Everyone will have an opinion on the Monday Night Football game on this morning. Sadly for the National Football League, it will not be about Pittsburgh coming back from being down 14 points at halftime to beat Cincinnati, or how Bengals struggled again in the second half. Rather, they will talk about how the game’s overall violence. This game sucked from that perspective. Pittsburgh-Cincinnati was a microcosm of why people are not going to keep watching football, and why ratings are down overall.

Let’s start with the violent nature of this game. Let’s be clear, this is unlike most football games you’ll watch throughout the year but having this game be part of your primetime package, it guarantees additional eyeballs with casual takes from everyone. Ryan Shazier gets carted off at the first part of the game where he cannot move his legs. It seems like Shazier will be alright, but for a second there, the NFL looked like they were losing a star defensive player out of a blue. But the crazy thing is that play somehow got shadowed by JuJu Smith-Schuster’s huge hit on Vontaze Burfict then George Iloka laid out Antonio Brown in the endzone.

Slo-mo look at Schuster hitting Burfict pic.twitter.com/o3RViZ44fZ

— Pete Blackburn (@PeteBlackburn) December 5, 2017

Unreal. Bengals respond with a brutal hit from S George Iloka on Steelers WR Antonio Brown. pic.twitter.com/DoLMgjHuqi

— Clint Lamb (@ClintRLamb) December 5, 2017

These were truly ugly occurrences. NFL cannot really defend any of these things. Smith-Schuster walked right over Burfict after making the hit, and that makes it 100 times worse. This whole game ended up being a goddamn disaster for the league. The proper steps would be to suspend Smith-Schuster and Iloka for next week. Send a message that this will not be tolerated from rivals.

We’ll see what the NFL does but whatever it is, people will still remember Monday.

Charlie.