Fortunately for the New Orleans Saints, the beginning of free agency was more important to the majority of us fans of loser teams, so a lot of us checked out on that whole “paying players to hurt opponents” things. Still, some Saints players are deeply hurt that the NFL and its fans would accuse them of playing dirty and intentionally trying to end the careers of players like Kurt Warner and Brett Favre.

Take Saints DB Jabari Greer, for instance, who was so insulted by these bounty accusations and looming punishments that he opened his heart and offered us a poem on his New Orleans Times-Picayune blog, Out of Bounds.

Oh, but first I’m going to show you his disclaimer so you don’t get lost in a whirlwind of emotions…

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For once, a YouTube comment cuts to the heart of a story.

Next Media Animation makes a good point here — that the NFL glosses over their scandals by depicting them as isolated incidents, and is basically a violence glorification machine — but the way they make it is classic Taiwanese batsh*t insanity, beginning with a “high horse” in the ESPN studios literally zero seconds in and culminating in the nearly-nude gladiator Saints murdering the New York Giants with swords.

The video’s highlight (besides the eerily accurate animated version of Gregg Williams) has to be the Dewey Cox-style splitting of Brett Favre in twain. If you’ve ever wanted to see a player celebrate over the lifeless corpse of Favre, this is your chance. This is also your chance if you’ve wanted to see someone clean up Favre’s body parts with a rag on a stick and a wheelbarrow. Wait, what the f**k is happening?

His appearance on ‘The Dan Patrick Show’ might not have reached deeply into the complex heart of the Gregg Williams/New Orleans Saints bounty controversy, but one thing was made perfectly clear: if you go to the police with this, Charles Barkley is willing to murder you with a nail gun he bought at the Hardware Barn and drag your dead ass into a vacant building.

“You have to be a punk to snitch that out,” Barkley said. “That’s like giving a reporter an anonymous quote. That makes you a punk, if you do anonymous, but also, you don’t bring that out x amount of years later. I mean you don’t compete in it if you don’t want to be in it. But I’ve seen at least three or four well-known NFL players say all teams have bounties. So I’m glad they came to Gregg Williams’ defense. Because I’m pretty sure all teams have that.”

(via Pro Football Talk)

A few things shouldn’t be surprising here:

1. “Every team encourages and rewards you for injuring opposing players” is the NFL equivalent to baseball’s “everybody’s on steroids” … it’s unfortunate, shocking at first and completely true. These are sports, but they’re also businesses, and people do objectively sh*tty things to make sure their business thrives. Way of the world.

2. Every person who has ever done a job well and stopped doing it thinks they were one of the f**king Boondock Saints when they were in their prime. Has Charles Barkley personally injured someone to keep them from doing something he didn’t like in a grown-up version of a kids game? Of course he has.

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WILSONNNNN

WILSON I’M SORRY

(via Cosby Sweaters)

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Links

On The Saints, NFL Bounties And Finally Being Treated Like Regular Human Beings - I don’t know why everyone’s so upset about these NFL Bounties, I think having paper towels with Saints logos on them is awesome! *bicycle horn honk* [Smoking Section]

Gregg Williams Has Complex Homophobia - “AIDS Convention” is almost as ridiculous as “the jerk store”, but it sells more jerks. [Kissing Suzy Kolber]

Matches We Loved 2011: Part II - The #ddslove continues, and I’m actually in this one! Watch the clip of the match I picked to see someone kick so hard their kickpad flies off. [DirtyDirtySheets]

The Best Of ‘Community’s’ #Abed - Cool. Cool. Cool cool cool. [UPROXX]

The First Ten Minutes Of John Carter Are Kind Of Impressive - I kept expecting Bryan Cranston to roll over, grimace at the camera and yell “nobody’s in the theater, John!” [Gamma Squad]

Project X kid was in a Bang Bus movie - Living the dream. I can’t wait until my UPROXX bosses find out about the time I Pornhubbed Allie Sin. [Film Drunk]

Discussion and Poll: Has ‘The Walking Dead’ Earned Back Your Trust? - “And furthermore, what do you guys think about season 4 of Heroes?” [Warming Glow]

Christina Hendricks & Olivia Munn Are The Latest Celebs To Have Their Cell Phone Pics Surface On The Internet - Proud of myself for getting up a link to this story yesterday before anyone else on the network. Also, disappointed in myself for being so into celebrity nudity. [UPROXX]

25 People Who Think President Obama Killed Andrew Breitbart - “Colledge” says everything you need to know about these people. Obama’s the reason for these tornadoes breaking out, too. He has an evil tornado machine. [Buzzfeed]

The Live News Sexual Innuendo Supercut - Nudes at eleven. Er, I mean “news”! Heh! [HuffPost Comedy]

Watch Britney Spears’ Changing Face Through the Years - “Watch how stress, drugs and eating disorders make you look like a 50 year old women by the time you turn 28.” [The FW]

Five Brilliant Graphic Novels that Just Happen to Star Talking Animals - Real talk: We3 is right behind Watchmen as my favorite comic ever. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and find it immediately. [Unreality]

"You owe that dude $2,000... that guy gets $500... and that guy killed Favre, so he gets a zillion."

St. Louis Rams defensive coordinator Gregg Williams won himself a free trip to New York City today, as he was hand-selected by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell as part of the league’s new contest – “What the F*ck Were You Thinking?” Williams was selected, of course, after a closed NFL investigation that had determined that Williams’ former team, the New Orleans Saints, had not been running a bounty system between 2009 and 2011 was reopened to determine that they were, in fact, running a bounty pool and that Williams may have been a bad little fibber.

As you’re probably already well aware:

The NFL said payoffs were made by the Saints for inflicting game-ending injuries on targeted players, including quarterbacks Brett Favre and Kurt Warner. “Knockouts” were worth $1,500 and “cart-offs” $1,000, with payments doubled or tripled for the playoffs.

No punishments have been handed out, but they could include suspensions, fines and loss of draft picks. Several players around the league have said the Saints and Williams weren’t the only ones with such a system. (Via ABC News)

Whether or not the Saints were the only team with a bounty system is probably going to matter very little in Goodell’s “Make an Example” system, so the Saints are probably going to deal with all that stuff mentioned above. But the rest of the media is like, “Let’s hop in Rufus’ phone booth and do some retroactive punishing, too.” Williams’ former players have been more than happy to spill the beans, as long as they remind us that they still love their big, dumb coach.

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It's okay, buddy, we'll drive down to Cleveland this weekend.

Jokes about how Detroit is poor and sad are nothing new. The area has been ravaged by an economic downturn, lower versus lowest class warfare and “people from Michigan” for years. Hell, even the Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism videos end with an affirming “we’re not Detroit”, so it seems a little like kicking a man while he’s down to hear Lions cornerback Aaron Berry react to an asshole-stomping from the New Orleans Saints by telling the city he plays for to go f**k itself with a double-wide. But, here we are.

With a hobo hat-tip to Shutdown Corner:

There’s a reason we have an ATHLETES SHOULD NOT HAVE TWITTER tag. Like every unpopular tweet from a popular person, this one was taken down quickly (maybe he was hacked~) and an almost Faulknerian apology was issued. See if you can pinpoint the moment when the big WOOP WOOP hypocrisy alarms go off:

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