$30,000: Chad Johnson, wearing a poncho and sombrero, 2009
In the National Football League, $30,000 will buy you a crotch grab, a poncho-and-sombrero performance, or two goal post dunks. That odd price list may be news to you, but it probably isn’t to Marshawn Lynch, who has paid the league more than $130,000 in fines in one season.
The NFL has charged players for “excessive celebrations” since the 1980s—anyone remember the “Ickey Shuffle”?—and tightened the rules around behavior it deems unsportsmanlike repeatedly in the intervening years, most recently in 2013.
Johnson—who changed his last name to Ochocinco in 2008 and then back to Johnson four years later—completed a typically superhuman catch for the Cincinnatti Bengals in a game against the Detroit Lions during the 2009 season. He then executed a seamless costume change, donning a dark gray poncho and a sombrero on the sidelines.
$30,000: Jimmy Graham, goal post dunks, 2014
The league was not amused.
In what may turn out to be the largest single-celebration fine of the 2014-15 season, the NFL stuck New Orleans Saints tight end Graham with a $30,000 fee for dunking the football through the goal posts, twice, during a preseason game in August.
$20,000: Marshawn Lynch, subtle genital gesture, 2015
In an impressive display of practical logic, the league’s reasoning for prohibiting this act is concern that a player might actually move the posts if he hits the structure hard enough.
Many of Lynch’s fees were penalties for not showing up at media events, hence his “I’m just here so I won’t get fined” response to most of the questions reporters asked him at a Super Bowl Media Day.
$11,025: Austin Seferian-Jenkins, Captain Morgan pose, 2014
Another chunk of that money, though, was paid for two post-touchdown groin grips, the second of the two obscene celebrations that earned Lynch a fine this season, executed during the NFC Championship game against the Green Bay Packers in late January of the 2015 season.
After catching a touchdown pass in the fourth quarter of a game against the Atlanta Falcons in 2014, rookie Tampa Bay Buccaneers tight end Seferian-Jenkins placed the ball under one foot and assumed the Captain Morgan stance. He then posted a picture of this entirely unoriginal choice of celebration on Instagram.
$10,000: Wes Welker Snow Angel
The league fined him, but the 15-yard penalty that came with the display probably hurt more: The Falcons used the field position to score a touchdown that helped seal the deal in a victory over Tampa Bay.
$7,875: Kenny Stills, Lance Moore, hip thrusts
In the midst of a 47-7 rout of the Cardinals in 2008, then-New England Patriots wide receiver Welker fell to the ground after catching a touchdown pass and made his mark on the snow.
Stills and Moore win the award for best-earned fine with their re-enactment of a sketch from the Comedy Central show Key & Peele. In the skit, Keegan-Michael Key plays a football player who gets flagged for hip-thrusting three times, rather than just two—the joke being that the league’s punishment system is arbitrary.
$7,875: Dez Bryant, throat slash
In a December 2013 game vs. Tampa Bay, the Saints’ Moore caught a 44-yard touchdown pass, dropped the ball, and thrusted three times while Stills did his best impression of a vigilant referee.
Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Dez Bryant was penalized for a throat-slashing motion after scoring against the St.
Louis Rams in 2013.