Giants’ Dexter Lawrence vows to fight brutality fines

Dexter Lawrence peeked into his rather messy locker on Wednesday and acknowledged that he had yet to see any documents indicating a league match.

“I haven’t received my ticket yet,” Lawrence told the Post. “We’ll know when I get my fine.”

Lawrence knows the NFL will take money out of its next check for the rough passer penalty he was given in the third quarter of last Sunday’s 23-17 win at Jacksonville. Lawrence isn’t sure if the league will award him even more money for the fourth quarter by running out the passer that was actually committed by teammate Leonard Williams but assigned to Lawrence during the game. The press box announcement stated that Lawrence had committed the penalty and the official play-by-play also stated that Lawrence was the culprit.

If the league wants to claw back from Lawrence for both penalties, he won’t just accept it.

“Yeah, you gotta fight, if it wasn’t me,” Lawrence said. “I’ll probably ask Leonard to pay them both anyway.”

Lawrence smiled as he said that, but he knows there’s nothing funny about those penalties. In the third quarter, he was reported for grabbing Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence – the two won a national championship together at Clemson in 2018 – by the front of the shirt and pulling him to the ground.

“They didn’t like me pulling him down,” Dexter Lawrence said, assuming the official could have felt the quarterback’s knee had already hit the ground before he was pulled down.

There have been all sorts of whispers and complaints about how the league handles these brutal penalties, with videos every week showing what is considered soft contact with quarterbacks flagged for personal foul. In the first five weeks of the season, however, brutal passer penalties were actually much less frequent than in previous years. There have been 29 brutal passer penalties for five weeks this season, compared to 54 at the same time in 2021 and 41 in 2020.

Lawrence, who had the best season of his four-year career, has already matched his single-season high of four sacks he had in 16 games in 2020 to seven games in 2022. He will target Geno Smith on Sunday in Seattle, hoping to add to his total bag. Smith has been sacked 16 times.

What Lawrence says he won’t do is stop or be gentle in the contact he makes with Smith.

“You just keep playing football, you don’t let it affect how you rush the setter or how you attack the setter because they’re going to call it or they’re not going to call it,” said Lawrence. “I had hits where I lay on him a little bit and they didn’t call him. You just keep playing our game, put some hits on it.

“It’s hard to avoid, you see a lot of things in the league that are hard to avoid without them breaking a tackle or messing you up, so you just keep playing football.”