Bill Polian, DeMarcus Cousins, Jon Gruden, Mike Krzyzewski, NBA, NFL, Paul Westphal, Raheem Morris, Tom Coughlin, Tony Sparano

Face the Firing Squad

I have to pose the question, in light of current events, why would anyone want to coach in professional sports? You have the shortest leash of perhaps any job in America with the most unrealistic expectations combined with the most volatile conditions.
Perhaps it is the pay. Or maybe it is the power. It certainly would be the pinnacle of the profession.
On Monday, a day after the conclusion of the NFL season, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers fired head coach Raheem Morris. The St. Louis Rams also parted ways with Steve Spagnuolo, the Chicago Bears fired general manager Jerry Angelo and ended the services of Mike Martz as offensive coordinator. The Indianapolis Colts let go of Bill Polian and his son, Chris. The Miami Dolphins also fired Tony Sparano. And that’s just what I could think of off the top of my head, there could have been more.
But then today the Sacramento Kings fired Paul Westphal, just seven games into the season – just 11 days after the season began on Christmas Day.
Even with the NBA’s reduced 66-game schedule, that’s the equivalent of an NFL team firing a coach after one game.
Were these firings justified? In the proper context, perhaps.
With a bigger picture outlook, what exactly do we require from coaches? Better yet, why do we keep rehiring the same ones who failed so miserably prior to their current position?
Because it is not a “what do we want” from them issue. That much is clear: championships. Owners and fans want coaches who bring gold back at the end of a season.
But realistically, 31 coaches will not win a championship each year in the NFL. Roughly the same number of losers exists each year in the NBA and Major League Baseball.
We somehow operate under the premise that every team should be good or make the playoffs in every sport. They can’t.

No, really, they can’t.

Some teams are just bad and will remain that way until a coach has enough time to put his practices and methodologies in place and the players respond accordingly.

But the instant a team doesn’t make a miraculous worst-to-first turnaround we get jealous, demand our favorite teams get the same and grab the pitchforks, banners and start shouting, “Fire him. Fire him now!”

We certainly love teams that click and quickly succeed after recent failures, but in reality, they fuel the cycle. In turn, it ends up shortening the lease for the coach who did it.

Morris’ Tampa Bay team clearly underachieved this season. A promising team with talent that won 10 games in 2010, they won just four games this season. In three years, Morris went 17-31 after replacing Jon Gruden, who was in turn let go by the Buccaneers in 2008, after he went 57-55 with the team over seven seasons.
Gruden’s tenure included three division championships and a Super Bowl win.
I suppose if Gruden wasn’t doing a good enough job for his boss, Morris certainly was not, either. But Morris wasn’t coaching Gruden’s players; the Bucs has a ton of young talent come in through the draft, playing in a division against the likes of Atlanta and New Orleans, two teams who have been perennial playoff teams in recent years.
The Colts firings seem most justified, as they poor draft selections over the past five years were radically and violently exposed to the fan base and to the rest of the league once Peyton Manning sat out the season following a series of neck surgeries. A team that finished 14-2 and lost a tight Super Bowl to New Orleans just two seasons ago – and went 10-6 and made the playoffs last year with nearly the exact same roster – managed to start out 0-13 in 2011 and finished 2-14 with the rights to the No. 1 pick in April’s draft.
As I wrote in the fall – someone has to lose their job over this in Indy, and someone did. Perhaps Jim Caldwell is safe because it has been evaluated that the coaching is acceptable, but the talent is poor.
Look, I’m all for change if something’s not working. I advocated for Polian’s firing, as well as Caldwell’s, earlier this season. I questioned Caldwell’s methods and his credentials and the man responsible for hiring him and picking the players in Indianapolis.
But I’m also in favor of a good stew, which takes time to cook and requires patience and the right ingredients.

And here’s where we have to start really analyzing everything.

Why didn’t the Dolphins just fire Sparano after the 0-7 start? Why do it after the team rallies around him and wins six of its final nine games? Isn’t it humiliating and emasculating to continue to coach a team knowing what’s floating out in the media?
Why fire Westphal a few days after the season begins? How did his job approval amongst his employers drop so drastically in 11 days that he was canned? Why not just fire him during the offseason, you know, the one with the lockout that saw the NBA not play a game for six (!) months? Did this have something to do with DeMarcus Cousins and the trade demand?
There’s goals, aspirations and then there are realistic (and in many cases, unrealistic) expectations.
I read a recent interview with Duke head men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski. Coach K’s third season at Duke was abysmal. In 1982-83, Duke was 11-17 and 7th in the ACC. He said if he had began his career 20 years later, he would have been fired. But in a time where people were allowed to truly build a program and had ownership support, or in this case, school support, Coach K got Duke on the right track shortly thereafter. In the roughly 30 years since that 1982-93 season, Duke has won four national champions, made the NCAA Tournament 28 times in 29 years and advanced to the Sweet 16 or better 22 times.
Look at it this way: who are these NFL teams going to hire? Most likely a former NFL coach who had his own ups and downs in the past.
Ironically, Gruden is one of the hottest coaching prospects despite his intentions to stay on as a member of the ESPN “Monday Night Football” broadcast team. The same guy who was barely .500 in seven seasons with Tampa Bay.
Coaches are getting hired and they turn right around and start a game of Russian roulette with job security.
What were the Kings goals for Westphal when he took the job? I can’t imagine the Kings told Westphal, “We’ll have to let you go if you enter Year 3 with a 2-5 record 11 days into the season.” Never mind the incredibly raw talent Westphal has to work with in Tyreke Evans and DeMarcus Cousins (a head case).
What we need are more specific boundaries and performance plans for professional coaches. Maybe they should be unionizing in professional sports coaching like players do. Because this little game we play makes it awfully difficult to believe coaches have any real authority over their players.
They have little time to follow through on the ideas and plans that probably got them hired in the first place.
Yet we’re up and down on coaches all the time. Tom Coughlin went from the “This Seat Is So Hot My Pants Are On Fire” back in 2006 to winning the Super Bowl and receiving a lucrative contract extension in about 12 months.

How does that happen? Was Coughlin really that bad or really that good? Or was it somewhere in the middle?

There is something to be said for longevity. Not just in a coach sustaining it, but being given it.

In December 2008, I wrote a similar column about this topic, when six NBA head coaches had already been fired in the first month and a half of that season.

Reggie Theus was fired in Sacramento after the Kings’ 6-18 start. Bad? Absolutely. Indefensible? Not entirely.
In 2007 the Kings traded away their best player and most valuable commodity, guard Mike Bibby. At the time of Theus’ firing, Kevin Martin, Brad Miller and Francisco Garcia, the Kings’ best players, had missed significant time.

So the question I posed three years ago was this: who are the Kings going to bring in to coach this team and make them that much better for the duration of the season?

And, if you’re going to fire a coach, why not do it during the offseason? Unless, his name is Isiah Thomas, you’re basically wasting your time.

Nowadays, it would take a coach six or seven teams (or more) over 15 years (or more) to accomplish what they have.

It’s a merry-go-round of professional coaching. No new ideas, but the same astonished reactions when these coaches fail all over again. At what point do coaches just stop interviewing when these jobs open up, since they know they will be fired sooner rather than later?

For once, I’m glad I’m not involved in professional sports.

There’s more stability in the current job market.
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Uncategorized

The Mid-Early 30s

Next Monday, I’ll be 32.
This is strange to me for some reason.
I’m not old enough for a mid-life crisis and frankly, with four children, I don’t have time for one anyway. But that is not what has made turning 32 an odd experience. It’s the number.
I don’t feel 32. As my wife and some close friends would attest, I certainly do not act 32. I barely act 12 most days (and I think that’s a good thing).
Thirty was not quite as overwhelming as I made it out to be in my mind. I was a little panicked leading up to 30, but it was not that big a deal once it was over. Yet for some reason, 32 feels older.
Perhaps it’s because my 9-year-old son wasn’t even alive the last time Michael Jordan laced them up. Perhaps it’s because I’m nearly 10 years removed from college. Maybe it’s the gray that’s creeping into my beard or it might be that my muscles get a little bit sorer each morning.
My dad used to go on about five hours sleep when I was a kid. He’d be up to 11 or 11:30 and then get up for work at 4:00am. I remember thinking that I could never do that. I needed and loved sleep.
And then we had four children. On the days that actually would allow me to sleep in a little, there’s a three-year-old up way too early on a Saturday (before I would even normally be awake) asking to play outside in 30-degree weather or watch Team Umizoomi.
And there it is: the circle of life running it’s course; I’ve become my father.
This is a good thing, as my dad is pretty cool and a great guy.
But man, it’s a little freaky.
As I hit what I’ve gently defined as my mid-early-30s, I’ve jotted a few notes down. I don’t want to stay it is what I’ve learned, because that would be a stretch. But here are 32 things I’ve picked up on:
1.     Faith takes a great amount of, well, faith. It is hard to rationalize something you can’t see or touch. It’s based on feel, but the kind of emotion and belief that’s required to believe in Santa Claus. The problem with this is we all stop believing in Santa. Religious faith requires that you let go all of logic and reason that you’ve been taught and give way to the fact that you are really not in control of certain things.
2.     I spend way too much time agonizing over the smallest things. I need to rid myself of this before I waste too much time worrying about a spill, a stain or how long that bathroom light was on. I need to approach every day like my kids do: what are we doing and whatever it is will be really, really fun.
3.     It’s much more fun to play Santa to your kids than to get the gifts. I finally get why they say it is better to give than to receive. When I was little, I thought that was crazy. Sure, I was glad someone liked their sweater I bought for them, but man was it fun to tear into my presents. And then I saw my wife and kids open up gifts I’d carefully selected and see the reaction on their faces. I no longer care about what I get.
4.     That said, toy companies should have these warning labels: “Grab a few beers, ‘cause this is gonna take awhile. While you are at it, go ahead and pick up 42 ‘AA batteries. Just be prepared to lose your mind trying to put this thing together. If these instructions read like broken English, don’t worry, they were because we’d been drinking heavily when we wrote them. We couldn’t put this thing together, either. When we say ‘some assembly required’ we really mean ‘major assembly’. Hope you graduated from M.I.T. and enjoy the carpel tunnel you get from undoing the 4,322 twist ties.”
5.     People do not know how to drive. They really don’t. I could be included in this group, as everyone seems to believe this as well. If we all think that everyone else can’t drive, maybe we’re really the ones that can’t. That said, it seems like no one really took Driver’s Ed or the exams needed to secure a valid license.
6.     Work is what allows you to live the life you want or need, but work is not life.
7.     Everyone should take road trips with their friends. Especially to Fenway Park.
8.     At 12, I had an obsession with really, really nice basketball shorts. I call them ball shorts. I’m talking like game official. At 22, I still had this obsession. At 32, I’m still obsessed with ball shorts. They are to me what shoes seem to be for women. I have a sneaking suspicion this is something that will not be going away no matter how old I am, so just prepare yourselves to see an 80-year-old Great Grandpa rocking the 2059 Los Angeles Lakers shorts around some Florida shuffleboard.
9.     My parents continue to be awesome. They’ve taught me a lot, but most importantly, they’ve spent a lot of time spending time with me and now, with my family. Their house around the holidays is perhaps the neatest place to be. It’s got that Griswold spirit, but so much more tasteful.
10.  I may be turning 32, but my favorite place on earth may still be Walt Disney World. I’ve got some weird thing where I feel most at peace on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride or in the second floor shop at the Grand Floridian, right next to the window that looks out over the bay. Yeah, I know it’s weird. And I kind of like that.
11.  I worry about money and paying bills, perhaps too much at times, but on the other hand, I don’t care if I leave this earth without a penny to my name. You can’t take it with you, right? It’s more important to me to give my wife and kids stuff now than it is to leave them with something if I go tomorrow.
12   If I really cared about money, I wouldn’t have had children. Once you have them, you’ll pay anything to keep them safe, provide them their dreams and make sure they have it better than you did. My problem is, I had it pretty good.
13.  Reality TV is not real.
14.  My wife saved my life. Emotionally, spiritually, any other –ally that I could come up with. She is my world. I am selfish and think that our love is different than everyone elses and we’re in on a little secret together that no one else has found. And I don’t say that out of ego. Isn’t that how you should feel? That it is different from everyone else and those around you just don’t get it? It’s also not meant to be boastful or to brag, it’s just what I’ve gleaned. When I met her, my world changed, she continues to amaze me and, plus, she’s smoking hot.
15.  I’ve also realized that I truly have no dreams for my children’s future professions. I just want them to do what they like and be happy. When I was agonizing over changing my major for a third time in college, my dad told me to do what I liked. I told him that the problem was I wanted to major in History and be a writer or professor. I wouldn’t be rich. He said I should follow my passion, because enjoying what you do while make you a different kind of rich. So if they want to be a teacher, lawyer, doctor, fireman, artist, astronaut, president, garbage man, dancer, professional athlete, chef, airline pilot, race car driver, gymnast, small business owner, volunteer in some third world country or a farmer, I’m good as long as they dig it.
16.  There is nothing like an ice cold beer.
17.  There is also nothing like a pizza and bread sticks. I’d eat it every day of the week and twice on Sundays. And I think I did that a few times in my early 20s.
18.  Little moments before big moments give me great joy. I look forward to watching a TV show with my wife at 10:30pm. I enjoy the drive in between my family and my wife’s family on Thanksgiving, when all the kids are napping because they had fun at one place and are getting ready to have more fun at another. I like driving to the airport before a vacation and Christmas Eve. Basically, I enjoy the moments before something starts. Anticipation is a great thing.
19.  There’s nothing like the endorphin surge after a good, long run.
20.  Even though it destroys my body, mainly my back, I like when one, two or all of our kids climb in bed in the middle of the night.
21.  I react poorly in some situations. I react completely appropriately in others. And the fact I can’t stop the former since I can do the latter is infinitely frustrating to me. I guess that’s why we’re human and have faults. But damn if I am not a perfectionist and would like to fix that.
22.  I love the chaos of our big family, but I am OCD about picking up and cleaning. Sorry to anyone who’s had dinner at our house while I begin cleaning up while the rest of you are eating. I hate a mess.
23.  That said, I will never clean-up if our kids have some big set-up and imaginary situation going with their toys. I’ll let them play out whatever fantasy world they have created for as long as they like.
24.  There isn’t an iPod big enough to hold the soundtrack of my life.
25.  Alec Baldwin has the voice of an angel. It’s like warm honey. I’ve watched episodes of “Thomas the Tank Engine” with my son just to hear him narrate.
26.  I used to be able to name the U.S. Presidents in order, with political party. Now, I can only get about 38 of them right. I keep forgetting Millard Fillmore and John Tyler. But I can still recite every NCAA Final Four team since 1980, along with the teams that advanced to the championship and the winner. I have no idea what this says about me.
27.  I love it when my wife doesn’t wear lipstick, because her natural lip color is amazing.
28.  Over thinking is overrated, but man do I love to analyze. For example, see this list as both analyzing and over thinking.
29.  I will never understand the current obsession with Vampires.
30.  There hasn’t been enough appreciation for all that we’ve accomplished in this world. From creating pen and paper and languages, printing, cars, machines, putting a man on the moon, telephones, cell phones, internet, wiping out diseases that killed millions 600 hundred years ago with a simple vaccination, indoor plumbing, light bulbs, etc. We’ve been one creative race.
31.  That said, we’re a little full of ourselves in the grand scheme of the universe.
32.  And finally, as I told my wife last night, I may be turning 32 and it could be a halfway point in my life. Or I might have 50-60 years left. Or longer. Or a lot less. I have no idea. But no matter what happens, life is extremely enjoyable and I hope it continues just like this, with her and our children.
Now that I’ve done this, 32 doesn’t feel so bad. Bring on the mid-early 30s. I’m totally ready. 
Kind of.


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Chris Paul, Dan Gilbert, David Stern, Dell Demps, Los Angeles Lakers, NBA, New Orleans Hornets

Obey Your Master

It’s official, NBA commissioner (czar, dictator, whatever you feel most comfortable with) is drunk with power to the point his ego is running the NBA. And to clarify, I literally mean David Stern’s ego in running the NBA now, now David Stern himself.
How did we reach a point where an American professional sports league is ran by a man who believes he is so powerful he can control everything? Can anyone stop him? He reminds us of any run of the mill movie villain, who has the crazy eyes and drives the car 180 miles towards the cliff, demanding, “I’ll do it, I’ll do it! And I’ll do it because I can.”
Stern was willing to set his own league afire this past summer and fall. In fact, he poured the gas and held the matches. He even lit a couple and waved them near the rubble that had become the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) negotiations.
He did this despite knowing how that worked out for the NHL several years ago. He did this despite the fact that the country is still in a recession and was just pissed off enough from the NFL lockout (one that did not miss any games but was still irritating) that everyone thought it was stupid. He did this in spite of a growing and shared belief that the NBA has been overpaying players for years.
The rationale for the lockout was not much better. “Hey, we know our teams can’t manage money very well and often give out 6-year, $60 million to the likes of Eddy Curry, but help us out of this jam.”
That’s like buying a mansion, not making the payments for a couple years and then right before foreclosure, asking your 70-year-old parents for money.
Ironically, this isn’t even about the NBA lockout and how Stern has lost his foothold with league owners who are no longer scared of him. It’s about how Stern is perhaps scared of them.
How else does one explain the blatant collusion involved with blocking New Orleans’ trade of Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers last week? By all accounts, Hornets general manager Dell Demps had been given full authority to execute a trade. Teams had contacted the league to check if deals for Paul would be blocked. Everyone did their due diligence. And so they proceeded in putting together a trade that took many days and man hours to pull off.
It didn’t take long for Stern to squash it. Coincidentally, everybody’s favorite moronic owner, Cleveland Cavaliers whiner Dan Gilbert, wrote an e-mail to Stern demanding that he stop the trade. The e-mail was leaked to the media shortly after the NBA blocked the trade.
The league may own the Hornets because basketball can’t survive in New Orleans, but they did themselves a huge disservice. Demps nearly resigned, reportedly. He was undermined in this whole thing and now his authority has been undercut, his team micromanaged by Stern.
As has been pointed out before, there’s no way Chris Paul is resigning with the Hornets when his contract expires at the end of the season. They will get nothing for him if he stays. By all accounts, most around the league felt the Hornets had won the purposed trade with the Lakers and Rockets.
But not Stern apparently.
All this on the heels of his posturing during the lockout, demanding the players had chosen a “nuclear winter.” And on the heels of reports that Stern belittled stars like Dwayne Wade and Paul Pierce during the negotiation sessions.
And let us not forget Stern’s changing the rules as we go style of leadership, the dress code, the headband rule (where you can’t wear your headband any way but right side up, logo facing forward).
I enjoy the dress code and the professionalism, as do others. But that’s not the point. Stern’s ego is driving the bus now. He doesn’t oversee a league and try to ensure balance, he enforces what he believes is fair and right and just. Too much hip-hop flavor? Dress code! Too many guys showing creativity in wearing arm bands or headbands, let’s get a rule out on that. Memo-style, double-spaced.
The league berated the players during the lockout with a hard line agenda that meant to imply they would not become Major League Baseball, where a few teams spend tons of money and have dominating rosters while two-thirds of the league meanders through the season in mediocrity ever year.
There’s just one problem: the NBA has always been that way, whether they pretend to want parity or think they once had it. From the period of 1980-2005, only seven teams even won NBA championships. And that list grows to only nine when you expand from 1980-2011. Thirty-one years, just nine different franchises have won championships. That’s quite a bit less than Major League Baseball during the same period.
The small market owners are trying to fight the power and demand they should compete with the big markets. They actually believe superstars want to play in Milwaukee and Cleveland and Indianapolis. Forget the lack of state income taxes in places like Florida, factors like weather and big cities like New York and Chicago. Who wants to play in a state that has beaches and sunshine 300 days a year when you can play in a gray, dreary place?
You can’t control free agency, David. You can’t control players like LeBron James and Dwayne Wade taking less to play together. If Chris Paul really wants to play in L.A. or New York, he might take $10 million less to do it.
You can be mad that the Heat’s trio (James, Wade and Bosh) chose to all play together instead of fight against each other. You can be mad the Celtics pulled off trades and signings that netted them Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen (along with Rajon Rondo) four years ago. You can be mad that the Lakers are always a draw to superstars who love the media, Hollywood, sunshine and being a star in a town of stars.
You can be mad. You can hope to change it.
But you can stop none of it.
That is, unless your name is David Stern and you believe yourself to be the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. Are we gonna have to zap him like the Stay-Puft marshmallow man one of these days?
His ego has overtaken his once strong and level-headed mind. Stern is no longer the same man that brought the NBA out of tape-delay and made it global. He’s an egomaniac who thinks everyone is a puppet whose strings he can pull.
It’s time to step away, David.
And if you won’t, then somebody needs to cut the strings.
With you.
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Bernie Fine, ESPN, gossip, Jerry Sandusky

The Era of Innuendo

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, a day of giving thanks for all that we have in remembrance of that very special day long ago when the Pilgrims feasted with the Indians in celebration of the first harvest.
Makes you all warm and fuzzy, to be sure.
Except that day is tomorrow.
Today, I’m not feeling so thankful. In fact, it’s more of a general repulsion.
There’s so much to not be thankful for in the world at this moment. Because we don’t specialize in turkey and stuffing or pumpkin pie. No, sir. We serve up hot and salacious gossip like a master chef. And at this very moment, we’re unfortunately perfecting our craft.
We can’t be thankful for is the sick and perverted folks who’ve enabled Jerry Sandusky and enabled this Penn State scandal. It’s disturbing and we have a long way to go as a society.
Additionally, I’m not thankful for ESPN and their never ending quest to create news. On the flip side of the Sandusky scandal at Penn State, we’ve got the Bernie Fine situation at Syracuse. The following comments are not to exonerate Fine, as I have no idea what happened or what is true.
But something smells fishy.
On the heels of Penn State and a scandal that was a decade in the making, with grand jury investigations and multiple eyewitnesses comes an ESPN report about Fine a week later based on two step-siblings claims. No one has corroborated their story. But now Fine is on leave, the water is boiling hot in Syracuse and all over the nation, people have already passed judgment on Fine based on the raw emotion left in the wake of the Sandusky scandal.
What’s more, many were critical of ESPN being slow to react to the Penn State scandal a few weeks ago. So how do they respond? They crank up their journalistic prowess and go searching for a similar story. Never mind the skeletons in their own closet that have existed on the internet regarding the highly questionable morals of their on-air talents.
Running the Fine story so close to the Sandusky one wreaks of ratings desperation during sweeps month. The facts weren’t in and still aren’t. But public perception is in because of the timing. People are still queasy over Sandusky and Penn State, so the natural reaction is disgust with Fine and Syracuse.
The Worldwide Leader In Sports, along with CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, is at the forefront of an era in which the line between truth and rumor is so blurred, you’d think it had been on a drinking binge for three days.
The sports headlines have been rolling like this for years: Magic has AIDS because he is gay! Jordan is a compulsive gambler whose father was murdered because of gambling debts! Kobe is a rapist! Tiger sleeps with prostitutes! Bob Knight hits his players! Erin Andrews was filmed naked in her hotel room and dated Tim Tebow!
Some turned out to be true, some were vaguely and partially true and some were just downright made up.
But we don’t care about what it turned out to be. We don’t blame whoever first inaccurately reported it. We just want the dirt. The details. We want to know who’s cheating who. We have to find out who’s genitals were sent by text message and what Ashton Kutcher told his one night stand.
There’s a little Hollywood, OK! Magazine, checkout line gossip mag in all of us.
And is this what we strive to be? Both as a country and as journalists? It would appear to be that way. And if it appears that way, then it’s the truth, right?
We’ve turned into a nation of gossip rags. Salacious rumors are the currency of the day and we’re all getting rich in this regard. We may be morally bankrupt, but wealthy in what counts the most, baby: information!
Sometimes, the truth does need to be revealed – when it’s actually true. People need to be unmasked when what’s underneath isn’t the perfect image portrayed by their own doing, to the public.
But what happens if we ruin a person’s life? Do we even care? You can’t get that back. Some things never come back – like faith and trust. If you accuse your spouse of cheating and they are not, it’s over. The trust you have with each other is gone and it probably won’t be coming back, at least never in the same way it was before.  
Again, the facts aren’t all in yet. Bernie Fine could turn out to be just as grotesque as Jerry Sandusky. Or he could be exonerated. Or somewhere in the middle. We don’t know right now. And that’s the point. We shouldn’t be spreading rumors for the sake of screaming, “First! We reported it first!”
The facts and details in these two stories, despite the same fundamental premise, are vastly different. And the sheer reality that those details are being pushed to the side isn’t just bothersome that we do this, it’s blatantly troublesome.  
The underlying theme here is simple: we don’t just report; we tell stories. We don’t just respond, we overreact. We are ruthless savages.
And then we push repeat 1,224 times until it’s been driven so far into our psyche that we believe it to be true.
You hear something enough, it becomes fact. And maybe we’ve been like this since the beginning of time.
For example, as mentioned at the start of this blog, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. We celebrate a historic day when European Pilgrims sat down with Native Americans and ate together to celebrate the first harvest and a growing partnership.
At least that’s what we’ve been told. It’s certainly what we celebrate.
What we know the truth to be is that the Pilgrims in Plymouth didn’t have enough food to feed themselves and relied on the Wampanoag Native Americans to provide them seeds and teach them to fish before that celebration in 1621.
Roughly four months later, hundreds of miles away in Virginia, Indians there massacred nearly 400 settlers.
Wait…what? Why?
Had our news cycle raged on back then, there would have been an massive public outcry. “But we just had Thanksgiving with them! How could they murder our people and treat us like that? Who do they think they are?!”
Certainly, our news cycle and current standards would have failed to mention that decades before, natives had be more than happy to trade with the colonists, but by the early 1600s, colonists had earned reputations as, well, savages. 
Without this knowledge, may be we would have isolated Native Americans, burned down their homes and destroyed their food supplies. Perhaps we would have tried to take over their land, put them in colonies and converted them to a different religion.
And by beating the public over the head with the images of the massacre and leaving out the reasons why it happened, we would have easily been able to accomplish this. 
But thank goodness the full truth came out and people we are able to see how early settlers treatment of the Indians had provoked the attack and we didn’t do anything rash in response.
Wait…what’s that you say? Oh, you mean we did do all that stuff anyway without the media to provoke us?
You see, it’s all about perspective and perception. And it’s a battle this country lost long ago. We’re easily manipulated, easily convinced of what is the truth and shamelessly obsessed with controlling perception and turning it into a coalition.
Tomorrow I will gather around the table with family and friends and be thankful that I have food on the table. I will be thankful of our freedom and those who protect it.
But today I remain bothered by what we are and what we’ve become.
And I will remain troubled that gossip will always be the hottest dish we serve – and the one we gorge ourselves on the most.
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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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