Thanks for tanking: Why the Colts were right, and why the NFL is happy

Bill Polian has fed the beast while also poking it with a stick.

Please pretend it is neither here nor there that punting on a chance at history means the Indianapolis Colts have Curtis Painter-ed themselves into a corner, where the only way out is winning the Super Bowl. (Like it wasn't already when everyone believes your robo-quarterback is a choke artist.) Polian's choice works on a practical level, as Polian noted: "The perfect season was never an issue with us. We’ve said it time and time and time again. It is somebody else’s issue, not ours. That was of no concern."

It was brilliant beyond that, though. For one, it gives the NFL its mother's milk — a talking point to beat into the ground from here to next year. It also skewered the we're-all-experts illusion which makes following pro football great. That is why all the armchair-quarterback apoplexy over the Colts tanking rings false. It was the right move.

The second part is more important, from a fan perspective. As much as you love the NFL, you don't need to sacrifice your better judgment and get carried along by its never-ending stream of contrived controversies, which keep the league at the top of the conversation. (Chuck Klosterman's essay, "Football," in Eating The Dinosaur provides a pretty good explanation.)

It is impossible to be aloof from it, even at Advanced NFL Stats or Football Outsiders. People buy into it, but also get blinded into playing expert, instead of accepting the Tao of Lloyd Dobler, knowing they don't know.

The truth with following the NFL is it's great, for the most part, to follow a league where people are very well-familiarized with the game. A joke about Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid's clock-management skills does not have to be explained too much.

This is double-edged. It lends to oversimplification. Observers start to expect the observed to act the way they would. It feel likes Polian and Jim Caldwell — all together: worst 14-1 coach ever! — were reamed for not going along with the popular whim and shooting for the Holy Grail 19-0 season. What, the Colts were supposed to proceed accordingly because of what fans wanted?

The NFL is entertainment, but it does not work that way (yet). It is nice when a team does something in line with what fans would do — like going for a game-winning two-point conversion in the final minute instead kicking the extra point and going to overtime — but that is rare. Teams want to keep their players healthy and fresh for the playoffs. To hell with people who expect sports to take away their cynicism instead of it having it reflected back at them (Jeff Pearlman, whom I would run through a wall for: "Now the Colts will walk a similarly worn path. Yet another team winning another Super Bowl. Meh.").

You are better off to accept that and try to see through the game the league runs. Better yet, develop a more flexible memory. Perhaps Indianapolis saw 16-0 for what it was worth: Sweet F.A. Did people forget during the first 10, 12 weeks of the season, all the talk was about the dearth of parity across the league. There was speculation two teams might finish the regular season 16-0, remember that?

Perhaps pissing on history, as sportswriters conceive of it, is a necessary good. It has always been a laugh and a half that the 1972 Miami Dolphins who went 17-0 are viewed as immortal. True, Miami is the only NFL team to run the table, as if 35 years of advances in coaching, scouting, player development, free agency, weight training, nutrition and game-planning should not enter into the equation.

The beauty of our era is we enjoy the benefit of readily available info which provides more context than win-loss records. For starters, the '72 Dolphins weren't even the best single-season team of the 1970s, much less of the past 60 years. The 1975 Pittsburgh Steelers fare better under Simple Ranking System.

The '72 Dolphins, playing in an era of a 26-team NFL, played more than half their regular-season games (8-of-14) in a five-team AFC East division where the second-place team went 7-7. The '75 Steelers, who went 12-2, were in a division where the third-place team was 10-4 (and they had two less divisional games, since the AFC Central had only four teams).

It also entirely possible that as pro football evolves — particularly if the salary cap is abolished — a 16-0 season might become more scalable, maybe even commonplace. (A commenter on Stampede Blue noted, "As the league becomes more and more unbalanced, it will become easier every year to feast on the Browns, Lions, and Rams of the league and more and more teams will be capable of going 16-0.")

The NFL is not college football. There's no benefit to being undefeated. So, we're mad at the Colts for doing something which is completely condoned by the rules?

Nowhere does it say a GM and coach are supposed to make decisions based on what would please the majority of fans. The Colts once traded away Hall of Fame halfback Marshall Faulk to speed up the rebuilding of a 3-13 team. The New England Patriots have jettisoned popular players — remember Bill Belichick cutting strong safety Lawyer Milloy on the eve of the 2003 season? — to stay lean and mean.

You might say that personnel decisions are different than in-game decisions, which is true. However, keep in mind that an organization's strength is often its weakness. The qualities which help the Colts be in the Super Bowl mix year in-year out might fail them when it comes to optics. The execution of the plan — why not do it at halftime, or wait until the team had more than a five-point lead — was sloppy. It will come out in the wash, and who isn't going to be fascinated to see whether the team which tanked can win the Super Bowl?

The Colts have given us a spur to thought. Give them that much. They will never going to hear the end of it and granted, there is The Hater Nation argument, "Now, going 15-1 or 14-2, bowing out in the first round will seem like every other Colts playoff collapse."

It would be nice if Indy still had a shot at going 19-0. It would be nicer if sports arguments weren't born out of people playing expert and expecting the sports world to indulge their fantasies. Besides, no one knows what this does for Indy's Super Bowl chances. For all we know, they might not have even been the favourite to win the AFC before Sunday (see Chargers, San Diego).

Meantime, the NFL loooooves it that a team quit mid-game and might still win the Super Bowl. It's perfect manufactured outrage. The NFL wins, again.

NFL makes curling cool

NFL stars are sometimes willing to branch out to try new things and San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis is no exception.
A few Winnipeg Blue Bombers in past years, such as Milt Steegal, have also given the roaring game a go. They caught on after a while, proving it's a sport you can learn quickly. It may take years to master, but anyone can do it.
Here's the video. Shout outs to the Washington Post and the Associated Press for posting the info online.

Damn Vikings ... a pretty nice little Sunday

It's hard to imagine a better first Sunday of the NFL season for a Minnesota Vikings fan.

• Adrian Peterson has a 180-yard day in an opening win over the Browns. A good friend who is a Chicago Bears fan immediately phoned after Peterson's 64-yard touchdown run where he broke six tackles and said, "Best running back I've seen since Barry Sanders. We'll talk later."
  
  
• Ol' Brett Favre mostly just stayed out of the way. OK, so it is not so clear the Vikes could win a game if they were unable to run well.
  
  
Neither the Bears or Green Bay Packers looked all-fired great during NBC's Sunday nighter, which NBC's Al Michaels did not call "the NFL's most storied rivalry between two teams which have losing records vs. the Vikings during the Super Bowl era."


• Jay Cutler's four interceptions on Sunday night were at least as hilarious as anything Jay Leno will do Monday night.
  
  
• The Bears lost Brian Urlacher for the season. A player being injured is not something to celebrate, but if the Bears end up bringing Derrick Brooks out of retirement, it means no one can razz the Vikings about Favre being older than dirt. Thirty-six in linebacker years is older than 40 in quarterback years.
  
• We can't wait to see what the alternative point spreads will be this Sunday for the Vikings' game vs. the Detroit Lions. The APS is the brain candy of sports betting lines. There is a double-digit spread on tonight's doubleheader, Bills-Patriots and Chargers-Raiders, but it would be much more fun it you took New England by 21½ instead a mere of 11.
  
  
• Percy Harvin gets his first NFL touchdown and does some damage as a runner, receiver and a returner like a latter-day Gale Sayers.
  
  There's a reason behind citing a Bears legend. Everything Harvin will do is karma for the Bears never doing much in the '60s when they had Sayers. For that matter, everyting Peterson does vs. the Bears is karma for using high picks on Curtis Enis and Cedric Benson and for Mike Ditka not finding a way to get the greatest football player of all time, Walter Payton, a touchdown during Super Bowl 20. Just saying
  
  
• And this happened, involving the Bears former quarterback:
  
  
  
  Of course, it was a total fluke play, but nevertheless.
  
• Last but not least, Queen's won and the Saskatchewan Roughriders "went out of their way" (Regina Leader-Post) to avoid scoring 60 points against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Banjo Bowl. Yeah, it was a pretty nice little Sunday.
  

Football: A new favourite player, Ellis Lankster

Nothing can be finer than tearing someone a new one today when you never heard of her/him prior to yesterday.

Only a true NFL obsessive knew that Ellis Lankster was a rookie cornerback for the Buffalo Bills before the clip below started to spread virally.



There should be some empathy for Lankster. He seems to have a speech impediment. He would not be the first person who had problems communication which belied his intelligence and value. Who knows, given the way NFL teams overanalyze every bit of minutia about a prospective player, perhaps it caused him to fall to the seventh round in the draft.

Anyway, sorry, but a football player stuttering is not funny. As for the Bills' offence sputtering ...

Related:
Leave Ellis Lankster Alone (Pro Football Talk)
Poor Ellis Lankster (OTR)

Brett plays dirty, then how come our conscience is so clean?

The English language really does not have a word to express the state of "laughing while also being mortified," which pretty much describes the reaction to Brett Favre bringing back the long-outlawed crackback block. The general reaction (not like everyone did not wonder) is questioning what the fallout would be if Michael Vick pulled such a stunt.



Either way, Favre might be a self-aggrandizing spotlight-hogger who also plays dirty, but since he is on the Vikings now, he is my self-aggrandizing spotlight-hogger who also plays dirty. It is an easier transition since the high-minded Vikings fan never really hated Favre, but understood and respected his role in the melodrama. That is the nature of it with a bitter sports rivalry: After a while, you come to realize the people on the other side are not evil and wrong, but they just happen to be aligned with something which is evil and wrong, like that media darling franchise in Green Bay which was grandfathered in to the modern NFL.

Who knows, perhaps ol' Brett was doing a homage to North Dallas Forty. The 30th anniversary of its release passed several weeks ago and this was his first extended game action since then.

(Sorry for the irregular posting, but the aim was to show people that Favre signing with the Vikes had not led to some kind of mental breakdown, although that could change if the rumours about trading Tarvaris Jackson are true. Besides, cisblog.ca has been taking up a lot of time.)

Blog blast past: It's a mad, mad, mad Madden world, baby

The first Sunday night NFL game is on and it seems weird seeing Cris Collinsworth next to Al Michaels in the NBC booth. It seemed worth re-posting this, from April 16.

It's going to be tougher to enjoy a perfectly good game of football without John Madden.

Gushing over the retirement of the 73-year-old coaching, broadcasting and video game icon, not necessarily in that order, is a bit silly. Celebrating the career of John Madden is akin to a quarterback tossing the ball helplessly into the air before the blitz buries him.

His career was a triumph of commercialism and he probably lingered a little too long. At the end of the day, who cares, though? That's just a truth. A larger one is that, for Gen Xers, Madden or Madden, whether you're talking about the man or the video game, was the conduit for learning football. He's even credited with suggesting the virtual first-down line, so try imagining watching the NFL without that innovation.

The first generation that was weaned on television was occasionally described as McLuhan babies. The point today is that football-obsessives of a certain age could be called Madden babies. In a sense, this is being written by the ultimate Madden baby, since yours truly, no word of a lie, was born on the Tuesday before Madden's Oakland Raiders crushed the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl 11. Minnesota (all together now: "Damn!") has not played in the big game since, except in Madden, "the one place where the Vikings hold roughly a .996 winning percentage all-time," according to Daily Norseman.

Someone had the wisdom to position Madden as the jovial next-door neighbour, a kind of Foghorn Leghorn who knew football backwards and forwards. It helped him become ubiquitous as a commercial pitchman, but no one ever said the high priest of football commentary was required to take a vow of poverty. Please bear in mind, if you take Tony Kornheiser on Monday Night Football as the baseline, Madden still comes off as pretty good.

The point is Madden wouldn't have become as big as he was if he wasn't, deep-down, the genuine article. He was the perfect guy to bring football to the masses, since he had a special eye for seeing what all 22 players on the field were doing. He demystified a very complex game.

In his prime, he could make an exhibition game in August seem riveting just by talking enthusiastically about some rookie free agent. The player was probably going to get cut the following Thursday, but Madden could make you care about a San Diego Chargers running back named Jo Jo Jones like no one else. He sort of radiated an interest in anyone who stepped on the field (which was why he came up with the All-Madden team), not just the glamour-boy quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers.

That carried over into his style of analysis. He didn't plug the stars, or stick to story lines hammered out by producers. (How many times have you watched a NFL game where some lesser-known player does something good, and the commentator immediately goes into a spiel about his more popular teammates?) He was always good for the stream of consciousness observation, like saying, "No kid wants to grow up to be a catcher or a nosetackle," or employing pants as a verb. He never seemed to get crusty with age, either, or see himself as bigger than the game.

Madden, the ex-coach, made it known that football is the most thoroughly team sport of them all. It's meaningless unless everyone on the team is seen as important, right down to the 53rd man on a NFL roster. He had a human side that made him unique in the cutthroat pro football world, as one of his Raiders players, the defensive lineman turned author Pat Toomay, related years later when recalling how Madden stood by New England Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley after he was paralyzed in a game in 1978.

"It was Madden's first instinct to go to Stingley. At the hospital, Stingley had been found to have fractured vertebrae in his neck and was being fitted with a halo brace to stabilize the injury. Our physicians, thankfully, had risen to the occasion. Having overseen a safe transport, they had summoned the appropriate specialists. Experts were now at hand.

"But even at the hospital something was dissonant, out of sync. Expecting to find himself among concerned New England officials, Madden found himself alone. No one from the Patriots was there. Not the owner. Not the coach. No one.

"Grabbing a phone, Madden called the Oakland airport. Immediately, he was patched through to the New England charter, taxiing out to take off. A more-than-animated discussion followed. The plane returned to the gate. The business manager was put off.

"In the hospital, Stingley was conscious, as doctors worked to fit the halo. Having donned surgeon's garb, Madden appeared beside him, leaning close. 'Everything's going to be all right,' he whispered.

"... In the days and weeks that followed, Madden visited Stingley, if not daily, then as often as he could. During one visit, Madden discovered a malfunction in Stingley's ventilator. In summoning a nurse to fix the problem, Madden might have saved Stingley's life."

Curiously enough, two other coaching icons, Marv Levy and the late Bill Walsh, who are often credited with possessing the same traits, also cut their coaching teeth at colleges in California in the 1960s. As Toomay has written elsewhere, that was a last bastion of football being the players' game, instead a coaches' game.

In one of his books, published during the mid-1980s, Howard Cosell sniffed in one of his books that Madden had "allowed himself to become a caricature of someone bursting through the wall with a beer can in his hands." That was a small price to pay, and it's worth noting that Madden is leaving beloved, while Cosell, not to speak ill of the dead, was bitter at the end.

Madden was as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola, but a lot of people like Coca-Cola. With respect to the video game, the story that he wouldn't allow his name to be put on the game until Electronic Arts (now EA Sports) could offer full 11-on-11 play shows he was bit of an early adapter. He might not be able to articulate or explain it, but it's impossible to understate how Madden's helped a generation of guys and a few girls learn the difference between a 3-4 and a 4-3 defence without having to put on the pads. People speak knowledgeably of I formations, trips right and Ace formations, not entirely because but largely thanks to the man.

In a sense, we're all a bit smarter as football fans thanks to him. It goes without saying that pausing to mull his legacy is a reflection that, as Ray Ratto at CBSSports.com noted, we're reflecting on the end of the sports broadcaster as national institution:

"Madden broke in an era when there were three sports carriers, not hundreds. We have replaced authoritative voices with cacophony because we have democratized the airwaves, at least insofar as we now have access to every broadcast of every baseball, basketball, football, hockey and major college football and basketball game that can be reasonably found. There is not one voice, but hundreds, and most of them are, well, not Madden. They work for the teams, and you can't be a national figure that way."

It's simply different. There can't be another John Madden. He has rubbed off on countless people, and speaking as someone who spent untold hours playing the original John Madden Football on the family's Tandy back in 1990, the gratitude is all on this end.

(It's impossible to resist including a Madden ambulance montage.)



Related:
John Madden retires from broadcasting (Lisa Fernandez, San Jose Mercury News)
Only one Madden, then, now and forever (Ray Ratto, CBSSports.com)
BOOM! Madden Retires (Daily Norseman)

American Needle vs. the NFL: Don't be so sure

It's a fair bet that most who have picked up on the American Needle v. NFL U.S. Supreme Court case have never read farther than Lester Munson's ESPN.com story which predicted a court win in the U.S. will hasten the apocalypse. Pro sports owners "will rule the world," as Doug Farraway just said on the FAN 590, Jim Balsillie will never be able to get a NHL team, no team will be able to improve through free agency.

Smart Football described Munson's tone as "all hysterical and apocalyptic," and the The Sporting Blog also had a very reasoned rebuttal pointing out that Munson was guilty of "a misunderstanding of the economics of the thing — the NFL and other pro sports leagues already auction off television packages as collectives."

It's damn entertaining to jump to wild conclusions for the sake of a 40-minute block of all-sports radio (look, Farraway just said they might as well bring back Eddie Shore!)

The rub is many people are just hearing about this, and Munson might have spread it on thick to get attention. The way some have spoken, it's like this is a walkover touchdown for the NFL. Please. No one knows how a court is going to rule, even if the SCOTUS leans more than a bit to the right politically. The SCOTUSBlog passed on an important take-home. The Supreme Court "sought first to get advice from the U.S. Solicitor General," before it elected to take the case. That is unusual:

"Ordinarily, when everyone involved in a case, plus outsiders, agree that the Court should review it, that is quite persuasive with the Court. But the Justices are looking for some legal advice before they act.

"When the Court asks the Solicitor General for the government’s legal views on a case, it often takes months for that office to respond. The Court does not set deadlines for such briefs. The new leaders of the Solicitor General’s office in the Obama Administration will determine what schedule they plan to keep."

Long story short, in a general sense, courts do not tend to award ultimate victory to one side in these matters. They also tend to be hands-off when it comes to how sports leagues manage their affairs, even when it's a practice which would be ruled illegal in other walks of life (i.e., entry drafts).

No doubt the big ball-and-stick leagues would love to reduce their player costs and increase what they charge for tickets and merchandise. You just don't know how a court will rule.

Antitrust case could be Armageddon (Lester Munson, ESPN.com)

Mannywood, Air McNair and the death of manufactured outrage

You live in a moral grey zone. You don't exit it when you are in sports fan mode.

That is the ketchup answer — covers everything — for whatever has been said in the past week about Manny Ramírez and the late Steve McNair. Some sportswriters based in the cities where Manny has hung his do-rag, Boston and Los Angeles, were apoplectic that Ramírez got a hero's welcome when he returned from a 50-game suspension for a positive drug test. Less than 24 hours after Ramírez rejoined the L.A. Dodgers, McNair, who played QB in the NFL for 13 years, was found dead next to the body of his 20-year-old girlfriend. As you know, McNair was still married to the mother of his four children (and God forbid that U.S. lawmakers realize allowing a 20-year-old, not much more than a child really, to buy a handgun is a really bad policy it's a bad idea to have a society where a 20-year-old can easily get a gun).

The common thread is how to deal when sports get crowded by stupid reality again. Once and for all, it is time to divest oneself of the notion that sports fans, much less sports writers get to play the ethics and morality squad. We don't.

Honestly, distancing oneself from the scribbling practised by the likes of the L.A. Times' Bill Plaschke and Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy, is about the best thing a sports nut can do. It's not clear if they really hate Manny Ramírez, or if it's just a routine, a face-dance. Either way, very little of it is needed.

Life is too short for both hate and for pundits who substitute shtick for trying to honestly convey what an event was like. When did manufactured outrage replace telling the shades-of-grey truth? As a L.A. Times user, reading Plaschke rail about, "Manny did the time, but what about the crime?" is a little like a pivotal scene near the end of The Shawshank Redemption. You know it. Red (the Morgan Freeman character) tells off a parole board official over the meaning of the word "rehabilitated."

"I know what you think it means sonny. To me it's just a made up word. A politician's word so that young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and a tie and have a job."

That is really part of what we're talking about. It's not whether Ramírez's return proves standards have gone all to hell. It's about respecting that ultimately, everyone gets to assert their own terms, not adhere to society's, like Red/Morgan Freeman did with his redemption. This is about getting rid of a sportswriting construct where the columnist fulminates over What Should Be, which has made Bill Plaschke semi-rich.

The hero's welcome Manny got in places such as Albuquerque while playing a few tune-up games in the minor leagues was not reason to go off half-cocked. Americans have always loved outlaws, from Wild Bill Hickok to Barry Switzer. This was not going to change on the say-so of some sportswriters who wanted Manny to do their jobs for them by being all teary and apologetic.

Honestly, Dan Shaughnessy comes off less like a gatekeeper (an outmoded old-media concept) and more like an out-of-touch grouch.

"The longer this goes on, the more it seems that the only people who care about steroids are Hall of Fame voters, a handful of baseball purists, and perhaps those players who have not cheated and now feel like suckers.

"I called the commissioner to ask him about Manny getting the Charles Lindbergh treatment in San Diego (site of his first game back with the Dodgers).

" 'The only comment I have on that score is that fans everywhere will have to make their own value judgment,' said a disgusted Bud Selig. 'That certainly is out of our control. That’s all I'll say on that.' "

Far be it to say there was another way to take Selig's comment that "fans everywhere will have to make their own value judgment." No one who was not privy to the conversation know that the MLB commissioner was really "disgusted."

Perhaps Selig, in the parlance of our time, actually dared to address baseball fans as if they are adults. Maybe those aggrieved Hall of Fame voters, rather than act above the rabble who pay for tickets and the MLB Extra Innings package, ought to heed the people who support the whole pro sports apparatus with their discretionary income. Just because you memorized baseball stats as a kid and that influenced your choice of profession doesn't mean you have superior reasoning skills.

Thankfully, there are a few who can better channel their rage and get a post up about this much sooner, such as ShysterBall. ("What all of these columns seem to boil down to is anger at the fact that there has been no sturm und drang associated with Manny's suspension. The minute baseball actually discovers and penalizes a major star in a drama-free and orderly fashion, however, everyone gets bent out of shape.") There is also Charles Pierce, who wrote a wicked piece for Slate on Monday pointing out that if anything, Ramírez betrays the general attitude toward steroids, exposes the big lie.

"... it was of a piece with Manny's greatest gift as a professional athlete — his innate ability to make everything about baseball that is self-reverentially loathsome look ridiculous. In the great, hushed temple that baseball is perennially building for itself in its own mind, it's Manny's who provides the dribble glasses, the whoopee cushions, and the exploding cigars. It is his holy mission to take the living piss out of the self-important, the moralistic, and the people who cling to baseball in order to defend their inherent right to be 13 years old for the rest of their lives. So, there he was, an Albuquerque Isotope, selling out the ballpark and, by all accounts, happy as a clam.

"... the great steroid hunt is almost solely an intramural problem between baseball and its various acolytes. The overwhelming number of baseball fans — who, given the economic problems of the moment, are filling ballparks in reasonably overwhelming numbers — have quite obviously made peace with what happened in the game over the past 20 years. Manny Ramirez was treated as though he'd pulled a hamstring or tweaked a tendon. Now, he's back. That's the way things are going to be from now on."

No one says you have to like what has gone on in baseball any more than you have to like hearing that McNair was found dead next to a Woman Not His Wife.

This is not an apologia for anyone. There is no hair-splitting about the nature of Ramírez's cheating. Steroid experts say the fertility drug he tested positive for is one that "every steroid dealer carries." It is in the same vein with McNair. Not to speak ill of the dead, but there is little to no defending someone straying outside her/his marriage.

The question is why, as a sports lover, one would assume the best about a NFL player, whom you only know through TV images on Sunday afternoons and the odd Monday night, along with some touchy-feely PSAs for the United Way. It might be best to presume everyone, whatever their many virtues while in the moment doing their thing, is flawed like everyone else. One of the most perceptive comments in that vein came from the Chicago Bears defensive end, Adewale Ogunleye:

"Life is not a game. Football is a game. You can't expect a guy to make pinpoint decisions the way he would as a quarterback. I'm not condoning anything but at the end of the day, he's a human being."

You know this already, but there are other, better options to have as heroes. Point being, people need to let up a little on the knee-jerk judgments. Meantime, and everyone does this in sports (present company included), it's important not to conflate ability with character.

You cannot keep real life from seeping into sports. If anything, sports seeps into real life. The desperate traditional media might be getting high-school catty, but you don't have to play ball. You just have to accept, hey, in this age you have to stickhandle through a lot of weirdness and shamelessness, kind of like the protagonist in Douglas Coupland's JPod.

I am not advocating for everyone to have lower personal standards for her/his conduct. If anything, it's as important as ever to try to set a good example. But if you're going to have people on that we should expect unambiguous virtue from sports figures, you're dead wrong.

Thank you, Manny Ramírez, and thank you, Morgan Freeman.

Steve McNair: Slain NFL MVP bridged a generation of black quarterbacks

The media tends to overemphasize the importance of someone being the first or last of his kind.

Steve McNair, the former NFL MVP who was murdered Saturday in Nashville, would fill the middle chapters of a book about the progress of the black quarterback in pro football. He was important, as someone who was taken in the first 10 picks of the draft. McNair, who "won’t get inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but was one of the league’s toughest players," (Biloxi Sun-Herald, June 28), spanned a generation when black quarterbacks went from novelty to normative to being at risk of becoming a novelty once again. That is important.

(P.S. Interesting comments from the ex-boyfriend of the slain young woman, Sahel Kazemi.)

McNair came up the hard way, playing at Alcorn State in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, which Sports Illustrated described in 1994 as "small, underfunded and unable to lure recruits with big-time television, yet it has sent a steady stream of players, from Buck Buchanan to (Walter) Payton to Charlie Joiner to (Jerry) Rice, to the NFL."

In that sense, he was the last of his kind, reaching back to a bygone era when the big-time football schools were not open to blacks. One macabre irony of his death is that McNair had just opened a restaurant on Jefferson Street near Tennessee State University. That is the alma mater of one of his predecessors in the NFL, Joe Gilliam, who also died young. Gilliam's nickname was Jefferson Street Joe.

McNair was a few years ahead of the trend in major-college football toward the spread offence, which has spawned a new breed of star, the dual threat quarterback. (He was more of a drop-back, pro-style passer, but since people think in images, he probably would have got a shot in the spread.) Here one thinks of several exemplars who are both black and white, such as Tim Tebow at Florida, Vince Young when he played at Texas, Alex Smith at Utah, current Pittsburgh Steelers backup Dennis Dixon, who if not for a knee injury would have led the Oregon Ducks to the BCS title game in 2007 and, of course, Michael Vick. Scouting and recruiting networks even in the early 1990s were nothing compared to today. Someone would have discovered him in this day and age, when in 30 seconds you can find YouTube footage of a quarterback from the University of Montana who might be signing with the Saskatchewan Roughriders (Cole Bergquist, remember the name).

Less than 20 years ago, people still noticed when you turned on a NFL game on Sunday and saw a quarterback who was black. In January, when the NFL playoffs were on, a writer named David D. at The Smoking Section mused that it might seem passé to dwell on this issue with Barack Obama now in the White House. However, it still draws a lot of water, especially with how Young, Vick and Daunte Culpepper have struggled:

"Aside from perhaps the hockey goalie, the Black quarterback is one of the last frontiers of major sports. The fact that the quarterback is responsible for the cerebral field has historically made general managers and coaches hesitant to put the keys in the hands of an African-American who is characterized as merely a instinctual athlete good for running out of the pocket, with questionable accuracy and limited ability to think on his feet."

If you read the S.I. cover story from the fall of 1994, you can understand the banner McNair carried into the NFL.

"It also makes him, one hopes, the standard-bearer for a new generation of black NFL quarterbacks, the first who will enter the league without needing to break some shabby stereotype about their capacity to lead. Williams's triumph in the 1988 Super Bowl and Warren Moon's stellar consistency over the past decade forced this change, but there's one final step to go: There have to be "so many black quarterbacks that it no longer seems like a novelty," says Minnesota Viking defensive coordinator Tony Dungy, 'or a charismatic type, a Joe Montana who wins so many Super Bowls that the issue just fades away.'

" ... College football has spawned many winning black quarterbacks over the past three years — Colorado's Kordell Stewart, Nebraska's Tommie Frazier, Virginia Tech's Maurice De Shazo; even Ole Miss, of all places, started Lawrence Adams last year. And now here's McNair, out of the same conference that quietly produced Jerry Rice and Walter Payton, carrying superstar intangibles like leadership and grace under fire.

"Of course, people said Florida State's Charlie Ward possessed those characteristics. But once the 1993 Heisman Trophy winner refused to commit to the NFL over the NBA, his supposed deficiencies — too short and lack of a cannon arm — made him anathema. He wasn't drafted, and that created an intriguing divide: It was easy to conclude that Ward must not be good enough for the NFL, but a significant number of blacks felt, as Dungy put it, 'slapped.' Ward was taller than McMahon, with a stronger arm than Montana's, in a two-sport quandary similar to that faced by John Elway as a college senior. His snub confirmed the suspicion that the NFL still takes fewer chances on black quarterbacks than on white ones. 'If you're black,' Williams once said, 'you have to walk on water or be gone.'

"Ward never even got the chance to try for that miracle. 'I remember the day it happened,' says Los Angeles Raider tight end Jamie Williams, who is black and who last year wrote and produced a documentary film on the media's treatment of black quarterbacks. 'My wife looked at me, and her eyes were watering. I almost cried. The guy did it all in college, and he didn't get drafted. I was training with Jerry Rice and Ricky Watters, and they were like, "I can't believe that happened." It hit an emotional chord with black Americans. It gave everybody a sour taste.' "

The record should show McNair carried the standard pretty well, guiding the wild-card Tennessee Titans to within one yard of forcing overtime in the Super Bowl in 2000 and sharing MVP honours with Tom Brady Peyton Manning in 2003. Brady Manning deserved it hands-down, but the voters made a huge deal of McNair's toughness and leadership, which shows how attitudes have improved.

Meantime, talk about an awful, unnecessary death. No one deserves to leave this mortal coil at such a young age, 36 years old. Ultimately, in the short time he had, McNair made a lot of progress, for that he should be remembered no matter what.

Update: Mocking The Draft wrote a very nice tribute:

"Still today, McNair remains one of the greatest quarterback prospects of all time. He was not wasted potential like Ryan Leaf, Todd Marinovich or Vince Young. He was like John Elway and Steve Young – incredible athletes who went on to NFL glory. Much like Jerry Rice and Walter Payton, he was the rare star from the Southwesten Athletic Conference.

"It took 13 years for an NFL team to take a Division I-AA quarterback in the first round when Baltimore took Joe Flacco. It's only fitting that McNair's roster spot in Baltimore to be theoretically used by Flacco after his retirement in April 2008.

" ... What was even greater about McNair was that he seemingly broke that last quarterback color barrier. Doug Williams won the Super Bowl. Warren Moon sustained greatness for a whole career. McNair was the first to be a top draft pick. It's impossible not to think, then, McNair's success played a factor in Philadelphia's decision to take Donovan McNabb second overall in 1999."

Update II:Jeff Pearlman has some good stuff:

"McNair was genuine. Teammates loved him. I mean, really loved him. He was gritty and tough and hard-nosed. He played through pain and thrived at overcoming odds."

Related:
McNair defined the magic of the NFL Draft (Mocking The Draft)
Air McNair; Steve McNair is the best quarterback — black or white, big school or small — in college football (S.L. Price, Sports Illustrated, Sept. 26, 1994)

The other 20 worst things to happen to the Vikings

Brett Favre's signing with the Minnesota Vikings is supposed to go down on Friday, July 3, according to the unimpeachable Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk. Other oracles are chiming in. The production of No. 4 jerseys has already been green-lit (how unfortunate that phrase evokes the colours of a certain rival in Wisconsin). Some even wonder if this is the canary in the coal mine, that owner Zygi Wilf has resorted to a desperation play because he wants to unload the team since it has zero chance of getting a modern stadium.

The indispensable Daily Norseman has tried to counsel Minnesota Vikings fan through this. As it put it in a piece titled The Favre Stages Of Grief.

"As a group, we've been through way more than this, and we've been through way worse than this ... and we've managed to persevere for this long. To be honest, I'm not even sure if 'signing Brett Favre' would crack a list of the Top 20 most disappointing things to ever happen to the Minnesota Vikings."

Twenty most disappointing things to ever happen to the Vikings, eh? Consider that gauntlet picked up, even if the author is unaware it was even thrown down. If nothing else, it's way to build a a forcefield for Favregeddon, starting right after the jump.

First off, there need to be ground rules, which the author reserves the right to make up off the top of his head.

Randy Moss' mock-mooning at Lambeau Field during the 2004 playoffs does not count. It came in a game where the Vikings beat the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. Moss came off better in that fiasco than FOX Sports' Joe Buck did. Scratch perennial 1,000-yard running back Robert Smith retiring from football in 2001 when he still had a few good seasons left, since that was his personal decision. Mocking former running back Onterrio Smith for getting busted at the airport with something called an Original Whizzinator is also out since that incident was symptomatic with his problems with addiction (read this post by one of Smith's one-time teammates, NFL tight end George Wrighster, and then say Onterrio Smith is fair game).

The rest is in play, as far as anyone knows.

20. Starting quarterback, Spergon Wynn

Spergon Wynn III was hardly cut out to be a CFL quarterback, let alone a NFL quarterback. The epitaph for his career in Canada came courtesy of one-time B.C. Lions teammate, Carl Kidd, who once said, "Spergon can be a good quarterback at times." The rub is none of those times involved the two starts he made for the Vikings late in 2001. He went 48-for-98 for passing with one touchdown and six interceptions and never started another game. He is the answer to a great trivia question: Who started at QB in the Vikings' last game under Dennis Green and the first under Mike Tice?

19. Drafting Troy Williamson

He's open deep and ... oh, he can't hang on! There is another NFC North team which is synonymous with spending first-round draft choices on wide receivers whose 40-yard dash times turn out to be fool's gold, but Williamson's ignominy ranks with any of the approximately 72 receivers Matt Millen drafted when he was doing to the Lions what a bunch of dopes in suits did to the U.S. auto industry.

Williamson, the No. 7 pick in 2006, was expected to give the Vikings the deep threat they had lacked since Moss left. Three years later, his name is mostly a punchline and he's an entry in Worst Man Drafted tournaments. Some of his drops were so bad that the director of a cheesy football comedy wouldn't have even included them, for lack of believability.



18. Paul Ferraro's special teams unit (2008)

Seven return touchdowns allowed in one season, a NFL record. The crazy part is Ferraro moved up the coaching ladder after that showing, since he was hired by the St. Louis Rams to coach their linebackers. Granted, that means worrying about three players, not all 11 on the field at one time.

17. Tony Dorsett runs 99½ yards (Jan. 3, 1983)

Perhaps it was not disappointing in the classic sense. It's just that the NFL Network seems bound by policy to have to air the clip of Dorsett's dash at least once every 24 hours. No one remembers that the Vikings actually won that 1982 Monday nighter, no mean feat when you allow a running back to go 99 yards on a play when his team lined up with only 10 guys. True story.

16. Vikadontis Rex (1995-2000)

There is only room for one lame dinosaur mascot in the four major sports. The Toronto Raptors totally called this one. Vikadontis was introduced in the wake of the Jurassic Park phenomenon in the early '90s, probably as a way to appeal to the kids. Of course, the Vikings already had a mascot, Ragnar, played by a guy who holds the world record for shaving with an ax, so it just ended up muddying the brand.

15. Antonio Freeman's catch (Nov. 6, 2000)

A semi-legitimate sports journalist is conditioned to eschew using the word fluke. However, what happened on the night of Nov. 6, 2000 was nothing but a damn fluke. The Vikings and Packers never should have been in overtime in the first place, but in a driving rainstorm, the Vikings botched the hold on a last-second field goal try.

In OT, Freeman slipped on the wet field while running a deep route and Dishman appeared to bat it to turf. However, it hit Freeman, who managed to complete the catch, get to his feet without being tackled and cut inside a defender to score and give Green Bay an ill-gotten 26-20 win. It also cost the Vikings home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.



14. Dennis Green tries to sue the team (1997)

To be fair, you might call a lawyer too if you had coached a perennial playoff team and found out the highers-up tried to replace you with a rah-rah college coach like Lou Holtz who was a failure in his one shot in the NFL.

13. Randy Moss' long goodbye (about 2002 to '04)

There are reasons Randy Moss is great and wonderful beyond him being in the picture when people talk about the greatest pass receivers in NFL history (after Jerry Rice and somewhere in there with Marvin Harrison and Lance Alworth from the AFL and if you include Terrell Owens in there, you're asking to get punched in the balls).

Moss showed an outcast could make it in an American team sport. That point was generally lost amid the "I play when I want to play," the meter-maid bumping and leaving the field before the game was over. No one really got that at the time, except perhaps for Karl Taro Greenfeld, but he didn't profile Moss until after he been traded to the Oakland Raiders for next to nothing. Meantime, there was so much lost potential left back in Minnesota, even though it's hard to begrudge Moss on NFL Sundays when he's catching touchdown passes from Tom Brady and polishing his application to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

12. Daunte Culpepper's knee injury (2005)

When pro football historians (how do you get that job? Is there a test, like the foreign service exam?) talk about the great passing combos whose first names need not be mentioned, they'll talk about Montana-to-Rice, Manning-to-Harrison, Unitas-to-Berry, and Brady-to-Moss. It will ignore Culpepper, who threw to Moss during his prime years, from the time he was 23 until he was 27.

It went so well for long, then one day it did not anymore. Since '05, Culpepper has played for the Dolphins, Raiders and the Detroit Lions, so you could say the injury was career-ending.

11. Pass not intended for Darrin Nelson (Jan. 17, 1988)

Plenty of teams have seen their Super Bowl dreams dashed in the final minute of the conference championship game, just yards from a tying or winning touchdown. The killer is that the final play of the 1987 NFC championship vs. Washington, the underdog Vikings ended up with Anthony Carter and running back Darrin Nelson in the same area of the field. That made it easier for Hall of Famer Darrell Green, who was covering Carter, to break up the pass. It was intended for Nelson, but considering that Carter had set a playoff receiving record the week before, it's hard to perish the thought Wade Wilson was throwing for him.



In hindsight, the other kicker two decades later is the Vikings, as a blue state team, could have won on the field and on principle. That was the season when the NFL used scab players for three games during a players' strike. The fake Vikings went 0-3, but they still made the playoffs and were six yards from victory.

10. Super Bowl IV (January 11, 1970)

The first of the Vikings' four Super Bowl losses might not be well-remembered. The fact remains is they were 12-point favourites going in against the Kansas City Chiefs and lost by 16. No team ever favoured by such a large spread ever lost again until 1998, when a certain bunch of Cheeseheads, thanks to a couple key turnovers by a quarterback wearing No. 4, lost to Denver after being favoured by 13.



9. Smoot boat scandal (Oct. 6, 2005)

Easy enough to laugh this off now, but the general mood was less tolerant in 2005. Between Moss leaving and Culpepper suffering a thermonuclear knee injury, it was a rough few months.

8. Jim Marshall's wrong-way run (1964)

Marshall's record of playing in 282 consecutive games across 20 seasons basically makes him the NFL's answer to Cal Ripken Jr., except Ripken did not have to get cut-blocked or leg-whipped on a semi-regular basis. However, there's a belief the member of the Purple People Eaters is not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame all because of one boner he pulled in 1964.



7. Nooooo! Nooooooo! (Dec. 28, 2003)

Six years later, the question how? remains unanswered. An 11-point fourth-quarter lead against the worst team in the NFL should have been safe. Somehow, the Arizona Cardinals, led by depth-chart fillers such as Josh McCown and Nathan Poole, scored two touchdowns inside of the two-minute warning, helping Favre and the Green Bay Packers get into the playoffs, keeping the Vikings out after they had started the season 6-0. It also inspired an epic rant. Of course, since the best a Vikings fan can usually hope for is justice delayed, several years later the NFL changed the so-called force-out rule, so Nathan Poole's end-zone catch would not count if they were playing the game today. Of course, they're not playing the game today, even if some of us are just replaying it over and over.

6. Metrodome opens (April 3, 1982)

Let's get this straight: You gave up the best home-field advantage in the NFL? How did that work out? Baseball's Twins, the NBA's Timberwolves and the University of Minnesota football team have each scored swankier digs, but only the Vikings remain unable to score a modern stadium.

5. Korey Stringer's death (Aug. 1, 2001)

As a fan, there is a lot you-don't-wanna-know when it comes to the sacrifices pro athletes have to make. Springer's death due to complications from heat stroke uncovered the dark side of the sport. Pushing someone that far was so needless, so unnecessary that it hardly seemed like a game.

4. 41-doughnut (Jan. 14, 2001)

Have you ever sat there as a sports fan after your team lost by a slim margin and wondered if it would have been easier to take if they had never been in the game? Losing 41-0 in the NFC championship game to the New York Giants, getting shut out by a defence which had Jason Sehorn on it, well, there's your answer.

3. Drew Pearson pushes off (Dec. 28, 1975)

Pass interference is like obscenity. There is no definition of it, but everyone knows it when they see it. Pearson's look of restrained jubilation after catching the Hail Mary pass from Roger Staubach to beat the Vikings in the '75 playoffs is all the proof one needs to know he pushed off on Hall of Fame defensive back Paul Krause, even if the replays are actually inconclusive.



2. Herschel Walker trade (Oct. 12, 1989)

The trade was so bad the temptation is to believe it was a conspiracy to restore the Dallas Cowboys to NFL prominence and help the league's TV ratings recover in the wake of the 1987 strike. It's easier to accept that

1. Almost perfect (Jan. 17, 1999)

All together now: Damn! One can finally laugh a little about it now that has been spoofed by an Emmy-nominated sitcom. It's a burn, not a serious one mind you since this is just football, to never know how Randall Cunningham and Cris Carter might have done in a Super Bowl. It is clear the Vikings might have been headed for a fall, having flown to close to the sun on the wings of bad song parodies.



(It was the end of the 20th century. You try to forget, but booze only helps so much.)

Of course, there was more to it than Gary Anderson (who, as Marshall Eriksen/Jason Segel has noted, is now retired and owns a fly-fishing business ... in Canada), missing a 38-yard field goal that would have wrapped up the NFC title when he had not missed all season. There was more to it than the irony that the Atlanta Falcons' winning field goal was also from 38 yards and it was kicked by Morten Andersen, a Dane, meaning the Vikings' fate was sealed by an actual Viking.

It was the aftermath. In this case, it meant having to go out afterward to cover a hockey game for The Queen's Journal while wearing a Moss jersey (going home to change was not an option) and being asked, "So, who won? Last I checked Minnesota was way ahead."

The point is the obvious. Vikings fans have been through much. After reading the magic words, "Top 20 most disappointing things," it took maybe forty-five seconds to come up with about 18 of the items on this list. Put all of it together and we're Brett-proofed. Bring him in, already.

Brett Favre: Creating the Cliff Clavin rule

Brett Favre is scheduled to be a guest on the premiere of "Joe Buck Live" tonight. Thank god satire was already dead.

When an good old-fashioned newsman breaks out the "yes comma," usually it means you better take heed, brother:

"Yes, this is it: If Favre is willing to sign a contract with an option that will determine his pay based on how he performs and how much he plays, the Wilf family will go all out to add Favre to the team. The contract will not be guaranteed. It could have some good incentive clauses that will pay Favre well if he can perform like he did in 2007, when he led the Packers to a 13-3 record ..." — Sid Hartman

Who knows, really. Speaking personally, friends have asked, "How can you be a Minnesota Vikings fan and not care if whether or not they get Brett Favre?" The response, after first pointing out that saying whether or not is a redundancy (yes comma, it is a dick move to correct someone's grammar, but it's an easily corrected mistake), is to say there's a higher power involved. Besides, the Vikings all-world defensive end Jared Allen told KFAN in Minneapolis, "The thing is I honestly don't care" about Favre. Please keep in mind this is someone who plays for the damn team.

The higher power could be called the Cliff Clavin Rule (here's an explanation), which is as follows: If only three people know the answer to something and none of them have ever been in your kitchen, it's a good idea drink a glass of shut-the-hell-up.

There are exceptions for those who can lend some particular background to the story or comedy you can lend, like Sports Pickle did when it put out a satirical piece that the Vikings had set a deadline for current quarterbacks Tarvaris Jackson and Sage Rosenfels to stop sucking. It all comes back to trying to be among the first people to find out something instead of the millionth and third to chew over the latest speculation about whether the Biceps Tendon Heard 'Round The World will be healed enough for Ol' Brett to be able to air it out when Percy Harvin is open deep after leaving some poor cornerback spinning like a top.

The other principle, which has some application to the Jim Balsillie/Phoenix Coyotes story, comes from the essay Neal Pollack wrote for Slate (dude, I know) several years ago, The Cult Of The General Manager: "Excuse me for wanting baseball highlights."

The Balsillie story is more newsworthy than any given game in one of the four big ball-and-stick leagues, which is more than can be said about Favre. However, it is best left to the people who can do the mental stickhandling through a labyrinth of legalese. From the sad-but-true files, sports stories which do not involve people doing something sweat-intensive sooner rather than later get dry up faster. However, Pollack conceded, "As deathly dull as a general manager's machinations may be, there's obviously an audience for it." The rub is that sports fans are conditioned for action, damnit.

Now did you see what the Chicago Bears linebacker, Lance Briggs, said about ol' Brett: "We know he's going to throw us a few (interceptions). He's thrown me a few, but I've also dropped several that I should have caught. We'd love to see Favre go there to play. We'd welcome it."

That is big talk from a guy whose team gave up 75 points in two games vs. the Vikings last season. That post is worth clicking through just for the pic of Lance Briggs the Chicago Sun-Times used. Either it was taken at the Pro Bowl in Hawai'i, or Lance Briggs emcees weddings and proms while wearing his jersey (since his face is hidden under a helmet and facemask, how would people know it's really him).

Anyway, the Clavin rule: Now you know.



(P.S. Nice to see Posted Sports rip off the same line of thinking, except their response is to take a Favratorium, which is both derivative and self-aggrandizing. That's the Canadian media for you!

In the name of the father: Dexter Manley II, a Ticat

Presumably the Hamilton Tiger-Cats signed Dexter Manley II for purely PR reasons, as in pass rush.

It speaks to the burden of legacy, how what happens to us is what first happened to our parents. There is an obvious hook with Manley the second trying signing with a team in the league where Manley the first tried to revive his football career during his long slide down from NFL glory in Washington to stints in prison and medical problems. He plays the same position, too, defensive end. (Mister Irrelevant joked he should be signed by the Washington NFL team.) You'll remember that it was kind of a running gag in the CFL, since the elder Dexter Manley went wherever Bernie and Lonie Glieberman owned a team, first Ottawa, then Shreveport, Louisiana.

ESPN's Tom Friend did a writeup a few years ago on the younger Manley when he was playing in junior college. This was before he passed through two college teams, Oregon and a small school, West Texas A&M. All throughout is kind of a theme of someone resisting his athletic destiny, plus it had an Ottawa reference!

"In 1992, Big Dexter signed with the CFL's Ottawa Rough Riders, and he invited Little Dexter to the press conference. The boy was in his bow tie, as usual, and afterward, he and Big Dexter raced each other in the empty stadium. That really was their last time running together on a football field."

As Friend related, Dexter Manley II played barely any football as a youth, instead focusing on hoops as wide-bodied, undersized power forward. He was playing junior college basketball in Southern California when some coaches basically said that with his genes, he was in the wrong sport:

"A couple of them had witnessed his (Charles) Barkley act on the court, and when they realized who he was, they asked him why he was playing a soft sport like basketball. 'Football's in your blood,' they said. They told him to come out for spring practice, that D1 scouts would see his speed and drool. A scholarship? His mom would love that. She worked at a Chico's in Atlanta, struggling to pay his juco tuition, and his dad hadn't made a child support payment since 1999.

"But more than that, football felt like home. He'd spent his life trying not to be Big Dexter, but he says the sound of cleats on concrete at spring practice made the hair on his neck stand on end. He'd hear one of his dad's favorite Luther Vandross songs and get emotional. 'I kind of forgave him,' he says.

"And get a load of what happened next: the coaches let Little Dexter Manley line up at defensive end. 'That's where I wanted to play," he says. 'If I was going to do it, I was going to do it all the way. I did it for my dad.' "

That part about tearing up when hearing a Luther Vandross song was jarring. Were this the movies, Manley would have made his peace with what Friend described as "carrying his father's demons." He seems to have the physical specs to play defensive end (6-foot-2, 280 lbs., timed at 4.6 seconds in the 40), but so do a lot of other guys coming out of a couple dozen other colleges. West Texas A&M, where he spent two injury-plagued seasons, isn't exactly a football factory. You know how some schools are known as Linebacker U or Quarterback U? West Texas A&M's football team could be Pro Wrestler U.

This is being written without knowing much about Dexter Manley II and how he can adapt to the CFL. Three-down football is not for everyone, especially with the adjustment defensive players have to make to lining up a yard off the ball. There is also the adjustment from playing at a U.S. school, where football is king, to playing in Canada, where it's a niche sport.

It's not as if the signing will set off a media circus, since Manley is just another rookie trying to make the team. The Ticats will probably try to shield him from the spotlight until he's assured a spot on the team. However, he has the pedigree and defensive ends who have played in Canada are somewhat in demand in the NFL, between former B.C. Lions sackmeister Cameron Wake signing a big deal with the Miami Dolphins and San Diego drafting Western's Vaughn Martin. Friend said of Manley's attempts to play football, "He's a bright kid. It's not too late."

The question is whether that still stands.

(It looks like he can get after the passer, but that clip is from a game three seasons ago.)

(Late) morning with Mr. Canoehead...

Stuff that should bounce off you like raisins off an Oldsmobile ...

Wondering how new Montreal Canadiens coach Jacques Martin will handle the insatiable Quebec media after being in a southern U.S. city and big-small-town Ottawa for so many years. Roy Mlakar won't be there to ride herd.

Hockey fans who complain "superstars get all the calls" in the NBA when the NHL did not suspend Penguins star Evgeni Malkin for starting a fight in the last five minutes of the game. Jeff Blair's suggested title for Colin Campbell: "NHL Vice-President and Director Of Figuring Out What’s A Cheap Shot." The greasiness was compounded by the fact the NHL announced Malkin was off the hook via a press release at 11:48 p.m. (literally, the 11th hour.)

Michael Vick being a contentious issue, while there is a barely a peep about current Atlanta Falcons player Quinn Ojinnaka being allowed to play in the NFL after he allegedly "spat at his bride, tossed her down some stairs and then threw her out of their Georgia home in the wee hours."

What Vick did was carried out over a number of years, but it's not as if striking a woman is completely random. Take it away, Bud Poliquin:

"What Vick, Ojinnaka's former Atlanta teammate, did to become a pariah will forever and properly be considered heinous. Training dogs to fight, and then executing those who don't win, is certainly reprehensible . . . and Vick has the shattered life, career and finances to prove it.

"But at the end of the day, shouldn't battering people be more prominently placed in the great photo of disgraces than any act of abusing (and, yes, killing) dogs? And isn't battering people made even more abominable when the alleged batterer is a 6-foot-5, 305-pound man, and the identified batteree is a woman of significantly less height and ballast?

The knowledge that HBO, which passed on Mad Men and Breaking Bad, has given Joe Buck his own show.



Conan O'Brien debuting tonight as host of The Tonight Show. The commitment NBC has made to Conan is truly amazing. They've given him the best lead-in that petty jealousies can buy.

(Lord, please forgive anyone whose reaction to seeing Jay Leno sign off last Friday night was to scream at the TV, "The show should have gone to Letterman in the first place!" The line of succession should have gone Carson-Letterman-Conan. It's a pain that never ends.

It's a sin to say that about Leno. Like Stewie Griffin once said, the fact is the man is out there every night with fresh material and he's charming.

Last but not least, having to be the guy who makes this joke: "Kingston Frontenacs defenceman Erik Gudbranson was taken in the Continental Hockey League draft today. Playing in Russia would be an easy switch since he's already in junior hockey's Siberia." So much for trying to quit making Frontenacs jokes.

(Kingston's own Taylor Hall was taken too. Three OHLers were taken and two had Kingston ties. Crazy.)

He's paid his debt, but there could be Bills in his future

In case you were wondering where any loose talk about the Buffaronto Bills signing Michael Vick sprang from (The Score's Tony Ambrogio mentioned the possibility during a report from the team's mini-camp), there was an item about on Pro Football Talk.

"The Bills want to win. Now. Whether it’s because owner Ralph Wilson is feeling a Leon Hess-style sense of urgency or whether coach Dick Jauron feels a Rich Kotite-style sense of urgency or a combination of both, the Bills are going all in.

"They offered receiver Terrell Owens $6.5 million guaranteed at a time when no one else was willing to pay him $6.50.

"And a league source tells us that the Bills made a very aggressive play for defensive end Jason Taylor immediately after Taylor was cut in March by the Redskins.

"... As to the potential backlash from signing Vick, consider the fans' reaction to the arrival of Terrell Owens.

He's already gotten the key to the freaking city."

Be that as it may, Vick is probably an even-money met to eventually return to the NFL. Even the New York Daily News is onside with letting him back into the league. The recently retired coach Tony Dungy, who is pretty non-threatening, has kind of become his advocate, taking up Vick's cause in the media with appearances on The Dan Patrick Show and an article in S.I.

Incidentally, on the subject of crimes and misdemeanours committed by NFL players (it would be nice if all those products of Domination Culture who run the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds and throw themselves around with reckless abandon were also wired to stay on the straight and narrow, but that ain't happening), the league is being reactive about the frequency of players arrested for ddrunk driving. A San Diego Union-Tribune story said earlier this month claimed there 73 players on NFL rosters who had been stopped for drunk driving. That's two players per team, about 4% of the league.

The league's efforts could be part of greater awareness that getting behind the wheel while impaired is such an anti-social act (remember the PSA which likened driving drunk to pointing a loaded gun at a room full of people?). The Ontario government recently increased the penalty for people who blow just .05, just below the legal limit of .08. It doesn't do any good to get sucked into a debate about what's worse, dog fighting or drunk driving (so just don't), but it's odd where the line gets drawn..

Anyway, getting back to Vick, the Jacksonville Jaguars said yesterday they are not interested in signing him. Of course, the other team with a feline-derived nickname, the Carolina Panthers, are more commonly known as the 'Cats. That meant ruling out the headline, "Dog killer won't play with Cats."

(So, so sorry. Going on about 3 hours' sleep.)

Related:
Keep An Eye on Buffalo As A Mike Vick Destination (Pro Football Talk, May 19)

The wildcat formation: Dr. Z totally called it

Deadspin has a nice tribute to Sports Illustrated's Dr. Z, Paul Zimmerman, the long-time NFL writer who was stricken by a pair of strokes last November.

Zimmerman always wrote to increase understanding, which is one of the two nobler goals of sports writing, and he didn't blow smoke up the superstars. One way to appreciate Dr. Z is to harken back on one of his more memorable pieces, from S.I.'s 1989 NFL preview, which had Randall Cunningham on the cover with the words, The Ultimate Weapon. It was one of those end-of-decade pieces, envisioning how football might look in the 1990s. It might be fun to wonder, two decades on, how prescient he was.

Dr. Z's predictions:

"The defensive emphasis in the years ahead will shift to big people who can run — 'tweener types, 220-pound linebacker-strong safety combinations and 250-pound linebacker-defensive ends." Partially right. There are plenty of NFL stars who could fit that loose description. Off the 2008 All-Pro team alone, one could pick out the Miami Dolphins' All-Pro linebacker Joey Porter (started his college career on offence and then moved to defensive line), the Arizona Cardinals' 230-lb. strong safety, Adrian Wilson and the Steelers safety Troy Polamalu (who plays in the tackle box on a majority of plays). The Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher, who was a college safety, could also fit in ther.

"Offensive coaches will give some thought to the emergence of this new monster and then come up with one of their own, thereby fortifying the most neglected position in football, tight end. They'll convert college linebackers and quick defensive ends." In 1988 and '89, no tight ends were among the top 20 NFL receivers in yards gained (yes, it's still strange the NFL ranks players by receptions instead of yardage). In 2007, three tight ends were among the top 20. In 2008, then-Kansas City Chief Tony Gonzalez was 12th and Dallas' Jason Witten was 25th.

"Players on both sides of the ball will be taller but lighter, because an effective anti-steroid policy will be implemented, preferably in consort with the Players Association (more on that later." Swing and a miss. Chalk this up to wishful thinking.

"Teams will load up on running backs, carrying as many as seven regulars, as more and more good runners come out of college. Teams will attack in waves, with three sets of running backs, to ensure that the offense always has fresh legs in the game. The heavy-duty 1,500-yard back could become obsolete." Forty-two NFL running backs had at least 100 carries in 1989, in a 28-team league. Forty-nine toted the synthetic leatherskin at least 100 times in 2008, in a 32-team league, about the same average per team. There might be more good running backs, but only so man coaches are willing to use regularly.

"With the emergence of mobile, more athletic quarterbacks from the colleges, NFL teams may put an extra passer in the back-field, much the way the Dolphins sometimes used backup quarterback Crash Jensen with (Dan) Marino in the mid-'80s." Talk about prescient. The evolutionary process has not been as quick as one might like. However, between the emergence of the Wildcat formation, the Miami Dolphins drafting a dual-threat quarterback such as Pat White of West Virginia, he might have been on to something.








(Kissing Suzy Kolber, of course, did this way better last summer.)
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