Helmet-Gate

On Sunday night, Giants running back Brandon Jacobs got annoyed at being pulled during a game in Indianapolis and flung his helmet down in frustration. (As a fantasy owner of Jacobs who lost by one point last weekend, let me just say I shared in his frustration). However, during this temper-tantrum his fingers became tangled in the facemask and held on. As a result the helmet didn't release when he expected it to, ended up going upwards instead of down and landed six rows into the stands. Within a couple seconds personnel from the stadium were swarming the guy who caught the helmet, asking for it back. The guy refused. Soon after that a couple members of the Giants staff arrived and bartered with the guy, who was holding firmly onto the helmet while those staff members tried to pull it out of his hands without being obvious about it. Eventually he relented and gave the Giants back the helmet, receiving an official game-used ball in exchange for his troubles. In a interview with a local radio station a couple days later the guy implied that the NFL officials essentially gave him an ultimatum: give us the helmet and take the ball or we're tossing you from the game and taking the helmet anyway.

While that seems harsh, this guy actually made out fairly well. The common practice in NFL stadiums is that if anything goes from the field into the stands fans are expected to just return it out of courtesy and don't get anything in exchange. Whenever a quarterback puts a little too much juice on the ball or an extra point misses the net behind the goal posts and end up in the seats most fans see this as an opportunity to show off their arm and fire it back down to the field as if this could earn them a tryout. So, given the unwritten fan rules about this kind of occurrence, you could argue that the guy holding onto the helmet was just being difficult. However, he brought up the great point that if he had thrown something this size from his seats to the Giants' bench he would have been immediately thrown out of the stadium and lost his season tickets. Also, he pointed out that this wasn't a football, this was a helmet that could have caused some damage had people not seen it coming, so he figured that changed the circumstances. [Sidebar: the circumstances also could have been changed because an authentic game-used helmet is a lot more valuable than a game-used football, but we'll give this guy the benefit of the doubt.]

You know, for all the good things that the NFL does with it's fan relations, this is one thing that I have never understood. I don't see what is the big deal about allowing a fan to keep the football, or in this case the helmet. I feel as though if something ends up in the stands then you lose the right to demand it back. Players routinely give away the football after scoring a touchdown, so what makes that ball different from one uses on any other play during the game? After all, baseball has embraced the tradition of going after foul balls and makes getting one part of the game experience. Even the NHL will let you keep a puck that ends up in the seats and those guys need to keep costs down as much as possible. I get that the official NFL footballs cost more than an MLB baseball or a puck, but a football ending up in the stands happens so rarely that you would think they would let it slide when it did happen. And in this specific case I feel that if Jacobs is going to be that careless with his equipment then he should be the one who should be concerned with trying to get it back, not some members of stadium security who would be holding just as tightly to the helmet were the roles reversed. Demanding the ball back 'or else' just seems extremely petty of a major sports league. They say you can't put a price on good publicity, but the NFL seems to like to buy bad publicity one confiscated football at a time.