No suspensions.
But of those suspensions, the majority were for drug use or legal- and violence-related issues off the field. A four-game ban went to Tom Brady for "Deflategate." And spotrac.com lists only one illegal-hit suspension — for three games — which went to Bengals linebacker Vontaze Burfict after his vicious hit to Steelers receiver Antonio Brown's head in last season's melee of a playoff game.

But he said the suspension helped change his outlook, in part because "if you can't play within the (rules), they'll find somebody else to do it."
"What do you do when you want to punish somebody? You take something away," Jaguars tight end Marcedes Lewis said. "The money, yeah, cool,NFL Jerseys China, but depending on who you are,Pat Tillman Cardinals Throwback Jersey, you're good as far as the money goes anyway because you know it's going to keep coming. When you take somebody out of the game, I think that's harsher."
Last Sunday, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce was ejected for throwing a towel at a referee.
After the hit on Williams, for which Landry expressed remorse, NFL vice president of officiating Dean Blandino told NFL Total Access it would've been a difficult call to eject Landry because "it's still a football play, and it's tough to read intent there." He conceded "we have few automatic ejections in the game today."
"As much as the league wants and needs to get rid of dirty plays and players, they don't want to take actions that compromise, or even appear to compromise, the actual contests themselves," said Doug Hartmann , a sociology professor at University of Minnesota, who teaches a course on sports in society. "Fines and such, in other words, have much less impact on actual games and outcomes than suspensions or expulsions."
Steelers defensive end Cam Heyward, the team's union representative, says the players would appreciate more clarity.
In 2010, after a rash of helmet-to-helmet hits, the league made a midseason adjustment and put the possibility of suspension front and center in an emergency effort to halt the violence. Predictably, defensive players complained — then, after a week that included $175,000 in fines, nobody was suspended.
The NFL did not make Blandino available to The Associated Press for this story. Instead it referenced a portion of the league rulebook that has been rewritten over the past few years to reflect its emphasis on curbing helmet-first, above-the-shoulders and other illegal hits that used to be celebrated but are now viewed in a different light.
The increased emphasis on technique and safety has undoubtedly played into the decline in fines for hits on defenseless players, which is one subset of the hits the AP reviewed as part of the spotrac.com numbers. The NFL says there were 40 such fines in 2012, and only 10 in 2015. Yet, the league's ability to police the violence this season came under scrutiny as early as Game 1, when MVP Cam Newton received four hits to the head in the season opener against the Broncos, none of which resulted in penalty yardage.
These two snapshots — polar opposites in both the players' actions and the NFL's response — underscore one of the league's most difficult issues. Faced with an ever-growing concussion crisis, it talks tough about curbing illegal hits, especially those above the shoulders. Yet it uses its most-stringent penalty for those sorts of infractions — the suspension — very infrequently compared to the number of relatively inconsequential fines it hands out.
Darian Stewart delivered one of those hits, then one the next week to Andrew Luck. He's been fined a total of $27,000 for the hits — a tad more than 1 percent of his 2016 base salary.
Meanwhile, spotrac.com lists 55 fines handed out in 2016 for violations including impermissible use of the helmet, roughing the passer, and blindside blocks the likes of which Landry delivered to unsuspecting Aaron Williams of the Bills. Williams crumpled to the ground and had to be transported to the hospital. Those infractions resulted in the single suspension (Burfict) and an average fine of $16,500 in a league with an average annual salary of $1.9 million. That's an average of 0.8 percent of a player's salary.
"There's so many gray lines. Everybody is always waiting for someone, or what Goodell is going to say," Heyward said. "If you have a set rule and a set amount and how it's going to be addressed, I think you'll see more clarity and you're not going to have to deal with those (questionable hits)."
The NFL has resorted to a more-direct approach before.
Since then, a total of 10 players have been suspended for illegal hits and other over-the-top physical play on the fiel