There’s not a lot of love for the Seattle Seahawks and the team’s players outside their own fanbase, but because their opponents are the New England Patriots, who have their own issues with overall popularity and now the targeting comments from Brandon Browner regarding the injuries of Richard Sherman and Earl Thomas.
Wait, what’s wrong with targeting? Honestly, it’s all a bunch of hypocritical BS. The NFL is a league of speed and violence. If anyone thinks players don’t try to use opponents’ injuries to their advantage, then you’re probably following the wrong sport. This isn’t a battle between chivalrous knights who only win through honor and some fake idea of a moral code. If you know someone’s hurt, you take advantage of that. You hit as strong as you can and take advantage of every weakness.
Brandon Browner, formerly of the Seahawks, told ESPN’s Josina Anderson that he’s going to tell his teammates to focus on Richard Sherman and his elbow and/or Earl Thomas and his shoulder. The only think wrong with that is letting that information leak out, instead of keeping it to himself and the locker room. Why? Because people like to see but not actually understand what they’re seeing. They don’t want to know people are hurting each other on purpose, despite the fact that one of the biggest appeals of American Football is big, athletic men rushing at each other and colliding at scary speed.
This isn’t exactly Bountygate, but the reaction from the Seahawks as if there’s something wrong in what Browner said comes from the same bowl of hypocricy that landed the Saints such a huge punishment for doing something everyone does. I don’t think there’s a defense (or offense and special teams as well) in the NFL that doesn’t try to make the most of every advantage and weakness they can get their hands on. In a spot based on physicality and violence, what exactly do you expect?
This won’t take away the spotlight from what seems to be still drawing the attention of the nation – the deflated balls scandal, but it does produce at least one headline that has nothing to do with air pressure, locker room assistants and PSI. And it makes a team with PED users, past and present, a team that gets away with a lot of illegal stuff on the field especially at home and above all else and arrogant big mouth in Richard Sherman, seem like the more likable of the two. That’s how easy it is to direct hate these days at the New England Patriots.