Organized Team Activities, a fancy, word-wasting synonym for “football practice,” begin Monday throughout the NFL. For two of the final eight teams from a year ago, however, three of the 10 practices won’t be happening.
Both the Seahawks and the Falcons lost a week of OTA sessions -- three each -- due to excessive contact during 2016 offseason workouts. While the extra aggression apparently worked, with both teams making it to the divisional round in the year the rules violations occurred, it’s now time to pay the fiddler via the forfeiture of important 2017 practice time.
For the Seahawks, the loss of OTAs included a forfeited fifth-round draft pick, a $400,000 fine for the team, and a $200,000 fine for coach Pete Carroll, given that it was their third violation of the offseason rules. The Falcons apparently lost only the practice time, with the league office opting not to fine the franchise or the head coach.
Contact is inevitable when 22 football players are put on a football field in football helmets with a football introduced into the mix. As the bottom of the 90-man roster constantly churns, players who don’t get the job done end up out of a job long before the total jobs get cut from 90 down to 53.
And so football coaches are expected to get football players to operate against every football instinct they possess. It’s amazing that more violations don’t occur, and it’s likely that the NFL and the NFLPA tolerate a certain amount of contact during offseason workouts because a certain amount of contact is unavoidable.