they said and admitted to lying multiple times (specifically cerullo).

Everything else they had (wasn't much) was very circumstantial and a lot of it was found after they had made the initial announcement.

Very general summary, long story short we got fricked. Buy the book you'll actually learn a lot. Only took me one night to read.

There will be Falcons fans in here shortly saying GW said mean things though

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I would argue absolutely none of the evidence would have been admissable in a legitimate court hearing.

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unfortunately though, it doesn't/didn't have to.

I hope ESPN eventually does a 30 for 30 on this BS

yeah maybe an independent documentary would be more fair to the story.

I pretty much already knew all this and reading the book would just open up old wounds.

The bottom line is Goodell is a complete POS and the NFL is a corrupt organization that only cares about the $$$ But that's not unique to the league.

The frustrating part is that the NFL won the PR war with "fake news." And the idiot public and media ate it up.

The unfortunate thing is that 95% of NFL fans, who don't root for the Saints, don't know the truth. The damage was done.

And that never changes until your team gets screwed. Cowboys fans were all aboard the Roger train until Zeke. Until it impacts your team, the public just goes with talking points the NFL throws out.

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2. Regardless if the bounty program was real or not, the saints were definitely a dirty team, Right? Wrong. We were below the league average in injured players per game.

Not only were we below the league average; we injured the second least amount of players per game in the entire NFL from 2009-2011. (Chargers were #1)

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Great read. Thanks for your post.

The Wall Street Journal did an article on the injury stats and penalties by the Saints on March 6, 2012 10:05 a.m. ET.

The WSJ concluded that there was no film, actual intentional injury evidence inflicted by the Saints during the so called bounty era.

Here is the link: WSJ

Very little honest journalism was conducted at the time of the accusations.

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Cant wait to read 16 more chapters of this. Sorry if this is old news to anyone.

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I'd like to read it as well. The points you've indicated here aren't new, however. This surfaced before.
I don't understand the part where you state our coaches and staff were suspended for 38 weeks. CSP, alone was suspended a full year while several others coaches were suspended 6 months.