cannot under any circumstances distinguish between the intent to knock the fuck out of someone with a perfectly legal hit and intentionally using dirty tactics or taking aim at certain areas of the body with intent to inflict an INJURY. In his mind, and in most it seems, this "cart off hit" bounty means you must be trying to INJURE someone. To him, it's all the same. And that's my point. Perception is reality.
I understand that players can be injured by perfectly legal hits. I understand that a player doesn't need to have the intent to injure someone just because he hit him hard.
But, when you have a system in place which specifically rewards injury by paying a player who causes their opponent to require assistance getting off the field, then you are giving players incentive to injure someone. If someone deems that incentive as sufficient (whether they need the money or they just want the bragging rights), then they're going to formulate the intent to go out there and do it.
Unless, of course, you're suggesting that when the bounty system targeted certain players and stipulated rewards for taking them out of the game, no one went out there with the intent to hit that player in order to satisfy the bounty. No one looked at any of the bounty objectives (which were presented in
pre-game slides) and set out to complete them during the game.
If that's what you believe, then yet again I ask this question: What the fuck was the purpose of the bounty system? If it didn't change the player's style of play, and if it didn't give the players incentive to go out and intentionally try to achieve those objectives, then why have the bounty system? Why change the bounties on certain weeks to target certain players if no one was actually going to intentionally go after those players?
To passively reward players for doing something that just occurred by happenstance during the normal course of the game? So, you're telling me that Coach Williams designed this bounty system in an attempt to make the defense "nasty," but then no one actually changed their style of play in an attempt to meet those bounty objectives? The increase in penalties from 2009 - 2011 was just a coincidence, as no one was intentionally trying to cause any players to be carted off from injury?
I don't buy it. The system was in place to give the players incentive to have the intent to go out and complete the bounties. From his statements, it was clear that this was Williams' intent for the system, and based upon the drastic increase in penalties, he got the result he wanted: players intentionally trying to satisfy bounty objectives.
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