Incase you haven’t heard, second-year Pittsburgh Steelers running back Jaylen Warren was fined nearly $97,000 by the NFL on hits he’s made this season.
And boy, when you watch the two plays you’ll find yourself scratching your head, wondering how in the world they led to fines of such large amounts of money. That’s ,ore than a whole game check for him…
Warren is still on a rookie contract, and $97,000 is a TON of money for what he’s getting paid. According to CBS, the fines will cost him about 10% of his 2023 salary. And legendary Houston Texans DE JJ Watt is sick of it.
Watt made an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show to discuss the egregious fines, and needless to say, he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. While watching one of the plays that resulted in a fine, Watt said:
“Anytime you’ve got to watch the play 10 times to figure out which person is getting fined, I think you messed up, alright? Like I posted that on Twitter and everybody was like ‘which player is it? Which one am I supposed to be looking at?’
If we’re having to do that, maybe we shouldn’t be taking the guy’s entire paycheck. I mean he’s playing for free, he’s literally going out there and playing for free two weeks in a row. What do you want him to do it’s a 300 pound man?”
And when McAfee asked Watt what it takes to fix stuff like this, he responded:
“You saw that play. If that’s considered lowering your head and dangerous, that’s what we’re gonna talk about. Let’s talk about cut blocks. Let’s talk about a tight end coming across a formation and throwing his head at the knee of a player, trying to wipe out his player.
Perfectly legal according to the rule book. You’re allowed to just go wipe somebody’s knee out. Literally the goal of a cut block is to blow somebody’s knee out basically, and we’re gonna be okay with that, but we’re gonna take this guy’s whole paycheck because he tried to block a 300 pounder and he tried to get lower and use his leverage…
We wear these guardian caps in training camp because it’s 10 times safer for concussions, but we don’t wear them in games. There’s a lot of things. Are we doing it or are we doing it?”
He also said that the NFL is slowly heading towards turning football into flag football:
“We’re literally headed in that direction. I mean if that’s what you wanna be, fine just say it. But I don’t love this middle ground we’re in right now.”
You can check out the full conversation here:
