Earlier this afternoon, the NFL announced that they wouldn’t be suspending Pittsburgh Steelers’ offensive lineman Cody Wallace for his cheap shot on Broncos safety David Bruton. Instead, they fined him $23,152.
Just in case you haven’t yet seen the hit, here you go:
All the talk about OBJ is justified, but this hit by Pittsburgh OL Cody Wallace on @D_Brut30 might be just as bad. https://t.co/w6vUfc62Al
— Cameron Wolfe (@CameronWolfe) December 21, 2015
Given that Odell Beckham Jr. was suspended for a very similar hit against Josh Norman — you could even make the case that Wallace’s was worse — it’s fair to say that Broncos Country was pretty upset about the NFL’s decision.
And so were his teammates.
When asked whether Wallace should have been suspended, safety T.J. Ward made his opinions very clear.
“Oh, come on, man,” Ward said, via Andrew Mason of DenverBroncos.com. “That was out of the pocket. He was completely out of line for that. It was malicious, and he was trying to hurt one our players. How do you feel about that?”
And Ward‘s frustrations probably extend from his, and the defense’s, belief that the NFL has unfairly been targeting them with penalties this season; Aqib Talib was suspended earlier this season after he poked Colts’ tight end Dwayne Allen in the eye.
“This year has been crazy,” Ward said. “There’s been a lot of things that I’ve seen that if I would have done, I probably would have been kicked out of the game, and if some of my teammates would have done [them], we would have gotten kicked out of the game and gotten fined. You see that other teams and other players are doing similar things — or worse — and there are really no repercussions to it. So that’s really frustrating.”
Hopefully the Broncos will have a chance to repay the favor come January.