Steelers: The Problem of Vontaze Burfict Going Forward

The Steelers and the NFL have a problem that is not going to take care of itself. That problem is Vontaze Burfict.

The Steelers have a problem. This is a long-term problem. And it’s a problem that is seemingly without a solution. I certainly don’t have one readily available. It’s a problem for every player in the NFL and for the NFL itself as a brand. It’s especially a problem for a team in the the AFC North, like Pittsburgh. Enough with the suspense. I’m talking about Vontaze Burfict.

The problem of course is this: The Steelers must play two games a year against a player who is intentionally trying to injure their star players. What can be done about this?

The Steelers of course dealt with two consecutive 8-8 seasons. An enviable “slump” for most teams but a slump nonetheless. Through the draft and a little bit of free agent work, shaking off the burdensome contracts of the old Super Bowl teams, the Steelers have rebuilt. The offense is the best in the league and the defense is getting better every game.

The Steelers are Super Bowl contenders without a doubt. They’ve got the pieces to be contenders for probably half a decade. It seems like a long time. It’s not. The 70s Steelers got all their Super Bowls in 6 years. The 90s Cowboys dynasty got theirs in 4. And that was before free agency took off.

My point is this. If Vontaze Burfict keeps injuring star players at the pace he set this year (3 pro bowl players injured), Ben is going to be retired and people will be wondering what ever happened to that crazy Pittsburgh offense we used to hear about.

The Steelers could very well lose against the Broncos because of Vontaze Burfict, who will be home writing checks to the NFL, not even on the field. Not because of his skill at football, but because he injured those players. Consider this, what if Vontaze Burfict played for the Redskins in the early 90s? Might there never have been an early 90s Cowboys dynasty?

I’m not saying the Steelers are at that level. But might we never find out because Vontaze Burfict is human garbage? Here is where I’d go on a little speech about being a man and looking yourself in the mirror and if you can’t respect your opponent or even the game at least respect yourself enough to have some integrity, but I’ll skip that. We all feel it, but what do we do?

This isn’t just a problem for the Steelers, or the AFC North, or Bengals opponents, many of whom have complained to the media about Burfict intentionally injuring players. It’s a problem for the NFL.

First, because of money. Star players sell jerseys. They’re ambassadors to the game. They’re the faces you recognize and the careers you follow. The stories are great.

How many people in their driveway have thrown up a shot and yelled Jordan? How many people’s love of basketball is inextricably linked to Jordan? What if Jordan got his knee taken out a couple times by some dirty, mediocre player on the Milwaukee Bucks, missed a few seasons, never quite was the same afterward? What if that happens to Le’Veon Bell?

Dynasties are good for business. It creates drama. It keeps people familiar and engaged. What happens if way back in 1992 some player on the Redskins likes diving at Troy Aikman’s knees? Or hitting Michael Irvin in the head? Dynasty gone.

Only takes four years’ worth of injuries and one of the most celebrated teams in NFL history never happened. You can’t have dynasties without stars, and you can’t have stars playing Vontaze Burfict twice a year.

Now Goodell has done a lot to make the league a friendlier place. Many, including me, have been occasionally annoyed by his never ending urge to tinker. But he has taken steps to make the NFL less brutal with an eye toward making it more widely acceptable.  The NFL is the most popular sports league.

The concussion protocol is a response to the public’s growing awareness and concern over concussions in the NFL. That, the hitting rules, and many other things are meant to make the NFL appear less a blood sport. How does this translate financially?

Anecdotally, over the last couple days both my grandma and a coworker have gone out of their way to tell me how disgusted they were with not only the hit on Brown but Ben too. Both of them were convinced they were each intentional and were sickened by the whole situation.

My high school language arts teacher, who once told me she didn’t know the first thing about football interrupted a newsfeed full of Shakespeare related webpages to celebrate the suspension of Burfict for those hits, complaining only that he wasn’t suspended longer.

Now the hit on Ben was technically legal, maybe (have you seen the angle where he drives his knee into Ben’s shoulder?), but my grandma doesn’t know about the rules. She just knows when one guy is obviously trying to injure another guy and that’s what she saw. And she saw no flags thrown.

And when it comes to Brown, Deion Sanders can talk about momentum all day but to those not familiar with the rules (or running? Been longer than I’d care to admit but I don’t seem to remember stopping being that hard) it doesn’t make sense. Even to those who are it doesn’t make sense.

Quick tangent: Burfict hit Browns head, defenseless receiver, and rule broken. Only thing that could acquit him is if he didn’t see or he couldn’t get out of the way. If you watch the replay, he is upright looking toward Brown when the ball flies through his hands. He bows his path toward Brown. The fact that he bowed his path to meet Brown proves he saw him.

And momentum was not a factor. As I mentioned Burfict was upright when the ball left Browns hands. If he continued forward he would have caught Brown in his arms, with his torso. He did not; he lowered his shoulder after Brown lost the ball during the two steps before contact.

So not only was momentum not too great for him to change, but he did in fact change, he lowered his shoulder. All he had to do was not stop and he’d have been fine, he affirmatively chose to lower his shoulder. Tangent over.

But anyway, grandma saw the situation escalate. She heard the announcers continually express amazement at the out of control nature of the Cincinnati bench. She saw Brown lying on the ground motionless after a headshot and Pac-man Jones push a coach.

Why am I talking about my grandma? Because she, my coworker, and my language arts teacher are the people that Roger Goodell’s rule changes have helped keep in the fold. They’re here to watch a fun game. To see the big names run around and make highlights.

They don’t tune in to see stars on crutches or passed out on the field while some doofus paces the field celebrating the injuries and trying to make mean faces for cameras. If those three people see a few more games like Saturday don’t expect them to be NFL fans.

And that hurts everybody’s money. The NFL teams get a significant amount of their profits from a pool that is shared evenly. So last year when Burfict tried to injure Cam Newton’s ankle by twisting it after a play, if he seriously injured an MVP player, that’s a huge amount of money. Not just for the Panthers, or Newton, but that’s money from the Raiders and Cowboys too.

Forget money all together for a second, these are real people. Some of this gets lost because we treat the players like gladiators but they’re real human adults. They’re professionals. They have a right to do their job and have their career as best they can without some sociopath trying to fall on their knee and ruin their life and everything they worked for.

You got talent. You are disciplined and focused. You work hard every day your whole life. You come to a stadium to do that job. You’re the best in the entire world at what you do and you earned it. You’re the best in the world and now you’re going to go out and entertain people and perform your job. No one can take that away from you. Except Vontaze Burfict.

And other Bengals come to his defense, as they are perhaps obligated to do. But with trades and free agency, they could easily be on the wrong side of the ball when Burfict suddenly can’t stop, or he’s stop-drop-rolling while he holds your ankle. This is an everybody problem.

Yes, people get injured in football. It’s unavoidable … that is … if it’s not on purpose. So say you own a gas station, you work your whole life to own a small business. Now, a car could come out of control, hit a pump, explode, and ruin your life’s work. And that would be sad, but unavoidable.

But that’s not the situation. The situation is that the competition across the street keeps ghost riding cars into your pumps trying to blow up your business. That’s avoidable. That’s not just one of the risks of entrepreneurship.

Now that’s an analogy obviously, but it’s no different than Burfict. It’s not different rules because it’s football. It’s still life on earth as a human. You can’t try to injure people.

And yes, he’s trying to injure people. I’m assuming intent and I feel pretty confident in doing so. Take the last two weeks for example. Three players were injured by Burfict in what looked to be hits where he tried to injure them. The third being Maxx Williams of the Ravens.

Now, if you tell me a guy gets accused of murder three times, by three people, on three separate occasions in two separate locations, in totally unrelated incidents, now I’ll let the trial handle the legal part but if I’m a betting man I’m thinking he killed somebody. A guy typically does not find himself accused of three separate heinous crimes in a lifetime, let alone two weeks, just by coincidence. Also there’s video evidence.

And it’s not just the last two weeks. Ben accused him of trying to injure him by diving at his leg. Many Steelers took issue with him celebrating the injury of Le’Veon Bell. It’s not just the Steelers and Ravens either. He was fined for punching a Green Bay Packer in the groin. Last year Cam Newton accused him of trying to twist his ankle. Teammate Greg Olson did the same.

Watch replays of all those. Let Deion Sanders watch Burfict try to twist the MVP’s ankle around and tell me about how hard it is to stop running and how that matters. He can’t stop his fist from colliding into the groin of a Green Bay player between plays?

It’s not just Burfict, its other Bengals too. Adam “Pac-man for some reason” Jones was spotted slamming Amari Cooper’s head into his own helmet during a game. Cooper’s a young star. What if he’s the next Randy Moss? What if he hurts his neck during that play because the NFL is letting sociopaths like Jones and Burfict behave this way and Cooper never has a career?

And then Jones goes pushing coaches too? And look, we can ask what was “Jerry” Porter doing on the field as Jones’ called him during his post-game Instagram rant. Because what do grown men do when they have a problem? Go to Instagram. But Porter knew what he was doing I suspect. He saw gasoline, the Bengals have no discipline, they’re an embarrassment, so Porter lit a match and walked around.

But regardless, it’s not a penalty for a coach to be on the field during an injury time out though. It’s not illegal for him to talk to Bengals players. It is to push him though.

But this is about injuries specifically, not the all-around pathetic nature of the Cincinnati Bengals. Burfict is trying to injure players. Even during the height of the Steelers-Ravens rivalry, even with Terrell Suggs, despite all the intensity and bad blood, it never ever got as bad on either side, as ugly and malicious, as it did with Cincinnati Saturday night.

Throughout that rivalry I never once heard either team accuse a player of trying to hurt another. And they openly talked about hating each other. Both those teams are now saying one player, Vontaze Burfict, is trying to injure their players. As fans or players on both sides, we’ve seen hard hits and bad blood, as hard and as bad as it gets, and we never threw such accusations, it’s because this is different.

Even a Bengals fan can see what’s going on out there. And they’re currently suffering for it, though not as much as Bell, Brown, and Ben. Yes, that’s three pro bowl players Burfict has injured this year for the Steelers. Some players get a rep for hitting hard, some for being dirty, but it’s rare that players and fans alike from several teams start accusing a player of injuring someone intentionally.

This is not a conspiracy, or a coincidence. So what’s to be done about it?

What can the Steelers do about trying to get to a Super Bowl, but having to play a guy who is setting out to seriously injure their star players twice a year minimum? There’s no training, no work, no plays that can account for a flat-out awful human being waiting for an opportunity where the rules or maybe a refs averted eyes provide him a chance to seriously injure a star player. So what can we do?

Well, not much. They’ve essentially done all they can at this point. They’ve said it publicly, as have many other NFL players. They’ve stayed focused on the game, which allowed them to pull out the win in this match and the last. But really, they can’t do anything that isn’t trying to injure him back, which is obviously not the right move.

The person who is in control of this situation is Marvin Lewis. The situation in Cincinnati has been getting worse for a while. It bubbled up and exploded Saturday. Marvin Lewis has lost control of this team. He is not capable of controlling his players.

It’s been questionable for a while with on and off the field incidents but there’s no more question. Announcers during the game repeatedly mentioned the Bengals sideline and Burfict especially being out of control, pushing cameras even. The signs were there and Lewis did nothing.

Pro Football Talk’s Michael David Smith quoted Lewis as saying, “He’s trying to go over and defend the play. There were a lot of plays out there and calls went different ways. They deemed that to be a hit to the head I guess,and others not today.”

If you didn’t pick up on it, he was subtly removing all responsibility from the guy who lost his team the game, and complaining about a call from the third quarter of that game. Did he just “I’m rubber, you’re glue” us? He went on to make a number of excuse for both Burfict and Jones, and to say they both feel bad so it’s ok. Listen to him after the game, it’s sad.

His response to the incidents was to question the refs, rather than express disappointment in his players. Now I like Marvin Lewis. I respect Marvin Lewis. But his response to Saturday was pathetic and did a lot to illuminate how the Bengals got so out of control. It’s because Marvin Lewis is the guy who gets mad at the teacher who gave his kid detention, not his kid for getting detention over and over again.

So it’s not the Steelers responsibility. And Marvin Lewis is not capable of controlling his team. So I ask again, what can be done? The NFL. The NFL is the backstop. Only the NFL can control the Bengals at this point, Burfict specifically. This is a strange new territory though.

The NFL used to be brutal. And these rules about hitting and pads and helmets etc that have formed over decades, many of them were meant to tamp down on that. The idea was to eliminate the act, the injuring act. So helmet to helmet hits, illegal. But the problem isn’t solved.

Because if you lock the door, someone might take the window, or maybe scale the façade. There’s no accounting for creativity. The problem is the motive to hurt someone. Taking away the means to hurt someone, like a helmet to helmet hit, helps, but it doesn’t address the root of the problem which is the motive to hurt someone. So how do you do that and still have the game of football be the game of football?

Perhaps an independent panel that assesses that kind of thing. Perhaps year long suspension, zero tolerance. Perhaps someone in the booth to monitor it. Who knows what’ll work. I don’t claim to.

The intent of this post is only to ask the question, because I don’t have the answer. It’s also to make the case that Vontaze Burfict is a serious problem going forward for a Steelers team that has suddenly ripened into a Super Bowl level team but whose window for winning, long or short, is limited. Burfict is a serious problem for the AFC North because they have to play this guy twice a year at least.

We also need to broaden the scope here too. This isn’t just Pittsburgh’s problem, although they’ve borne the brunt of it. It’s not “oh those crazy AFC North teams are at it again, let them work it out.” It’s not Steelers-Ravens, it’s Vontaze Burfict is trying to injure people and the Cincinnati Bengals, especially the defense, are out of control.

It’s a problem for every player who wants to have their careers’ arc determined by merit and effort, not a random act of technically legal violence committed by 250 pound child. It’s a problem for the NFL who are constantly balancing the tough and the fun in an effort to maximize fans, and therefore revenue.

It’s a problem for fans too who want to see dynasties and stars, the best of the best, not the best of who haven’t been injured by Vontaze Burfict or some player like him.

Under the Goodell years the NFL has been slightly reactionary. By that I mean, when a problem hits the news they go full force at it. Sometimes they aren’t proactive enough however (Ray Rice’s first suspension for example). Well we’re past Ray Rice’s first suspension. Non-football people are talking about football in a bad way after that game.

That means the NFL is in super clean up mode down at HQ. They know it’s a problem and they know everybody watching saw it. Roger Goodell probably wanted to punch that guy who threw the water bottle at Ben more than Ben did.

So what’ll happen? Will it die down and be forgotten about with that 3 game suspension? Because if it does it will only happen again, because the Bengals have proven they cannot control themselves and neither can Marvin Lewis. So what then will the NFL do?

Next: Steelers vs Bengals (Wild Card): Defensive Huddle

I don’t know. Hopefully the NFL finds out soon though before it’s too late and Vontaze Burfict ends somebody’s career.