Marvin Lewis " Penalty for hit on Jimmy Graham was worth it"
We said the same EXACT thing about the Vacarro hit on Matt Ryan last year. This season sucks, but let's not get butt hurt over something we don't seem to mind if our team is the one dishing it out.
I understand where you're coming from, and I think it can be too easy for a lot of us to refer things back to the made-up bounty scandal, but I think Lewis' comments do illustrate the very thin (arbitrary?) lines that exist when it comes to coaching, playing, and the physical nature of the sport.
Hearing a coach say in an interview something about a hit like that setting the tone will leave a lot of fans shrugging and saying "yeah, it's football." And...that's the point.
Get some recording of a coach saying in a pre-game talk that he wants his players to make those kinds of hits to set the tone and now we got us some kind of problem.
Whatever the Saints did or didn't do, and whatever Marvin Lewis says in the lockerroom before the game or in the interview after, it's football. Players hit each other. Coaches want their players to set the tone. Defenders don't need to be reminded to make a receiver think twice about coming across the middle of the field. So when coaches say that stuff, before or after, it's in a very long tradition of rah-rah football speak.
And fans of other teams never should have needed to be reminded of that when the bounty fiasco got crafted out of crap evidence. There's nothing really wrong with what Lewis said, except that there's been this faux culture shift, at the direction of the league, itself, in what football is supposed to be and integrity, and whatever... There was never anything really wrong with the way the Saints played in 2009, nor with the way the coaches prepared them before a game, or addressed them after, either. Now we're just left with hypocrisy and glaring inconsistencies in what coaches should or shouldn't say and how that's met by the league, the media, and fans.