Football Field

This is football, after all. However true, there are rules that need to be followed and when an offending player commits an infraction, his team must be penalized. In the NFL, when a player commits a penalty, the Referee announces the penalty to the whole world. He will announce what the penalty is, and who it is on. For example, he will say something like, “Holding, number 74, Offense”. This tells everyone that number 74 on the Offense committed a holding penalty. In the NFL, you can run, but you can’t hide. When a player commits a penalty, the Referee (or one of the other Officials that spotted the infraction) tosses a yellow “FLAG” (which is really a weighted down hanky) into the air. So, anytime you are watching a game on TV and you see or hear the word “FLAG”, you will know that a player committed a penalty. While there are a number of different penalties that players can commit, I am only going to mention the most common ones. Here they are: - False start - this occurs when a pl …

Every team has discipline problems from time to time. Now the Steelers can go on like nothing happened. Ray Anderson and the Steelers now understand the fines the NFL gave to Hines Ward in the past weeks. During the past two weeks, four Steelers players were fined a total of $50,000. That’s including $15,000 in fines to Ward for two plays that weren’t penalized on the field. That doesn’t make sense to me. If there wasn’t a penalty flag thrown for either infraction, then why is the league punishing them with fines? It sounds like they are singling the Steelers out to me. The NFL has given out 139 fines this season. The fines were supposed to improve player safety and conduct and no other reason. “The meeting gave us a chance to get on the same page and, for lack of a better term, clear the air so this club could move on very confident that our interests are aligned with theirs and vice versa,” Anderson said. Ward said the meeting “gave us a better understanding of why the NFL imposes …