I don't know the details, and have no desire to know them about this incident.
However, there are countless examples, in multiple scenarios and types of groups where some sort of stress, difficulty, etc. serves as a rite of passage that allows people to bond as a team.
The strongest occurs with a shared experience, but there are other examples.
Those in the military know that another has gone through boot camp, and that ties them together.
Doctors know the other Doctor went through the long hours of Residency.
Hazing practices, are also well documented to forge such bonds.
There is no doubt that hazing can go too far, as the death for that marching band a year or two ago readily demonstrates.
So I don't agree that hazing/crap/stress/etc. can't forge bonds among teamates. If done at the right level it can be most effective.
As with anything, the trick is to find the Goldilocks level.
I have no doubt that hazing
can forge bonds that strengthen a team (though it can, and does, often backfire). And it's entirely possible that simple hazing with that intention is what Incognito et al believed was all they were doing. The back-and-forth text messages from Martin certainly obscured what was "really" going on with him.
However, seeing as how this went on for a very long period of time, it seems to me that the hazers or uninvolved other players (if they were grown-ups) at some point would have recognized that something wasn't quite right with the situation, with Martin, with the atmosphere in the locker room and taken those concerns up the chain of command.
I also think it's part of the HC's job to know about what's going on in his locker room since, obviously, bad locker room situations are not conducive to winning. A head coach being oblivious to a situation as awful as this one turned out to be has to be, from an owner's perspective, just slightly less bad than an HC who's aware of it and doesn't deal with it or can't figure out how to deal with it and doesn't ask for help (If I were Stephen Ross, Philbin would have gotten a serious ass-chewing during the team's "internal investigation").
On the radio this morning, a couple non-football news types were discussing the report and speculated that the NFL might have to intervene in a way similar to their player safety interventions. I suspect, though, that very few NFL locker rooms have situations that come close to blowing up like this one did (the blow-up part being at least 50% the responsibility of Martin himself) and, in any case, it's a team issue and there's not much, if anything, the league office can (or should) do about it (and I'd hate to see them try) aside from speechifying and posturing (which Goodell will undoubtedly do, at some point). If team ownership, front office, coaching staff and players truly want to win,
they need to police this stuff themselves.
I guess that, for me, limiting the blame/justification game to either the Incognito side or the Martin side is just too narrow a perspective (though the media will relentlessly continue to play it that way). There's a metric crap-tonne of responsibility to be spread around, IMO.
