I get my legal info from Grisham and Google also. too.
After all, we live in a real world where actions have consequences (be they moral, legal or the "life's a bitch" variety) and therefore quasi-legal and "parlor-law" stuff is fascinating if not worth discussing.
I just listened to a half-hour of Mike Golic (Mike & Mike) rationalize about "why the bounty system is merely part of football." He was missing a huge point.
His case included arguments like: "The big hit is the single most enjoyable part of the game", "Other teams do it/Williams was just at the wrong place at the wrong time", "quite often the players do it on their own", etc.
The point Golic misses is that there is an important difference between (a) delivering a clean hit in order to change the course of a game (with the boundaries of the playing-rules) by forcing a fumble, breaking up a pass, robbing an opponent of down, distance & time and (b) deliberately trying to injure an opposing player.
If nothing were to be done about this by the League Office, what message would be sent to our children who play youth football (& the kids they'll be playing against) - that it's OK to single out an opposing kid for injury? (What if it was your own kid who was being targeted)?
When an "incentive program" makes injury its prime objective, sooner or later an NFL player is going to die. And if it can be proved that the death was caused by an individual or individuals seeking to injure the dead guy, I could see -at the very least -an attempt by an eager DA to prosecute for "wrongful death" and that, further, that anyone having full knowledge of or even indirectly was involved the bounty program & who did nothing about it could conceivably be drawn into a conspiracy to commit that crime.
I love big hits. I hate the injuries they sometimes cause. It's unlikely what seem to be 2 contradictory goals can be completely resolved. But at least we can start by differentiating between "hitting to make a play" and "hitting to deliberately injure."
Just sayin'.