Price for Saints' bounty program should be heavy fines, suspensions, forfeiture of draft picks - NFL - Yahoo! Sports. Jason Cole is one of the best NFL writers, with very good great sources, so he probably knows what type of punishment Roger Goodell could hand out. Also, he's probably correct in that Saints GM Mickey Loomis could lose his job over this.
I'm really surprised about how open former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams has been about the matter. I expected him to keep his mouth shut, but instead he's issued a mea culpa:
It was a terrible mistake, and we knew it was wrong while we were doing it. Instead of getting caught up in it, I should have stopped it.
This seems more like an NCAA violation in college football. Often the violation itself isn't the real scandal, and the cover-up is the worst part. Everyone involved with the Saints appeared to have lied early and often about it.
Luckily, the Green Bay Packers rarely played the Saints or Titans. Shawne Merriman thinks Jeff Fisher and Gregg Williams had been offering bounties for a while, and Brett Favre thinks its just part of the game. I've never thought for a minute that the Packers engaged in a bounty system, but did you suspect anything like this from another team in 2011?