Countertrey wrote:PulpExposure wrote:welch wrote:And I agree that Gibbs usually knew everything, and could have known about a bounty system. Generally, he let Petibon coach the defense while he coached the offense, but Gibbs was so thorough that he would have known about a bounty system.
Gibbs apparently didn't [url=http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=3138182]know when Wiliams started 10 players in a game after Sean Taylor's death.
That tells me there's probably a good chance he didn't know what GreGGG was doing most of the time.
Williams may have been the only one who knew about the 10 player thing... MULTIPLE people knew about the Bounty thing... players talk... players brag... Sorry... don't buy it. Gibbs is a great, and decent guy... but he was also a coach who cut his teeth on hard nosed football... and he is and was no chump. He either knew... or suspected, and didn't want to know (which is the same thing).
Players brag, but because people knew this practice was dirty and probably illegal, I doubt they were making much noise about it. IMO it's pretty easy to understand why the players / Williams would want to keep this secret. At the end of the day, it wasn't that much money (for these guys). The bounty program was about being an assassin, which isn't something you tell everyone and their mother about.
FWIW, Greg Blache spoke up solely to swear that there's no way Gibbs knew about it:
http://cli.gs/4a05lg3
Joe Gibbs was not aware of the Washington Redskins’ bounty system operated during his second stint as the team’s head coach, a longtime Washington assistant coach said Monday.
Commenting for the first time about the pay-for-pain program former Redskins defensive coordinator Gregg Williams directed between 2004 and 2007, Greg Blache, who coached Washington’s defensive line for four seasons under Gibbs, said in a phone interview the Hall of Famer was not involved in the conduct that violated NFL rules. Last week, Gibbs said he had no knowledge of what many current and former Redskins players and two assistant coaches said occurred under him.
“I assure you, he had no idea of what was happening,” said Blache, who was aware of Williams’s actions but declined to provide specific details on the bounty system. “If he had, he would have put a stop to it.”
. . .
Blache, who succeeded Williams as defensive coordinator before the 2008 season, recently declined to discuss his decision to shut down the operation after Williams was fired following the 2007 season.
But Blache, who rarely granted interviews during his final three seasons with the Redskins, decided to speak out Monday in support of Gibbs.
“The only reason I’m talking at all is that I don’t want to see a man like Joe Gibbs get pulled down into the muck of this because Joe Gibbs did not know,” Blache said. “The whole situation, the way this is all coming out, is unfortunate.
“But to have anyone think Joe Gibbs knew, or to accuse Joe Gibbs to be part and parcel to it, is just totally wrong. People who know me know I don’t put my name on a lot of things. But I know for a fact that he didn’t know, so I’ll put my name to this.”
Williams had significant freedom in running the defense, “and this was done in a very closed setting,” Blache said. “It was done separate from the team. It was done strictly as a defensive room situation. There was a saying in that room: ‘What’s said in here stays in here.’ Coach Gibbs had no clue.
“He’s such a straight-laced Christian kind of guy. Not that what went on was un-Christian . . . but he was just not tolerant of a lot of things. And had he ever gotten a drift of it, I can assure you, he would have come down with a hammer on the situation immediately. There’s no question.”
Other than the defensive players and coaches, Blache said, few people at Redskins Park were aware of the cash bonuses, which were also paid out for sacks, interceptions and forcing and recovering fumbles.
“Quite honestly, 99 percent of the offensive coaches didn’t know,” Blache said. “ There were a lot of people that didn’t know about it. Really, unless you were in that room, you didn’t know about it.”
. . .
“I’m not here to throw Gregg under the bus. I know Gregg, I’ve worked with Gregg . . . he’s a friend of mine,” Blache said. “But I just want people to know Joe Gibbs was not part of this.
If Gibbs says he didn't know, that's personally good enough for me — I give him the benefit of the doubt, and since there's zero evidence that says he did know (aside from what we assume about how an NFL locker room works), that means I assume Gibbs is innocent until something damning shows up.
But even if Gibbs' word wasn't enough for me, what Blache says here also seems convincing. Here's a guy who shut down the program after Williams was gone and could easily have used that to grab media attention with this story, but he's too private to care about that. And yet he goes out of his way to speak up for Gibbs, and even stakes his own reputation on what he claims Gibbs didn't know. For someone as old school as Blache, that means something.
Either way: to say that Gibbs either knew and didn't do anything about it or purposefully avoided finding out is a fairly serious charge against his character, CT. I think the man deserves a little more of the benefit of the doubt: have you seen any evidence that makes you think he knew? If not, we should probably take him at his word. My two cents
