RUSH: I have been wondering about this for the longest time. I misunderstood a question a caller was gonna ask. He asked about player discipline, and he wanted to know why would the Seahawks jump offside in the fourth quarter when all they would have had to do, they tried to create a safety. It was after the interception, and Brady was taking the snap in the end zone, and so they jumped to try to get a safety and get the ball back. In that case, I think Brady’s cadence drew ’em off, so eager. And Michael Bennett, their best player on defense at Seattle had just been anticipating the snap all day long and had been giving Brady all kinds of trouble, so I think that was — the kind of discipline I’m talking about, look at Marshawn Lynch crotch grabbing, that’s one thing.
This other guy Doug Baldwin scores a touchdown and pretends to drop his pants, take a dump on the football. In baseball, you have players that do not run out ground balls to first base. You got players routinely will hit a long fly ball and stand there at the plate watching, posing. It won’t go out, it’ll hit the wall, and instead of ending up at third base for a triple, they’re barely making it back to first base on what should have been an automatic double.
But in football, any of these other unsportsmanlike or taunting penalties that players get or unsportsmanlike they get for improper celebrating in the end zone. The rule is the rule. Where are coaches on this? When I was a kid and didn’t run a ground ball out to first base, I got benched. I mean, I was coached, I was told, “You’re gonna hustle.” I remember when I played high school football and I didn’t get away with this for very long. The end of every practice was sprints. After two hours of just physical torture, here came the sprints. Sometimes they were 70 yards, sometimes 40, sometimes 65 across the field and back. And position groups ran with each other.
I was an offensive tackle so I ran with the tackles and the guards, offensive linemen. I’d always take a look as we’re doing the sprints, I’d make sure I finished in the middle of the pack. And eventually the coach would say, “First three tackles take it in.” Well, I was always one of the first three ’cause I had been pacing myself. So one day the coach came up and said, “Mr. Limbaugh, I notice during sprints you’re always here in the middle of the pack, until it’s time to go in, and then you’re just beating everybody. What are you doing?”
I said, “I’m pacing myself, coach.” And he said, “You know, Mr. Limbaugh, in football and in life, we don’t pace ourselves. We go all out all the time. So you’re running 10 extra sprints for the next five practices no matter where you finish.”
If I didn’t run a ground ball to first base, I got yelled at, chided. I mean, this is not how we play the game. You get a ground ball, you never know, gonna throw it away, you dig and you get there as fast as you can. Don’t sit there and preen and think that you’re ball is gonna be thrown out. Get to the professional level. And I wouldn’t think these guys would need to be coached. I don’t understand professional football players who behave in immature — well, I do understand, that’s the point, but why it’s not coached, why it’s put up with by the coaches.
I understand, “Well, the players are getting all the money, and if the coach says, ‘Hey, Marshawn, stop the crotch grab.’ Marshawn, ‘Screw you, buddy. If one of the two of us is gone, who do you think it’s gonna be? It’s gonna be you.'” I’m just using him because he’s a recent example. There’s all kinds of players that the coaches seem to exhibit no — I mean, ridiculous 15-yard penalties that are killer penalties against a team and a player will get one for stupidest post-play behavior or whatever. Do the coaches not take these guys aside after the game and say, “One more time like that and you’re not starting?” It just makes very little sense to me. So that’s what I thought he meant by player discipline and the lack of it, ’cause there clearly is a lack of player discipline.
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