Many Steelers fans have been waiting for former LB Greg Lloyd to weigh in on the NFL's current direction of offensive emphasis and general "safety" initiatives.
The wait is over.
Lloyd, speaking to WXIX-TV in Cincinnati while at Bengals coach Marvin Lewis's charity golf tournament (Lewis was Lloyd's position coach in Pittsburgh), minced no words over the matter, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who remembers Lloyd from his "I Wasn't Hired For My Disposition" t-shirts.
He played up the recent scoring increases the NFL has seen in comments about the state of the league.
I don't want to see a game where the damn score is 75 to one or 75 to two, all this passing and passing. I want to see somebody hit a quarterback, ... that is what people come to see. And at the end of the day if he gets hurt, so be it.
It's unclear whether NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will seek to fine Lloyd for his comments, but no doubt, someone's going to try to reach out to Lloyd, typically media-reclusive, to ask him about bounties. No mention of that question is in the report.
What is, though, is Lloyd's typical bravado and wit, calling out Goodell for what he feels is a watering down of the game he played at a high level throughout the 1990s, as well as a lack of effort, in his eyes, to have protected players during his time.
This is not PBS, it's not the public channel that you go watch. It's the National Football League, it's a violent freaking game. The point of it is that if the NFL and the league would get behind and start taking care of their older players and taking care of guys, they wouldn't have these issues. As opposed to saying, 'Hey, go out there, do it hard, then bang we're done with you.'