Richie Incognito; Is This a Football Team?

Parent Cafe
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<p>What I don’t understand is, in this day and age why Jonathan Martin’s teammates didn’t stand up to this sociopath Richie Incognito. Like Mike Golic said on ESPN Radio this morning, sometimes with a bully your only resort is to stand your ground and pop him in the mouth, whether he’s bigger than you or not. The other players who knew about this nonsense, including the Black players, and did nothing, have dirty hands just like Incognito.</p>

<p>Argh, I continued to be extremely disappointed in today’s “big time” athletes! Foggy morals, situational ethics, no true conception of what the world is really like outside of the arena, where life doesn’t revolve around them.</p>

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<p>I just posted this on the football thread. Guess I’ll move it over here.</p>

<p>I heard a little piece on this yesterday on ESPN radio. John Madden said “Nowadays, they’ve got 20 assistant coaches on these teams. They either knew about this and didn’t do anything, or they didn’t know about this when they absolutely should have.”</p>

<p>I wasn’t familiar with RI prior to this incident. In reading about him, it sounds like he has been a problem on every team he’s been a part of, but his athletic talent has carried him along. He’s been characterized as having an anger problem, but it seems just as likely that he is just a tremendous &*$%#.</p>

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<p>I can think of a possible reason- if he’s as violent and temper-filled as everyone says he is, players may have honestly feared for their lives had they stood up. How many football players with temper issues have access to guns and have used them? </p>

<p>I’m normally the first one to stand up for someone bullied- especially since there aren’t too many people bigger than me. But a person with an anger problem who clearly has no issue being dirty and possibly worse? Nope, my mouth would be shut.</p>

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<p>Ditto to what romani said.</p>

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<p>I’m guessing that the coaches and other players knew about everything except the racial stuff. I’d bet he reserved that just for Martin. Too many other minority players to pull that in public.</p>

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<p>The old adage about talent over all else apparently continues to this day in big time sports. Superbowl Coach and true gentleman Tony Dungy said that years ago when Incognito’s name came up on the NFL draft board, at Indianapolis it was a unanimous decision to pass him by because he was known back then as very flawed character, despite his potential pro talent. The former General Manager of New England said the same thing. Pittsburgh drafted him nevertheless and even that bedrock organization eventually got tired of Incognito. Of course, Miami has been a loser operation for years, so I guess they figured Incognito’s talent was worth enduring his character flaws.</p>

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<p>In reading about him, I saw that he had left U of Nebraska and transferred to U of Oregon, only to be asked to leave after one week because he refused to stick to an agreement regarding minimal standards of behavior and attendance of an anger management course.</p>

<p>It’s estimated that roughly 4% of our population is comprised of sociopaths. This guy could well be one of them. If so, no amount of anger management or strict rules of conduct are going to force this guy to behave like a decent human being if he doesn’t have personal incentive to do so.</p>

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<p>LakeWashington, the Steelers have enough problems this season without you associating them with Incognito :slight_smile: He was drafted by St. Louis.</p>

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<p>Have y’all seen this video? What a jerk …</p>

<p>[TMZ</a> Has Video Of Richie Incognito Using N-Word In Pool Hall | SportsGrid](<a href=“http://www.sportsgrid.com/nfl/this-video-of-richie-incognito-slinging-the-n-word-in-a-pool-hall/]TMZ”>http://www.sportsgrid.com/nfl/this-video-of-richie-incognito-slinging-the-n-word-in-a-pool-hall/)</p>

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<p>Youdon’tsay- yea, I watched the video; what amazed me was the number of people laughing along with him. Didn’t seem like anyone really cared what he was doing… but it was rather dark-lit and blurred, so my observations may not have been the best.</p>

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<p>If I’m in a bar with that shirtless idiot, I sure wouldn’t have stood up to him. I wouldn’t have laughed, probably, but I sure would have lied low and avoided eye contact.</p>

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<p>I heard him cursing but not the n-word. What was the occasion? Some guy said something about being the best man at his wedding.</p>

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<p>I saw an interview yesterday morning with sportscaster Jim Gray explaining that with football there is always a “toughening up” of rookies just as there is in the armed forces. Unfortunately he made those comments before many of the details broke but his comparison of men playing a game and those that serve our nation has really bothered me. RI just seems out of control.</p>

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<p>A story out of S. Florida says the coaches asked Incognito to toughen up Martin, though it only quotes “unnamed sources” but it’s a real paper, the Sun Sentinel, and a real reporter. I assume they didn’t mean to go this far but even so I would expect at least some people to get fired, like the offensive line coach, maybe the coordinator and maybe the head coach. It’s really inexcusable.</p>

<p>As I noted in another thread, according to former Patriots LB Tedy Bruschi, in the early 2000’s when the Patriots were winning Super Bowls the rookie hazing was tamped down by Bill Belichek. In reference to sticking rookies with big bills, he told a team meeting they had gone too far and they had to cool it. Coaches always know and they always control what happens because they determine who plays and who sits.</p>

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<p>New Orleans coach Sean Payton was suspended for a year because he didn’t stop the defensive player’s bounty on quarterbacks. I like Philben but I think he should get some form of discipline if it turns out he turned a blind eye to what was going on.</p>

<p>All those players who stood up when Martin sat at the table, should at least get some sort of a fine.</p>

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<p>Martin, by contrast, is a Stanford man. And coming out of high school he was also heavily recruited by Harvard. Had he chosen Harvard over Stanford he would have been the first ever 4th generation African American to attend Harvard. His great grandfather was a Harvard grad.</p>

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<p>Sorry Hoosiermom, I guess I got some bad intell about Incognito and the Steelers. I should have known that the Steelers have more dignity and bedrock work ethics than to draft a malicious dimwit like Incognito.</p>

<p>So Martin is a Stanford man and his grandfather and a parent are Harvard alumni? No wonder the dim lights on the Dolphins harassed him; they were green with envy! Too bad Marcellus Wiley, George Starke (both Columbia) and Gary Fencik (Yale) weren’t around to slap around the dimwit Dolphins. Fencik in particular had a reputation as a particularly nasty hitter.</p>

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<p>It wasn’t that fellow players were afraid of icognito, I don’t care how crazy he is, if 5 300+ pound guys got together and told him to knock it off, he would back off. Ex players, including Bart Scott, have said icognito was a typical bully, that when he did something dirty and they got in his face, he backed off.</p>

<p>More importantly, with Icognito suspended, his teammates had nothing to fear, yet according to Boomer Esiason on Fan and the guys over on ESPN radio, his teammates for the most part are standing by Icognito, and comments from within the league, including the executives and such, are saying Martin broke the unwritten code, he should have ‘kept it in the locker room’ and other such drivel. Funny, growing up, schools teach you that if someone is bullying you, the answer isn’t to take matters into your own hands, I have experience where if you kick the crap out of a bully, they often want to punish the person who did that rather than the bully (I guess on some stupid psychobabble that the bully is really the victim), and you are supposed to ‘let a teacher’ know what is going on. That is what Martin did, and now many in the NFL are calling him a coward and worse…</p>

<p>What Incognito did was not rookie hazing, which generally consists of things like veterans going out to dinner and making the rookie pay for it, or carrying gear or doing idiotic things (sorry, a 300 pound lineman in a skirt just doesn’t do it for me…)…this went on for well over a year, and there is no way the coaching staff couldn’t know about it…and if the coaches asked icognito to do this, then they and probably Philbin should be fired and the league should slap them with suspensions as well. I am not talking as an outsider, I played football in HS, so I am well aware of the culture, but that guy was so far over the line it isn’t funny. More importantly, the way he harassed Martin could mean all kinds of pain for both Miami and the NFL, what Incognito did on top of everything else is covered by workplace rules regarding harassment, especially if he was using racial slurs or threatening to kill him, this stuff isn’t hearsay, they have the actual texts and e-mails, Adam Shefter (sp?) of ESPN tweeted some of what that piece of garbage did.</p>

<p>Among other things, Martin was probably attacked by Incognito because apparently Incognito is not exactly a poster child for college football players as ‘student athletes’, he was so bad Nebraska threw him off the team several times (which given Nebraska’s track record, is amazing, they don’t throw anyone off), never graduated, apparently got through his classes by getting grades he didn’t earn…meanwhile Martin went to Stanford, was recruited by Harvard and comes from a family with generations going to top level schools…so he probably earned the wrath of a jerk like Incognito because he was educated, probably could speak a full sentence without grunting, and from all accounts is a gentle character off the field. I would be surprised if as part of this, Incognito assumed someone who was that well educated was gay, he seems that kind of a ■■■■■. </p>

<p>Football is a brutal sport, there is no doubt about it, it is one where aggression and testosterone rule, but the sport is supposed to remain on the field, where there are rules. Incognito violated a bigger ‘rule’ than Martin did, when you are on a team, your fellow teammates are supposed to be ‘yours’, and you are supposed to stand up for them, not bully them or treat them like crap. It is one thing to try and get a teammate to perform, it is another to do what this moron did. Maybe because I respect the game, but there is no room for creeps like this guy, there is no justification for what he did. </p>

<p>More importantly, Miami is struggling, and now thanks to this idiot, he just probably destroyed whatever chance they have (I don’t mind, the Jets have two games with them), this probably will destroy whatever hope the team had. It isn’t Goodell’s fault, it isn’t Martin’s fault, it is Incognito and anyone who enabled him who did this, and personally, if I was the owner, Philbin and his coaching staff would be gone right after the last game was played.</p>

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<p>Wow, musicprnt! </p>

<p>Well said.</p>

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<p>Saw a brief encounter of RI with a reporter today. He was very calm, cool and collected…which rather surprised me given what I had heard/whether he was capable of reigning it in (which some will say is true sociopathy).</p>