Bpurple, I'm not sure Essendon should be punished according to the view we have of ourselves. Australians are, like everyone else, enormous hypocrites. We're the country that actually believed Warney when he said he took a diuretic because his Mum told him it would help him lose weight.
Essendon, Hird, Dank etc all thought they were being clever. Up-to-but-not-over the line they thought. The problem was, they weren't nearly as clever as they thought. Does anyone actually think they were trying to cheat?
But at the end of the day, they did. The players have copped a whack, because under the rules it's up to them to know what is being put into their body. The club has copped a bunch of whacks - missed finals, fined, stripped of draft picks - basically everything short of being banned as a club. The real damage is ancillary: they will be out millions, their team will suck for years, and they are still in the gun for civil claims. I'm not sure what good banning them does.
