Fines a Weak Response

The NFL announced yesterday that both Tyler Brayton and Jerramy Stevens would be fined and not suspended for their behavior in Monday Night's Raiders-Seahawks game. The Raiders' Brayton got into a post play scuffle with the Seahawks' Stevens and the end result was a national television audience watching Brayton knee Stevens in the groin. Niiiiiiice... If you've seen the video(and I don't know how it's possible that you haven't at this point), then you can see that Jerramy Stevens is hardly an innocent in the matter. Stevens has a bad reputation around the league for being an instigator and that probably helped get him a fine along with Brayton. Here's the thing, though... Why aren't both of these guys suspended? Brayton took most of the initial heat from observers since he was the guy caught clearly on tape trying to make Stevens run his next route a little funny. But the league obviously doesn't think that the Seahawks tight end was just minding his own business. I'm not naive enought to think that dirty things don't go on at the bottom of piles in the NFL, far from the prying eyes of the network TV cameras. But when something obvious like this happens, doesn't the league have to do a little more than just a fine? There are cups in football, but some things are just wrong. It's embrassing for the players and the league. Of course there were those that thought the fine was a bit much, namely Brayton's grandfather, 81-year old Bobo Brayton.

"I told him, 'It will be, what, five hundred, a thousand bucks?'," Bobo Brayton said Wednesday by telephone from Pullman.
Told the league had just taken $25,000 from his grandson, the elder Brayton said, "Holy balls!
"That's a lot of money. Must be inflation," he said. "We could go on a fishing trip — and a hunting trip."

Holy balls indeed, my man.