Another Joint Practice, Another Huge Brawl

Folks, we’ve got another joint practice brawl, this time between the Colts and Ravens, at Colts training camp Saturday afternoon. The brawl appears to have started after Colts linebacker Antonio Morrison leveled Albert McClellan in a special teams drill, and McClellan jumped up ready to make war:

The Indianapolis Star tempers had already started to flare by then, stemming from a play in which Colts receiver K.J. Brent was flattened by Marlon Humphrey, and had to be carted off the practice field with an apparent knee injury. It was a practice loaded with assorted tussles and skirmishes, and new Indy coach Frank Reich was not happy about his players forgetting about THE CHILDREN:

“We’re football players, professional football players, we’re not fighters,” Reich said. “This is not the MMA. We’re not in the cage. We got kids in the stands. We’re role models. We wanna find ways to execute football plays and win games.

He continued: “It’s bush league. It’s undisciplined. Teams that do that, and players who do that, lose. That’s not the team we want to be.”

The joint practices come ahead of a Monday night preseason contest between the teams, and in addition to the uhh moral failure of fighting during practice, Reich was also rightly irritated that all the scrapping and fighting and brawling distracts from the purpose of training camp, which is to practice and improve at playing, you know, football. A couple different Washington players had similar criticisms of the joint practice model after last weekend’s big Skins-Jets training camp brawl. But this is part of the annual summer ritual for the NFL—before the real games can begin, there’s a seven-week period where rosters are culled as much by non-game violence and bodily destruction as they are by mandatory cut-downs.