Why wouldn't he? Football is an incredibly bizarre way to make living.

The key difference here is between hazing and harassment. The latter is always unacceptable, of course. Hazing, though, serves a purpose because, at a very primal level, we care more about things when we suffer to get them. Despite the sniffing condescension of The New York Times, hazing in safe and limited doses can be a perfectly useful part of team-building. Pranks and weird rituals build team spirit, the locker room functioning as a sort of boot camp, where teammates demonstrate emotional toughness, earn trust, or simply learn how their teammates will react under pressure.

That sort of thing may not be necessary with jobs like ours, Patrick, but the NFL is not your typical workplace. Not much that goes on in a locker room would be acceptable in the modern corporate American workplace. Walking around naked, for instance.

One of the appeals of the game is that it makes extreme psychological demands. Players must act like savages on the field and gentlemen off it. Incognito, clearly, has never been able to draw that line, as reflected by his conflict-riddled career. He used the cover of a locker room as a way to bully. The fault lies with him, and the Miami coaches and staff who failed to either notice or care what was happening.

But judging what happens in a locker room by the standards of the modern American workplace is ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with making a rookie carry equipment or get a funny haircut, and to equate weird pranks and juvenile rituals with Incognito's racial slurs and threats of violence is simply unfair.

Jake, what do you think? Is Incognito just a one-bad-apple situation, or a tip-of-the-iceberg one? Is he simply weird and sick, or the symptom of a much larger sickness?

Simpson: He's both, Hampton. Incognito's verbal, emotional, and perhaps physical terrorizing—let's call it what it is—of Martin suggests that he's a behemoth of a bully who should probably be kept away from all people, not just his teammates (read about his dust-ups here and here). But the National Football League is full of large, super-athletic young alpha males who willingly, often eagerly, commit violent acts dozens of times a day for dozens of week every year. And in all 32 locker rooms, the team is supposed to come first.

It'd be stunning, then, if there weren't a sub-culture of bullying in the league. We just don't really know about it.

Like the military or law enforcement, sports teams are built around an understood hierarchy, a pecking order based primarily on length of time served. Rookies in the NBA have had to carry their teammates' bags and make much-needed drugstore runs for a veteran for decades. Just ask Jalen Rose. In the NFL, star Cowboys wideout Dez Bryant was once a rookie who got stuck with an absurd $54,896 dinner tab in 2010.