Surprised that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell upheld his decisions? You shouldn’t be. C’mon, you can’t win an appeal from the “judge” who handed you that verdict and expect him to change his mind. Unlike Brett Favre, Goodell’s mind is already made up. The man has spoken, and what he says goes.

I say this is a fair punishment. Payton knew what his team was doing, and he chose not to react to it. Football is a contact sport. It is extremely competitive and very physical. Of course coaches are going to preach to their players in the locker room about beating a team and playing well and playing hard, but the Saints crossed the line.

Now I’ve never been inside a locker room where the coaches are giving their pep talk to the team, but I highly doubt talks like Gregg Williams’ took place. I listened to the audio of him instructing the Saints to intentionally injure the 49ers during the playoff game in January this past year, and to tell you the truth I found it somewhat disturbing.

You don’t go into the locker room and tell your team to “kill the head and the body dies.” You don’t tell your players to see how many times you can attack an opponent’s head, especially when that player has a history of concussions (that just seems wrong to me). You don’t tell your players you want to put an opponent’s ankles over the pile or take out his ACL.

Yes, you want to be the guy that makes a big hit, but you shouldn’t be motivated to literally want to take a guy’s head off or to tear up his ACL. Yes, the way these guys go about playing football isn’t going to change. Like I said football is a very physical sport. It’s always going to be physical, but you have to note that the players in the NFL are a lot bigger and a lot faster than they used to be, which results in harder hits at a higher impact. Consequently the NFL has had to change the rules on tackling and hits. The way players are built these days is changing the play of the game, but intentionally wanting to lay a player out on the field instead of making a clean hit, that is twisting the game.

There is always concern from fans that the NFL is getting soft, that the league is going to turn into flag football or probably a game of two-hand touch. The way I look at it, football is football. It’s highly competitive and it is rules-based. Sean Payton and the Saints broke the rules with their imposed bounty programs. Don’t get me wrong, I love to see the big hits, but when it becomes a team’s mission to go out there and cause physical injury to a player rather than a mission to win the game, how can you call that football?

Sorry Saints, your mission has been aborted.