Category Archives: NFL

Andrew Luck, Bill Polian, Indianapolis Colts, Jim Caldwell, Jim Irsay, NFL, Peyton Manning

What Goes Around…

The Indianapolis Colts are 0-10. They have lost their last four games by a combined 110 points. Coincidentally, they lost their fans about four games ago, too, when they were beaten 62-7 on national television by the New Orleans Saints.
And last Monday, their head coach, Jim Caldwell, said this: “You can see that they [the players] are going to fight you until the end.”

Everyone smiled happily and nodded. Unicorns danced about the room and Colts owner Jim Irsay sang a song about Caldwell’s lucrative contract extension while playing his acoustic guitar.
Fine, I made those last two sentences up. In fact, it was the total opposite. I was waiting for the next question to be from someone called “Reality” who asked if Caldwell had ever visited him or if he just sent postcards from Fantasyland.
Caldwell says the Colts are just going to keep playing and playing extremely hard. Odd, as most of us are wondering if the Colts knew that the season started two months ago. Perhaps the lockout threw off their internal clocks and they think it’s still preseason, because I can’t come up with any rational explanation for why the Indianapolis Colts are 0-10 and by far and away the worst team in professional football.
As I wrote last month, someone’s got to get fired over this. But that’s not the issue to me anymore. You don’t get to 0-10 and it’s just the coach.
It’s pathetic to watch the effort, or in this case, the lack thereof, the Colts display on weekly basis. And I can’t help but wonder what sports karma has to do with all this? If, possibly, past sporting sins are catching up to the Colts.
The thought process is simple, if even by my own admission somewhat silly: what you do as an organization, what your players do, how your owner acts, how you win and lose plays into future results.
For example, I’ve long believed that Jerry Jones is the reason the Dallas Cowboys haven’t won a playoff game in 12 years. He’s a smothering figure over that franchise and their drama over the years is comeuppance for that.
Likewise, I think sports karma can work for and against you at the same time. The New England Patriots openly declared they were chasing perfection in 2008 and were rewarded with a perfect regular season. However, they ran up the score and illegally taped some opponents, so sports karma put velco on David Tyree’s helmet in the Super Bowl, leaving the Patriots with the moniker of greatest regular season team to not win a Super Bowl.
Perhaps what the Colts are experiencing now are ramifications from all the years where they didn’t go for it, when they didn’t rest their players. Everyone should be trying to win every game, because, in essence, that is the backbone of sports. You are giving your full effort against an opponent who’s giving his best effort. Someone wins, someone looses. But the common thread is the integrity with which the game was played.
Maybe karma decided it broke the integrity of the game by not playing all their games to the best of their ability and always setting their sights on the playoffs.
Why teams rest players, I’ll never fully understand. You play to win the game! (copyright, Herm Edwards). How many sports do you see rest your best players? How often does it work out well and the team that does the resting does the winning of a championship? More often than not, it’s the hot team that fought and kept working that wins the title (the Green Bay Packers last year, St. Louis Cardinals last month).
But wait, you say, what about teams that don’t fall behind and are good like the Colts were? Well, did you see the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls take their foot of the gas? How about the 1998 New York Yankees? It’s often fun to prove how much better you are – in both the regular season and the postseason.
The minute you start getting ahead of yourself and eyeballing the playoffs or setting your lineup or protecting your players, karma seems to get irritated.
And I’m only half-serious. I don’t widely suspect this is the case. I don’t really, deeply believe in karma. I’m Catholic for crying out loud. But I can’t say that I’m mildly curious and wondering if all this epic Colts sucktitude isn’t the hair of the dog that bit them.
All those years resting their stars when they were 13-0 or 13-1 or 14-0; all the seasons they took the last couple weeks off to be fresh for a first round drubbing at home at the hands of Bill Volek and the Chargers or Mark Sanchez and the Jets – that has to account for something.
At the time, we probably thought the loss in that year’s playoffs was to a byproduct of the resting players. But Dungy, Caldwell, Polian and the Colts just kept on doing it. Year after year after year. After. Year.
You know, they say insanity is defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Maybe sports karma got pissed off the Colts didn’t ever learn their lesson?
Forget the theories of how resting players prevents injuries. Athletes get hurt all the time, doing any number of things. That’s not the point. Why keep doing it if it never worked? I mean at some point, doesn’t someone suggest doing it the other way? Why did that light bulb never go off? Why didn’t someone say, “I think, I don’t know for sure…now call me crazy…but possibly…we should play our starters the entire game.”
(Cut to gasping sounds of disbelief and most likely a shattered coffee cup. I really see the whole thing in playing out in slow motion as Polian was the one who dropped the cup and screamed “Nnnnnnoooooo!”.)
For a team that never approached anything from the standpoint of being “in the moment”, the Colts, somewhat oddly, also seemed wildly unprepared. From the playoff loses to mediocre teams – again, Billy Volek? – to this whole YWP (Year Without Peyton), to their draft strategy, the Colts always seem frantic, confused and out of sorts.
You’ve been trying to build and sustain a franchise around a quarterback like Manning, that has 12-15 years to win a championship and you waste prime seasons on underwhelming talent in the draft the past five years? You proclaim to be a small market team that can’t spend money in free agency to bring in a big name or marquee talent, but then you don’t draft good talent? It seems, I don’t know, contradictory.
And Jim Sorgi is fine as a backup when a young, vibrant Peyton Manning is between the ages of 25-30. But at some point, around the time your franchise quarterback hits 32 and starts wearing down after 250 consecutive starts, you might want to spend a pick on a decent quarterback. Not even to be Manning’s replacement – just to have a decent backup quarterback.
But all of this seemed to shock the Colts, especially when it was revealed that Peyton wasn’t recovering quickly after having a second offseason neck procedure this summer. And even if the Colts believed that it would only be 4-6 weeks, they could have signed someone who was passable at the quarterback position to keep the team in the hunt.
Yet what did they do? They went and signed one of Polian’s old favorites from his days with Carolina, Kerry Collins. The same Kerry Collins who six weeks before he signed with the Colts, retired because he didn’t want to put in the work. No, really, he said that. Here’s his retirement statement:
“The past several months have brought on much introspection, and I have decided that while my desire to compete on Sundays is still and always will be there, my willingness to commit to the preparation necessary to play another season has waned to a level that I feel is no longer adequate to meet the demands of the position.” – Kerry Collins, July 7, 2011
And the Colts signed him anyway! How do you read that statement and think Collins is a guy who can lead the Colts offense in Peyton Manning’s place, coming off a lockout, with the season opener two and a half weeks away?
If this were a movie, it would be a comedy.
Except no one is laughing. And even worse, and somewhat indefensible, no one is questioning the logic and rationale of the Colts brain trust on how they arrived at this point.
Now, why is that? Why is no one questioning Polian, his son, Irsay or Caldwell? Is it because Andrew Luck is coming to town? All is saved, right? The Colts will just lose their way to the No. 1 pick next April, draft Luck and enter another 12-15 years of competing for championships? I mean, Peyton Manning gave Polian his blessing to look for a quarterback just the other day. Everyone wins!
I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time believing fate will allow that to happen.
For one thing, we have every right at this point to question the heart and integrity of this team and management for how they’ve played out this season. And on some level, I could totally see Luck not panning out. And I’ve got no other reason to say that than this: fate. If Luck went to Miami or some other team, I bet he’d have a fabulous career. But part of me wonders if because of how the Colts operate, how they’ve played (or not in some cases), if Luck wouldn’t get hurt or become Ryan Leaf 2.0 and set the Colts back five years.
And if that happens, they’d be $%# out of luck.
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Duane Bickett, Indianapolis Colts, Jim Irsay, NFL, Peyton Manning

What Goes Around…

Like any good football fan, around 1:00PM yesterday, I was all set: Fantasy football league StatTracker loaded on the computer, beer in hand and scrolling through NFL Sunday Ticket to see which game I wanted to watch, I settled on the Atlanta Falcons vs. Chicago Bears tilt.
Being a Bears fan, this was a natural selection for me. But living around Central Indiana all these years, as the Indianapolis Colts bandwagon grew, part of me reveled in checking in on the Colts trip to Houston to play the Texans. So I did, around 1:20PM.

The Colts were already down.

I had a hunch – just a sneaking suspicion really – that the Colts would sorely miss Peyton Manning, out for “awhile” (in the words of owner Jim Irsay) due to a second surgery on his neck.
And wouldn’t you know it, I was right.
After the Texans 34-7 throttling of the Colts, I couldn’t help but chuckle. Scrolling through my Facebook updates, I saw friends trashing the team, talking about how horrible they were, how it could have been 68-0.
Right on all accounts.
And then I saw this: “This is going to be such a long season…I won’t be able to watch!”
Bingo. 

The money line I’d been waiting for. You could almost hear Colts fans across the state hitting the sauce, opening their fourth beer of the day in the early second quarter.

See, a few years ago, I wrote about how the Colts fans were spoiled brats, the whole bandwagon lot of them. Nearly 10 straight playoff seasons, seven straight 12-win campaigns, nine straight 10-win seasons, fans didn’t know how good they had it – or had forgotten had bad it had been.
The last time the Colts were under .500 was 2001 and Manning was in his fourth season, just 25-years old. In fact, 2001 was the only other season other than Manning’s rookie year in 1998 that the Colts were below .500. The last time the Colts won 10 or more games in a season before 1999, when Manning led the Colts to a 13-3 mark? Try 1977, when they were in Baltimore.
Since arriving in Indianapolis in 1984, the Colts had 7 losing seasons in 13 years. They had a few fun years with Jim Harbaugh and Marshall Faulk, but they always felt like punchy underdogs in the playoffs.
But since Peyton Manning came to town, the Colts have been the heavyweight favorites in the regular season. I’ve often argued that most fans just want a team that always has a shot and contends. But the Colts are proving my theory wrong, really.
Perennial contenders, the Colts fan base forgot how bad it sucked to be Colts fans. And I can say this because I’m unattached, unemotionally watching it happen from the sidelines as a fan of another team who doesn’t rival the Colts like the New England Patriots or Pittsburgh Steelers.

The fan base has swollen to include people who can’t name anyone on the team before 1998. They don’t know who Ron Stark is, Billy Brooks or Duane Bickett. The majority of these fans didn’t watch the team in the 1980s and 1990s – I know because the games were often blacked out. They got excited when Eric Dickerson came to town, but when the Colts didn’t win games, they stopped coming.

If you were looking for something to do in downtown Naptown in the late 80s or early 90s, it would have been a Pacers game. Or, wait for Indiana and Kentucky to play college basketball in the RCA Dome (or, as most should remember it, “The Hoosier Dome”). 

I can’t remember a single friend from the age of 8-16 who told me, at any point, they were a Colts fan. No one wore their jersey to school, no one went to the games.

And then, in 1999, it happened – they went 13-3 and had a franchise quarterback. Over the last 12 years, the Colts have used their success with Manning to build a new stadium and host the upcoming Super Bowl, bringing in millions of revenue in one form or another. Yeah, he’s worth the money and the roster bonus he earned even if he doesn’t play a down in 2011.
But Manning has masked a flawed franchise for years. Poor draft selections (just see everything from 2007-2011), bad hires (is Jim Caldwell even alive?) and an owner who seems to be going slightly insane (check out his hilarious Twitter feed).

This is what ancient Rome must have been like just before the end. Romans just ticked off at the lackluster leadership and star power: “Well, he’s no Caesar!“

Maybe Manning never plays another game or maybe he plays five more highly productive years and wins another Super Bowl. Honestly, both options are on the table. But that’s not what is at play here.
It’s the city and its fans at stake. This isn’t just an abnormal season or set of six games in which the Colts won’t have Peyton Manning at quarterback. No, Indy, it’s the future.
Take a look around – poor special teams, lackluster and unimaginative offense with a bumbling, aging quarterback and an incompetent coach? 

Welcome to how the other half of the NFL lives every week.

The problem is the fan base is built upon guys who’ve started rooting for the Colts in the Manning era and subsequently convinced their wives and girlfriends to watch, to go to games, to tailgate and host Colts parties.  At least 30 percent of the fan base is women under 50 – and I have no real way to back that up other than the fact I live here and see it with my eyes.

As a friend told me today, “My girlfriend didn’t want to watch the entire game because it was getting out of hand and she said, ‘I think I’m just a Peyton Manning fan, not a Colts fan.’”

And there you have it – the bulk of the Colts fan base is centered around Peyton Manning and wearing cute No. 18 jerseys.
Take a look at fans in other cities and you’ll see Gale Sayers and Walter Payton throwbacks in Chicago, Dan Fouts in San Diego, Montana and Rice in San Francisco, Bart Starr in Green Bay, Randall Cunningham and Seth Joyner in Philadelphia. 

No one’s wearing Earl Morrall throwbacks in Indianapolis. It’s a young fan base that hasn’t aged through time.

Being a fan of a team means you support that team no matter what. Want to curse at their ineptitude? Fine. Hate the GM? By all means, question the draft strategy. Criticize the players for not caring like you do? Well, only if you can back that up. You still have to tune in. You have to take your lumps, otherwise, the big wins and the championships don’t mean as much.
Most (again, not all, but most) Colts fans would tell you the lean years were during Peyton’s career, losses to the Dolphins, Jets, Patriots and Chargers, when the team had a good regular season and blew an opportunity in the playoffs.
Wrong.
The hard times were 1-15 in 1991, 4-12 in 1993, 3-13 in 1997. Those were the bad times, the bumbling times you looked away in horror, wondering desperately if it would ever get better, if they would ever contend. But there weren’t enough fans of the team now to remember that kind of pain because they bought their first jersey or ticket in 1999, 2001 or 2002.
Once Peyton’s done, this franchise will move forward and find a new quarterback. It might take five or six rough years, but they will eventually find a new guy that will be a good player for a decade or so and put the team in position to contend. It happened in Dallas, Green Bay and Pittsburgh. It’s the circle of NFL life.
There was only one Roger Staubach, but there was also only one Troy Aikman. He had a couple bad years early on too. Dallas fans stuck around for the whole thing.
No team can remain that good forever. And there will never be another Peyton Manning.
But there will be Colts football.
Question is for the fair-weathered fans of Indy, will anyone care enough to be around for the truly hard times?
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DeMaurice Smith, Drew Brees, NFL, NFL Lockout, Peter King, Peyton Manning, Roger Goodell, Tom Brady

Days of Our Football Lives

As the NFL lockout continues and labor negotiations drag on, it has become more and more obvious what is really going on here.
It is a scripted daytime soap opera.
Call it “Days of Our Football Lives” or “As Negotiations Turn” or “The Rich and the Reckless” but at the end of the day, just call it something.
It is not hard to connect the dots. With the soap industry flailing around like a fish out of water and shows that have been on the air 30-plus years being cancelled, those writers have to go somewhere, right?
And it is no secret that NFL has, over the years, actively positioned themselves to dominate the sports headlines all year long.
From changes in the draft schedule (from one day to three and in prime time) to the release of its schedule, the NFL (wisely) has looked to steal headlines from other sports February through July.
And now that the NFL has reached what should ultimately be described as their peak popularity, they have us hooked like a housewife with a box of tissues.
We are absolutely addicted to professional football. There is no real rehab program, no center for us to detox in.
And there is no placebo.
If we were logical, instead of worrying about what we are going to do without football on Sundays from September through February, we would realize that we make it through just fine during the off-season. How do we spend roughly 34 Sundays the rest of the year? And how will we make it without fantasy football? Well, what do we do the rest of the year without fantasy football?
The difference is in our mind. 
Like any addict, we think that we cannot make it. We need it, we have to have it. We need to talk trash to friends of other teams, we need fantasy scores, we need to watch games and question coaching calls and wonder why the 49ers are still employing Alex Smith. We need to know how Al Davis’ corpse will look in a 1990s/Starter era windbreaker this year.
This is not to make light of addiction, either. We truly are addicted to football – it is just that football addiction does not hold the same long term ramifications that narcotics, alcohol or cigarettes do. Or, if you are David Duchovny, the horizontal waltz.
Perhaps it’s the physicality of the sport, the speed. We can’t get the jaw-rattling hits from the NBA, we can’t get the speed of the game from Major League Baseball.
Or perhaps it’s the length of the season that drags us in. We get football for 17 weeks and playoffs – and then the action goes away. With other sports, their seasons span multiple seasons of the year. And before we can even forget they were over, baseball and basketball are back. They are never gone long enough for us to actually miss them.
Certainly, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
But why would our favorite sport go to these lengths to make us aware of that? Why the posturing and the drama?
Is the NFL that insecure that it needs to feel our anxiety over its possible absence? It’s like someone telling you how deeply in love they are with you, yet at the same time threatening to leave.
Like any good TV show, they set the stage for this in advance. 
Who knows who has been in on this nefarious plot to keep this cliffhanger going. Peter King of Sports Illustrated began writing about a possible locket back in 2009. Despite the conditions at the time being sunny, he began to warn of dark clouds on the horizon, like some football Nostradamus.
And like any good story arc, it’s taken time to develop.
The NFL played their own version of ratings sweeps when it got the courts involved, with the lockout lifted, then reinstated – coincidentally (wink, wink) giving the players enough time to swoop in and pick up playbooks for about 48 hours.
We’ve had heroes, villains and those who blurred the lines. Is Goodell a puppet? Are certain owners the power brokers? Do Drew Brees, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady really hold that much weight and respect in the players union?
Could we get more melodrama? How about union leader DeMaurice Smith telling lawyers to “stand down” a few weeks ago? That script has quite a bit of manufactured drama dripping from the pages.
When it’s all said and done, the NFL will reach an accord with the players and there will be football. Sadly, many of us will sit around talking about how close we were to losing the sport for the season, even though I now believe that was never the case.
Call me a skeptic or a conspiracy theorist, but there has always appeared to be some level of unbelievability (yes, I just made that word up) to the whole thing.
At this point, I just want to see the closing credits to this soap opera and look forward to hearing some hokey, slow, contempo, elevator style song – as a football spins in the clouds.
Slowly.
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Allen Iverson, Brett Favre, Major League Baseball, NBA, NFL, Sports, Tiger Woods, Yankee Stadium

From the Vault: A Few Good Fans

(Note: The following was originally written a little over two years ago, but some portions have been updated to fit the current times. It is being re-posted on this blog at the request of a Cube follower)
Dear Sports,
I hope this letter finds you well.
Oh, who are we kidding? We both know where this letter finds you – and it’s a hell of a long way from well.  
We need to talk, sports. We need to create a dialogue, an open line of communication – something you have a hard time doing amongst your owners and players in nearly even major damn sport America has.
If we don’t start communicating and conducting some much needed group therapy, I fear that we’ll drift further apart until our relationship is irrevocably damaged.
And the truth is, a divorce would hurt you much more than me or the rest of us fans.
You need fans, you really do. You think we just follow you in droves? We survived for hundreds of years without you, frankly. We made things in this country. We can get obsessed over muscle cars again, if we have to. We can play Angry Birds, we can all get into music and films. We don’t need you to survive.
We love you, but we’re not feeling the love from you right now.
Sure, you secretly despise us for our irrational behavior, our lofty expectations and our demands. And granted, it’s embarrassing for you when we wear paper bags during a bad decade or two. Or when we drink ourselves into a stupor and throw empty cups onto your players. Or when we confront them in the parking lot after the games.
We can take responsibility for our actions. Can you?
You haven’t exactly been treating us like royalty as of late.
Some of your guys (we’re looking at you, Charlie Villanueva) are Twittering, er, Tweeting (whatever bird sound it is) – at halftime, no less – to stay in touch with us. Sweet, really. But, um, maybe they should take it just a tad more serious?
See, we think that our favorite teams paying triple what a doctor or president makes (or roughly about 300 times what we make in our profession) brings on expectations that for six months during the season, they should, you know, try really, really hard and stuff.
And yes, Allen Iverson, I’m talkin’ about practice too, man.
Speaking of taking things serious, that’s part of the problem. Most of the time, when we fight, you accuse us of taking things too seriously and we don’t think you take it quite serious enough.
Different worlds, I suppose. You are not the one who has to clumsily explain the Tiger Woods sex scandal or baseball’s steroid era to their impressionable, inquisitive and sports obsessed nine-year-old.
Thanks for that, and all the naked athlete cell phone pics, by the way. It’s been a real treat spraining my thumbs trying to change channels when a new story breaks. And I’m fairly certain my children think I have a stutter because of my stumbling and baffled responses to their questions. But I digress.
As fans, we lack the resources, the guilty pleasures, the comfort of the payday you provide your players and coaches. In fairness, the vast majority of us don’t have the inherit skill to break down film, the athleticism, the stamina required or the knowledge of a particular sport. Then again, neither do many of the “gifted” people who announce the games for you, but that’s another story.
The one place we seem to outnumber you is in the passion department. We care about you a heck of a lot more than you care about us.
As professional leagues, you lack the passion that got you there – you forgot what it was like to be where we are. Remember empty stadiums? Remember when very few people wanted your autograph or thought your sport was a tad stupid?
Yet the passion of the athletes, owners and league offices pushed you to new heights from the 1950s-1990s. And the growing fan bases of your various sports helped a little bit, don’t you think?
So we ask, where’s the passion?
And that passion has little to do with work ethic. Most athletes are workout fanatics, busting their humps to chase a variety of things: respect, pride, trophies and, of course, a little coin.
Generally, though, pleasing the fans comes last. That’s cool, we’ve dealt with it and that simple fact explains so much.
It’s apparently why roughly 1,100 seats at the new Yankee Stadium are obstructed view. We’re not smart enough, apparently, to figure out why, in this day and age, any stadium – let alone Yankee Stadium – would be built with obstructed views. To us, that’s so 1920s.
The seats in new Yankee Stadium certainly don’t cost 1920s prices, though, do they? Even though we’re living an economy that reminds us of December 1929.
And yet, you still want $1,500 for ticket. For a single game.    
I gotta tell ya, Sports, the vast majority of us don’t make $1,500 every two weeks. And those that do are pulling into gas stations and watching it float away in a river of oil. 
So cut us some slack, will you? We’re looking for a little latitude, the same as you were with the steroid era, the NBA referee scandal and the BCS.
Now, we’re not dumb. We don’t expect $10 tickets to the Super Bowl. But work with us a little.We’d at least like to have seats that we paid for at the Super Bowl. Don’t shuffle us under the bowels of the stadium to watch it on TV because your people couldn’t get the stands together in time.
This is why we’re asking, and here’s the juicy part, where we hold all the power in this relationship – the part where you need us, but we don’t need you.
Oh, we want you, all right. Like a fat kid wants a cupcake. We lust after you, but if we can’t afford you – if you come between us and the mortgage, our kid’s college tuition, our groceries or potential family vacation…well, you’re gone.
This means that eventually, you’re really gone.
Oh sure, we don’t directly pay your salaries. These days ticket sales are just a small piece of the cash pie. But we fans find it more than ironic that your leagues are all arguing over pieces of that pie – a pie that’s adding up to $9 billion in revenue for football.
But if we stop coming to games, due to the economy or just being plain pissed off, well, who buys your $7 hot dogs and $8 beers? Who buys a t-shirt or jersey? Still think you’ll have $9 billion to argue over?
If concessions and novelties aren’t moving in the arena or the stadium – does the provider wish to continue leasing its services to you? If you have no place to play because no one is coming to your games, what are your franchises worth to rich Russians then?
Seriously, if it gets that bad in other aspects of life, if we’re just scratching for crumbs and we’re all shopping at Goodwill – if it’s a depression…well, you can think that far ahead can’t you?
If we can’t afford TiVO, cable TV, DirecTV, DISH, whatever…well, forget about live attendance – who’s watching from home? And if we’re not watching, how do the advertisers’ spots get noticed? And if the sponsors aren’t selling any products or finding any value, their money comes off the billboards, pregame shows…you get the point.
Or maybe you don’t. Maybe, for once, we need to explain it for you.
As an individual, what I spend on you over the course of a year is probably equal to what Frank McCourt spends in an hour of divorce attorney fees. If you lose me, or better yet, pieces of my wallet, you could care less because there are millions more just like me that will shell out the cash.
But what if a large portion of us fell by the wayside? What if 30 percent suddenly stopped spending our greenbacks on you? What about 50 percent? What about 60 percent?
Working up a sweat just thinking about it, aren’t you, Sports?
If this recession affects 95 percent of Americans, which has been indicated, isn’t it reasonable to think that a large percentage of that group might be cutting back on those things deemed unnecessary?
Sports, in times like these, your prices become unnecessary.
So, again, you need us.
In the spirit of Jack Nicholson and “A Few Good Men“, let me paraphrase:
You need us in your stands. You need us in your seats, holding beers, brats, gloves and banners. You need us on that wall – you want us on that wall. And our absence is the very thing your athletes and coaches don’t talk about in locker rooms.
You survive under the very blanket of security that we provide and we’re starting to question the manner in which we provide it. We’d rather you just said thank you by slashing prices and making things more affordable. 
We’d appreciate it if you built stadiums in the 21st Century that you can actually see the entire field from any seat, instead of giving us another worthless bobblehead night. Either way, we don’t give a damn if the economy has affected your bottom line – we are your bottom line!
And the bottom is about to fall out of this relationship.
Sincerely,
One of a Few Good Fans
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Baltimore Ravens, Crime, ESPN, Michael Wilbon, NFL, NFL Lockout, Ray Lewis, Sal Palantonio

CSI: NFL

Well, the jig is up.
And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling football players.
Namely, Ray Lewis.
I had already planned out no less than four bank heists for this fall, you know, since there will be nothing to do on Sunday afternoons without the NFL, but then Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis had to go and expose my plan – along with thousands of others plans for crime – when he exposed our evil ways in an interview with ESPN’s Sal Palantonio earlier this week.
“Do this research if we don’t have a season – watch how much evil…which we call crime…watch how much crime picks up if you take away our game,” Lewis said.
Ever the dramatist, when Lewis was asked by Palantonio why he thought that, he sadly, yet passionately replied: “There’s nothing else to do, Sal.”
How did he read my mind? Does Ray Lewis have me on surveillance? Is Ray Lewis a part-time psychic? Does he know about those Algebra II assignments I didn’t complete all by myself in high school? I am freaking out a little.
In all seriousness (or not), let’s take a look at his claim.
Is it possible that we’re so obsessed with the NFL that in its absence, average Americans will run amok? Riots. Looting. Smashing windows. I’m picturing another “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel. Or perhaps a new spinoff for the CSI series.
Well, if it were true, then wouldn’t crime therefore increase each year when the NFL season ends and decrease each fall?
(Hint: it doesn’t.)
There is one demographic where in fact the NFL season does serve as a potential deterrent to crime: among NFL players themselves. According to John Mitchell of Grio.com, arrests among NFL players have spiked during the lockout.
And if crime is bound to increase somewhere due to football or lack thereof, it is actually the opposite of Lewis’ take.
Justin Wolfers, a contributor to Freakonomics, reported recently on a study showing that crime rates increase during college football game days. Assaults, vandalism and general disorderly conduct increased on game days in cities of home teams, but were basically non-existent in the cities of the visitors.
Huh.
So, when people go to football games and get drunk tailgating or by having many $8 beers from the overpriced concession stands (only in the NFL, since college football bans alcohol sales inside the stadium), you are telling me that would cause them to act out after leaving the stadium? Total mind-blower.
Now, let us get back to Lewis.
Lewis thinks the NFL lockout affects “way more than us” – the owners and the players, because “there’s too many people that live through us, people live through us.”
Moments later, when discussing the root cause of the lockout, Lewis replied that it is all because of ego.
Um, hey Ray, do you think there is a little bit of super-sized ego going on when you claim that all fans live through you and they will turn to crime in the absence of being able to see you tackle someone?
Lewis has always been a bit dramatic and preachy, and it’s obvious that many players around the league look up to him. All that has served to boost his ego and put him in a place where he feels comfortable expressing his opinions.
All of his opinions.
ESPN’s Michael Wilbon made a great point on yesterday’s Pardon The Interruption, when he said that in the current media age of Twitter and Facebook, we are taking every sound bite and dissecting it like a dead frog in freshman biology. Wilbon said it is not worth it and we should not feel the need to find every angle to every little thing an athlete says.
He is absolutely right, we should not, mainly because it causes other athletes to feel like their voice is powerful and effective and worst of all, should be heard.
This blog rips and dissects all the time, but with good reason. For decades, leading up to around 2000, we blindly worshiped our sports heroes, as well as politicians, without knowing anything about them.
But we are learning more and more about who they truly are, not only because the media is 24/7 and won’t stop until it gets the quote, but also because athletes are now readily offering up opinions on their own. Sometimes it is funny, sometimes it is sad. Sometimes it is just plain nonsensical.
We can either ignore what we learn or accept it. We can still idolize them, but they become more human. We realize they do and say stupid things, just like we do. Just because someone is not a good person or has clear moral flaws has very little to do with how good they are at their respective sport. Likewise, just because someone is good at their respective sport doesn’t make them an authority on issues such as politics or race.
Or crime.
It’s not like because Ray Lewis is a Super Bowl champion and future Hall of Famer he is suddenly a renowned expert on the mind of criminals, right?
Maybe if the lockout drags on and the NFL misses games, Ray can take his two talents, one for delivering violent hits with force and the other for sniffing out evil and work for the Baltimore police department. He would not even need a gun or taser, really.
Guess I should cancel the grand theft auto I had planned for late September in Maryland.
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