Ndamukong Suh: Detroit Lions DT Isn't Nearly as Dirty as His Reputation Holds

Ndamukong Suh has a bit of a problem.

He’s been placed between two conflicting personal goals, both equally important to his identity. Suh wants to be recognized as an expert at his craft as a defensive lineman, but he also wants opposing teams to dread going up against him.

In his first season-and-a-half in the NFL, he’s made remarkable progress on each, making him and his Detroit Lions a much stronger team with him at its defensive core. But, en route to showing the league that Detroit was no longer going to be pushed around, Suh has stumbled into a mounting reputation that he isn’t just a dominant defensive player—but a dirty one.

It all, ironically enough, comes down less to his play this season and more to a play that didn’t even count for anything. In his rookie preseason, perhaps trying to make a statement upon his debut, Suh grabbed Browns quarterback Jake Delhomme’s helmet and twisted it as he threw the man to the ground like a rag doll.

It’s an image that’s stayed at the forefront of the NFL’s consciousness since, at once making Suh every bit the terror on the defensive line the Lions hoped for and sullying his reputation for being a hard-nosed, but clean player on the line. 

But the thing is that Suh hasn’t really lived up to that manhandling of Delhomme. And while a Sporting News poll of NFL players showed a belief among his peers that he’s the dirtiest player in the NFL today, this is one of those cases where perception and reality are at odds.

Part of the issue is that the kind of hard-nosed play that Suh embodies has slowly been getting killed off by the NFL. While Suh’s job is to cause havoc in the backfield—a job he’s proven very good at—the league has been increasingly treating quarterbacks with kid gloves.

There have been, in Suh’s short career, three plays that have generated any real level of controversy: the Delhomme play, a tackle from behind of Bears quarterback Jay Cutler and a play this preseason against Bengals quarterback in Andy Dalton. All three were flagged for personal fouls and led to fines against the defensive tackle, though the flag against Cutler, given the circumstances of the play (Cutler was past the line of scrimmage, making him, by rule, a runner) continues to be the most laughable of the three pieces of evidence.

That’s it—two preseason plays that have been isolated incidents and a laughable flag in a game against a divisional rival. This, combined with Suh’s aggressive play style has made him feared on the field and dirty in the minds of many NFL fans, as well as in those of his peers, evidently.

But whether this notion matches up with the reality begs the question of what, exactly, is a dirty player? It’s long been held that a dirty player is one who bends and breaks the rules consistently and actively tries to injure his opponents for a competitive advantage. There have been plenty of dirty players in the NFL’s history who have done just this.

Ndamukong Suh is not one of them.

While the image of Jake Delhomme getting hammered overtakes many players' and fans' image of Suh, the fact remains he’s not done anything like that since. Even the play against Dalton this preseason came nowhere close to that one sole incident.

Suh doesn’t constantly bend and break the rules, doesn’t try to injure his opponents and, moreover, has been trying to minimize the flags that he does get called for. A dirty player doesn’t go up to the league office on his bye week to try and figure out how to better fit his aggressive play into penalty-free football.

Even one of the players who voted for Suh in the Sporting News’ poll admitted that he wouldn’t necessarily call Suh’s play “dirty” as much as “aggressive and intense,” according to the Detroit Free Press. Those adjectives—aggressive and intense—are supposed to be valued in a football player, not a detriment to his reputation.

If aggressive play, hard-nosed football and alleged trash-talking during games is all it takes to make a player “dirty” in this day and age, then the NFL has gotten even softer than I thought possible.

It may be a reputation that Suh has to live with and being feared on the field is a great thing for a defensive lineman to be. But that doesn’t make him a dirty player.

Rather, it makes him a good one.