The NFL hit the Dallas Cowboys and New Orleans Saints with $500,000 fines each after their joint practice turned into a series of brawls this week. The league is trying to send a message that the fighting at joint practices has gotten out of hand, and they picked two of the loudest offenders to make an example of.
Look, half a million dollars sounds like a lot when you write it out. It is not. To the ownership groups running these franchises, this is somewhere between a rounding error and the cost of a nice dinner. Jerry Jones has probably signed off on bigger tabs at his suite in the last month.
If the NFL actually wants to stop the fights at joint practices, this is not the way to do it. Money does not scare NFL owners. They print money. What actually gets their attention is losing something they cannot buy back, which is why the real deterrent here would be losing draft picks or losing practice days.
Take away a fourth-round pick from each team, and see how fast Mike McCarthy and Kellen Moore are on the field pulling players apart. Cancel a joint practice next preseason, and watch how much the coaching staffs care. Suspend the head coach for the season opener. Any of those actually costs something the front offices care about.
The joint practice culture in the NFL has been drifting for a while now. Every summer there are two or three sessions that turn into helmet-swinging events. Half the highlights that make the rounds on social media in August are guys throwing punches in shells. That is not a real football fight and nobody wants to see it, but the league also has not done much to stop it.
Part of the issue is that joint practices are actually valuable. Teams love them because they get real reps against a different color jersey without the injury risk of a preseason game. Starters get work. Coaches get film. Depth guys get evaluated against real competition. Nobody wants to end them.
But when a session with the Cowboys and Saints turns into multiple bench-clearing fights, and multiple guys have to be pulled off the field, that is not competitive edge. That is chaos, and the league has to step in.
The Cowboys have been in the middle of joint practice fights for years now. Something about how they set up their sessions invites the tension. Maybe it is the trash talk, maybe it is the pace, maybe it is just who Dallas is right now. Either way, they are a repeat offender.
The Saints came into this session with their own edge, and Dennis Allen’s replacement, Kellen Moore, is trying to establish a tone in his first year. That is fine, but the tone should not be brawling with another team in a practice that means nothing to the standings.
Roger Goodell’s office has some options going forward if they actually want this to stop. Public fines only do so much. Escalating the punishment for repeat offenders would be a start. Making the fines come from the football operations budget instead of the general revenue would make the coaches feel it. Threatening to take away joint practices as a privilege would be the ultimate stick.
For now, the Cowboys and Saints will write their checks and move on. The players who threw punches will get their own smaller fines from the league office. And the next joint practice on the schedule will probably feature at least one shoving match before the second period, because nothing about this changes the underlying culture.
If the NFL wants a real deterrent, they need to hit something that actually hurts.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
