If two teams meet for joint practices, you can pretty much set your watch to a fight breaking out at some point.
Mike Florio doesn’t understand why the NFL has taken such a blasé attitude towards that.
Fights, like they do every year, unfolded across the NFL this week as teams linked up to host practices together. The Packers and Patriots got into it a few times, so too did the Ravens and Commanders – with Washington corner Danny Johnson straining his rotator cuff after getting body slammed by Mark Andrews. Maxx Crosby got into it with Cam Akers, and even Micah Parsons was beating up on his own teammate Thursday.
But you won't see the NFL step in and start levying punishment, something Florio lambasted Friday in his weekly appearance on “The Joe Rose Show.”
“I don’t get it, I don’t understand it,” Florio said. “They micromanage players on the field – if you give somebody a dirty look, they’ll throw a 15-yard flag for taunting because you might’ve made him upset and he’ll be looking for you later in the game to try to get back at you. If they’re going to worry about that, why do they not care about guys throwing each other around?”
Florio pointed to the Johnson incident, as well as Aaron Donald thrashing a Bengals player with a helmet amid a melee last season, as examples of damage being done as a result of the scraps.
Theoretically, a team could punish their own player for such behavior. If the NFL doesn’t care though, why would the team?
“What’s the team going to do? Is the team going to suspend Aaron Donald for something like that? Hell no,” Florio said. “The team is conflicted, they want their best players, that’s why the league steps in. The league doesn’t defer to the teams when there’s misconduct during games, why in the world would the league defer to teams when there's misconduct in joint practices?
“What’s going to happen is it’s going to continue, and then somebody is going to get seriously injured. It’s going to be a player, it’s going to be an official, it’s going to be a coach, it’s going to be a fan – because a lot of these training camp practices, they button right up against where the fans are. And when that happens the NFL is going to be ‘Oh, we had no idea. We need to do something about this.’ Well, if you do something about this now, that thing that you have to react to later would never happen.”
As we’ve learned over the years with other health and safety matters like concussions, the NFL tends to take a reactive approach. It would likely be to their benefit to be more proactive, but though Florio has a point, he's asking the NFL to do something they rarely do: plan ahead when it comes to player safety.
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