We haven't touched the Gregg Williams/New Orleans Saints bounty scandal in quite some time. But with Saints brass scheduled to throw themselves at the mercy of the NFL Thursday, and with audio surfacing of Gregg Williams apparently instructing his defense to target the head and injured body parts of players on the San Francisco 49ers, another former Redskin has come forward to say that a ... let's call it "informal bonus system" was in place while Williams was with the Redskins.
Here's Rogers, now with San Francisco, on that city's KNBR radio station, via Pro Football Talk.
Rogers said it started as a pool of money consisting of fines imposed by Williams for players being late to meetings or missing meetings, along with money kicked in by players. Payments would be made for big plays, like interceptions.
[snip]
"It went on to guys just suggesting stuff in a room," Rogers said. "If you knock this person out, let's say a receiver, he comes across the middle. Safety knocks him out, a legal hit, you get this amount of money."
Rogers insisted that the word "bounty" overstates the situation, and he claims that the payment system is a product of "competition in the [meeting] room," and that "once the ball is snapped you're not thinking about it."
At this point, Andre Carter is the only Redskin, current or former, to go on the record and say unequivocally that there was no bounty system in place. The accounts of Williams' involvement in the scheme vary depending on who you ask, but at this point there can be no doubt that what happened in New Orleans happened to some extent in Washington and likely in a lot of other places as well. Whether the league chooses to acknowledge it will go a long way toward deciding whether to take this investigation seriously.
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