Minnesota Vikings Hit Hard with Suspension

First of all, Chicago and Green Bay fans should not rejoice at the suspensions of the "Williams Wall." Every athlete with an ounce of pride will say that they want to play the best their opponents have to offer and the Williams twins are exactly that for Minnesota.

Should the Vikings lose two or more of the remaining four games, Vikings fans will cite unfair suspensions as the cause of their woes.

Should the Vikings win three or more of the remaining four games then Vikings fans will brush off the suspensions as pointless and say it’s a team effort every week.

Violating team and league rules has come with greater consequence over the past few years. This firm stand has effected teams and players all over the league.

Individual teams have suspended players for entire games for missing meetings. From Tommie Harris of the Bears to Chad Ocho Cinco to Plaxico Burress (okay, maybe he’s a bad example).

The Vikings themselves even punished Adrian Petersen a few series for missing or being late for a team meeting. The point is that the rules haven’t changed it’s the leagues reaction to them. They’ve become stricter across the board.

Back to the "Williams Wall."

From a business standpoint, these players broke the rules. Regardless of whether the rule(s) in question are fair or not they were clearly broken. Action/reaction, these players should be suspended.

From a competitive standpoint, this is a disappointment not only to Viking fans but also to the rest of the NFC North because should teams beat the Vikings in the final four games of the season, they will do so knowing the Vikings weren’t at full strength.

But it’s the players own fault for that. They can plead ignorance as much as they want but the NFL has a strict policy of what a player does and does not put in their body. Violating that rule comes with consequences. The Williams twins have to pay the consequences and have put their team in a difficult position in the home stretch of the season.

I believe that Jimmy Johnson, Super Bowl winning coach and Fox Sports personality, put it best when he said that there is a list that the NFL sends out to every team and player that has on it all the supplements that are allowed by the league.

If you take a supplement that’s not on the list, then you run the risk of being in violation of NFL policy. So, whether it was the trainers or the players themselves making the choice to take the non-league approved supplement, it’s the player who suffers if the supplement is illegal.

Pleading ignorance is not an option. The league probably sees this in two ways; either you did know the rules and broke them anyway making you a cheater or you didn’t know the rules and broke them, making you incompetent. What’s in common in both of those scenarios? Rules were broken.

An important thing to remember is that the validity or fairness of the rules in question is not up for debate here. If you want to debate the fairness of the rules regarding supplements then that most likely has to wait for the off season. Right now, near the end of the season it’s all black and white. Players violated the rules and now they have to be punished.