There's a nice interview with Steelers wide receiver and recent Dancing With The Stars champion Hines Ward over at Sports Radio Interviews in which Ward discusses his performance on the show, Kym Johnson's injury, and the "Steelers Rule," in which teams would have to pay the price when the NFL deems hits by their players to be too violent:
↵↵↵I mean, I understand they’re trying to bring safety to the game, but you can’t bring safety to a game that’s a violent sport already. When you have two grown men traveling at 20 miles per hour on a head-on collision, guess what, something in your body is going to hurt. So regardless of what you do, it’s still a physical ball game ... So for me, I understand where they’re coming from, but at the same time you can’t protect football. It’s a violent sport. If you want to protect it, we need to play flag football.
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Ding ding ding! No doubt the violence in the NFL is a problem. But it's a complicated, deep-rooted problem, not one that can be remedied by slapping James Harrison with a few fines. It's a violent game, and while I agree there should be serious discussions about how to fix it, you can't really do that by arbitrarily handing out fines.