Josh Norman Thinks Roger Goodell Is "Horrible"
WaPo - Norman is on the cover of ESPN the Magazine’s latest issue — which focuses on NFL defenses — and the story by my pal Kevin Van Valkenburg has enough choice Norman moments to create four or five different buzzy Internet headlines. Let’s just look at one notable excerpt.
“Spend any time around Norman and it’s easy to understand how he became one of the NFL’s most interesting, and polarizing, players. Riding in an Uber past the Eiffel Tower and during hours of idle conversation over the next two days, he offers thoughts on everything and everyone, including NFL commissioner Roger Goodell (“Horrible. He’s straight horrible.”), the league’s crackdown on big hits (“What happened to us? Society is so soft.”) and Washington’s nickname (“Redskins is not offensive to me. I’m part Native American on both my mom’s and my dad’s side. It’s kind of a funny thing, though. A redskin playing for the Redskins.”).
It’s pretty funny to see current NFL players openly bashing the commissioner. It started slow, but now it’s really picking up the pace and it’ll only get worse as the season goes on for Goodell. It’s the NFL, it carries more storylines week in and week out than the WWE, something is bound to happen to have a player absolutely lose his shit on Goodell. The player will probably be in the right, and it won’t matter, because all Goodell does is make the owners more and more money. All he does it get state of the art new stadiums built with taxpayer money. The players are his chess pieces, and they can either choose to keep playing or not make millions.
The statement he made that I find more interesting though is his thoughts on society being soft because of the crackdown on big hits. Players need to decide what they want to do about it, because they want it both ways. On one hand they want to be able to lay the hit stick and light up WRs over the middle with outrageous blind side hits. Good, great, grand, wonderful. But then on the other hand they want to sue the NFL for a trillion dollars because of concussions. That’s why the NFL is cracking down on the big hits, ya jabronies.
As for the Redskins part, don’t careeeeeeee. It was actually a very quiet offseason with regards to the name debate. Only took 3 years, but it seems like Dan Snyder has won the short term battle and everyone has name change debate fatigue.
PS: We are halfway done with preseason. The regular season is so close I can smell the torn ACLs.