After Sunday’s game against the Rams, which included a knockout blow to Minnesota quarterback Teddy Bridgewater, Vikings coach Mike Zimmer threw a dart or two at St. Louis defensive coordinator Gregg Williams. Later that night, Rodney Harrison of NBC’s Football Night in America aimed a level higher.
“I wasn’t surprised because it happened to me in 2006,” Harrison said. "[Titans receiver] Bobby Wade came and chopped my knees and tore my knee up. I’m lying on the ground, and I look at Jeff Fisher and he’s smiling and laughing. So this is typical of Jeff Fisher-type teams.”
It wasn’t the first time Harrison said this; in a 2009 appearance on The Dan Patrick Show, Harrison made the same comments.
Six years ago, Fisher didn’t respond. This time, he did.
“I don’t want to say I took things personal, but it was kind of a personal attack on me,” Fisher told reporters on Monday. “I think you have to consider the source. . . . You’re talking about a guy that had a great career. I mean, the guy played a long time. He was hard to defend. He was a really active defensive player. But this is coming from a guy that had 18 unnecessary roughness penalties, seven personal fouls, four roughing the passer penalties, a total of 77 penalties in his career and was voted three times the dirtiest player in the National Football League and was suspended for a hit, a helmet-to-helmet hit on Jerry Rice in 2002. Okay? This is where these comments are coming from. I’ll just say this: Since 2000, it’s been a privilege and honor for me to be on the Competition Committee. Our main focus, as you guys have followed this league for a long time know, our main focus is player safety. So, for Rodney to come out and say that I did something like that is absolutely absurd. So, that’s all I have to say on that.”
Fisher separately was asked whether it bothers him that his teams have been called dirty or chippy.
“I haven’t heard that,” Fisher said. “So, we are going to play fast. We are going to physical and we’re going to play furious and we’re going to play contact football. Okay?”
But the charge of dirty and/or chippy play isn’t new. In 2012, when Fisher became coach of the Rams, Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (via an assist from Mike Sando of ESPN.com) pointed out that, from 2001 to 2010, the Titans: (1) led the NFL in most personal fouls with 163; (2) had 67 unnecessary roughness penalties, leading the NFL; and (3) had 46 roughing the passer penalties, leading the NFL. More recently, Miklasz combined the full Houston/Tennessee years with Fisher’s Rams teams and concluded that Fisher’s teams had 236 more penalties than their opponents, 1,937 more penalty yards than their opponents, 116 fewer first downs via penalties than their opponents.
Last year, Giants linebacker Jameel McClain dubbed the Rams a “dirty ass team” after a fight that broke out following a late hit from St. Louis linebacker Alec Ogletree on New York receiver Odell Beckham Jr.
So it’s hardly the first time someone has called out a Fisher-coached team. It’s also not the first time someone has taken direct aim at Fisher.
In 2007, former Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman suffered a sprained knee on what he dubbed a “cheap shot” from former Titans center Kevin Mawae and former Titans tackle David Stewart. Merriman said that “several” Chargers players told him Fisher had ordered the hit on Merriman. Reprising the remarks with Colin Cowherd of FOX Sports Radio on Monday, Merriman said that he heard Fisher had ordered the hit from Titans players, too.
On one hand, football is football. Players use raw physicality to achieve results, from overpowering the opponent on a given play to intimidating him on future plays. On the other hand, there’s a line between using force to get results and doing so to inflict injury, especially as the NFL attempts to secure its future by promoting health and safety in a game that is inherently unhealthy and unsafe for those who play it.
The problem is that the recipients of physicality aimed at the former often will perceive it as an effort to accomplish the latter. And it becomes difficult if not impossible to get those inflicting the physicality and those absorbing it to agree regarding the intentions.