Did ESPN really need to talk about the Richie Incognito situation all day every day for more than a week? Absolutely not.
I don’t get it. The topic really isn’t all that interesting, but all last week, over the weekend and into this week the ESNP radio announcers have asked nearly every guest about their thoughts on the Incognito situation.
What do you think about the Incognito situation? What do you think of hazing? How would you have reacted? Who can you put down in this situation to make you look righteous and feel superior?
Who cares? Why do they keep talking about it over and over and over? It’s really not that controversial or scandalous. The whole thing bugs me for several reasons.
First of all, every ESPN guest last week was asked to speculate about something they really knew nothing about. I realize that sports radio is based on speculating about things you don’t know much about, but in this case they most likely had no clue about what actually happened in the locker room.
At first, the discussion was that Incognito was bad, and then it turned into blaming Jonathan Martin for his role in it.
Then, other players were interviewed and the narrative changed again and again. Each new quote was treated like “Breaking News” in the “developing story” about the Miami Dolphins, when really nothing was breaking and the only thing that was developing was my boredom over the issue.
I am going to speculate about something I know nothing about here (just to continue the trend) but it seems to me that the main reason to
keep talking about the whole situation may have been just to protect the NFL.
ESPN says very little bad about the National Football League, and generally is in favor of the status quo in many of its stories. This story had some controversy tied to it, and it probably got a decent amount of attention from the talking heads just because it was football related.
But I believe that by hammering the story over and over and over and then by giving plenty of people the opportunity denounce bullying, say that it isn’t the norm in NFL locker rooms and then to blame Martin for his role in it, it all just served to help protect the NFL.
This was an isolated situation. People are overreacting. This is just how real men act. The NFL did nothing wrong. Blah blah blah.
For someone who likes to listen to sports radio, I was extremely bored with the conversation and found myself changing the station much more often.
Here’s the real story. People do bad things all the time. Incognito looks like he did a bad thing and he should probably be punished for it. The Miami Dolphins probably did something wrong too, and there are probably a lot of jerks in the NFL.
But this story is not symbolic of our society or all NFL teams or anything like that. It was a bad situation and one that NFL teams should watch out for. Maybe it will come out that Incognito didn’t do anything wrong, but that seems a little unlikely.
Hopefully, Martin is doing all right and can resume his NFL career if he wants to do so. And hopefully, ESPN can resume talking about things other than the Incognito situation soon. I can’t stand much more of it.
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Absolutely needed to get talked about while it might not have been interesting to some it’s an eye-opener for those around the NFL and those who cover it.
Sorry if Incognito bullying a young player for more than a year is not newsworthy nor having him threaten the life of a teammate let alone having other players on the team even threaten that said players family.
Then to have an alleged incident in 2012 at a golf tournament in which Incognito sexually assaulted a woman and yet did not receive any punishment from Joe Philbin shows how bad the Dolphins locker room really is.