This week, the NFL announced a punishment for the San Francisco 49ers as a result of a payroll mistake during the 2022 season that will cost them multiple draft picks. But as one NFL insider points out, this punishment was pretty extreme compared to what teams have received for seemingly more severe violations in the past.
As Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk points out, the San Francisco 49ers actually received a more extreme punishment for an accident that gave them no competitive advantage than the Atlanta Falcons did for using artificial crowd noise during games a few years ago.
“On Monday, the NFL announced that the 49ers will lose a 2025 fifth-round pick and will see their 2024 fourth-round pick fall four spots, to the bottom of the round, for a ‘clerical error’ regarding player payroll in 2022. It was presented as an accident that created no competitive advantage and did not put the 49ers in violation of the salary cap,” Florio wrote for Pro Football Talk.
“But it’s still a major sanction, especially if it was an accident. In 2015, the NFL gave less of a punishment to the Falcons for piping fake crowd noise into the Georgia Dome. That year, the Falcons lost a fifth-round pick in the 2016 draft.”
That’s a pretty extreme punishment for the 49ers for something that doesn’t seem nearly as big of a deal as what the Falcons did.
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