Things may have been a little different in the NFL back in 2012, but a coach telling his players to hurt opponents on the other team was still a huge no-no. Still, that’s exactly what then-Atlanta Falcons defensive end John Abraham said Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive lineman Donald Penn told him his then-coach, Greg Schiano, told the Bucs to do 12 years ago.
“[Penn] was like, ‘Hey man, be careful out here. The coaches told us to hurt you all,'” Abraham said on The Water Boyz Show (h/t JoeBucsFan.com). “I was like, ‘Stop playing.’ He’s like, ‘Nah, they told us to hurt y’all. So, we’re going to be going extra. After the whistle, we’re going to be doing everything to try to mess with y’all.'”
Abraham said the reason the Buccaneers left tackle told him this is that “Me and Donald Penn was cool. We went against each other, but we was cool. We hung out, you know, in offseasons.”
The JoeBucsFan.com blog, a Buccaneers fan site, reached out to Penn to confirm the allegations.
“Penn acknowledged [sic] he’s a friend of Abraham but said Abraham’s comments about an order from Bucs coaches to hurt players are completely ridiculous and dirty play was never even implied in Bucs’ player meetings with coaches,” Joe wrote in his blog. “Penn added that if Bucs coaches had ordered players to hurt Falcons players, his teammates wouldn’t have gone along with it and certainly he never would have told Abraham about it.”
The author also notes that he’s inclined to believe Penn because “Abraham spoke on the podcast about how he drank excessively during his playing days and suffered several concusssions [sic] plus a bleeding brain late in his career.”
What makes this mystery even deeper is that Abraham did suffer an injury during the game in question during Week 17 of the 2012 season when the Falcons DE collided with a Buccaneers player, per Pro Football Talk.
Atlanta lost that contest 22-17, although the outcome didn’t matter for the Falcons who already had the No. 1 seed in the NFC wrapped up at 13-2 on the season. And whatever injury Abraham did suffer, whether intentional or not, didn’t cause him to miss any time.
After the playoff bye week, Abraham started in his team’s Divisional Round win over the Seattle Seahawks and its NFC Conference Championship loss to the San Francisco 49ers.
Greg Schiano, the 2012 Buccaneers, and Bountygate in the NFC South
What makes the John Abraham claim about Greg Schiano telling his 2012 Buccaneers to hurt Falcons players in a game is that this was an AFC South clash at the end of the season where Saints head coach Sean Payton and defensive coordinator Gregg Williams were suspended for their role in Bountygate, a scandal where Williams paid players for knocking opponents out of games.
Following an NFL investigation of the matter, commissioner Roger Goodell found that Williams and the Saints did indeed reward players monetarily for injury-inducing hits, and laid down major punishments for all involved.
Abraham was obviously entrenched in the NFC South at the time, so maybe his memory of that situation is where he gets some of this story from.
Also, it is hard to imagine that another team in the same division would do anything even remotely similar so closely following this massive scandal.
Still, as Mike Florio of PFT points out, “Bucs coach Greg Schiano is the guy who brought to the NFL the tactic of attacking victory formation, sending defensive linemen into the knees of offensive linemen, hopeful to force a fumble at a time when teams typically concede the outcome of a game.”
So, unless someone outside of John Abraham or Donald Penn comes out and adds more context to this story, we may never know the full truth of the matter.
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