Gregg Williams Audio: Ex-Saints Defensive Coach Instructed Players To Injure 49ers

Hours before members of the New Orleans Saints' coaching staff and front office were scheduled to have their appeals heard by the NFL regarding the team's bounty scandal, an incriminating audio recording surfaced of former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams seemingly exhorting his players to injure opponents during a fiery pre-game speech.

Yahoo's Michael Silver spoke with documentary filmmaker Sean Pamphilon, who recorded the speech at the team’s hotel the night before the NFC Championship game against the San Francisco 49ers. In Pamphilon's recording, Williams can be heard instructing his players to injure several of the 49ers players, notably making explicit references to "taking out that outside ACL" of 49ers wide receiver Michael Crabtree.

Pamphilon informs Silver that Williams put a bounty on 49ers quarterback Alex Smith when he made the cash sign with his fingers and said, "We hit fuckin Smith right there, I got the first one. I got the first one. Go get it. Go lay that mother fucker out."There's a line in violent sports between controlled chaos and assault. On the field and from the stands, it's a line that gets blurred in every contest, and that's a part of the sport that everyone realizes, most accept and some revel in.

Keeping this line visible, however blurred, is why penalties are handed out and why fights are stopped. Ignoring the line or pretending it doesn't exist is why Williams, Payton, Loomis and the Saints are in the trouble they're in.

When the motive is clear and the motive is criminal, we cannot accept such a despicable and systematic erosion of the game as just part of the game.

When our culture accepts the worst possible iteration of the NFL as the paradigm of what the NFL should be, it's time to give up as both a sport and a culture. The game of football isn't what Williams preaches and what Saints fans want us to believe.

That game, the game Williams coaches, isn't fit for our Sunday viewing, and it isn't fit for our children to grow up emulating and playing. Williams' motives strip the game of its valor and make it something less-than-human.

The game of football can be better than this and has always been better than this, and if fans refuse to accept this lesser brand of football, the game will always be better than this.