If the last year didn’t already prove it, the NFL is turning into the Eastside High School of professional sports. Roger Goodell’s latest smackdown on the Patriots proves he’s in Crazy Joe Clark-mode permanently. But after inheriting a league in dire need of an image makeover, there needed to be a new HNIC to get things straightened out.
“I want all of you to take a good look at these people on the risers behind me…(Pac Man, Odell, Tank, Michael)…”
And since none of them were going to graduate anyway, they’ve all been expurgated. If Pac-Man tries sniveling back again, begging for a second chance because his mom’s gonna kill him, he’ll need to get marched up to the rooftop of Goodell’s office for a proper reality check.” You smoke crack doncha? Jump. Gaw head, jump!”
With the latest scandal, Bill Belichick plays the role of the mouthy music teacher, only concerned with getting his kids to the national chorus championships every year, rolling his eyes at all this rah-rah discipline. Well, a $500,000 fine and an executed draft pick(s) later should keep him on point. The undermining of authority will not be tolerated. Now, go wash your hoodie and stop spying.
Is this punishment excessive? Possibly. However, it manages to keep Goodell’s message: No more shenanigans! (As does, you know, dispatching NFL security to make house calls because some idiot decides to ask questions about dog fighting to the wrong PR flack.)
This is a new league, and here’s Roger Goodell with a megaphone and a baseball bat. We’re only one more character smudge away from him having to put chains on the inside of the doors.
So, this week, I’m dressing up like Kid Ray, impregnating Kaneesha and placing odds on the next heavy-handed discipline Roger Goodell will hand down.
Let’s help him carry on, after this MORE.
No Ho Policy: 1/5
There will be no more one night stands. Those players who wish to engage in promiscuous sexual activity will have to do so with a wife or girlfriend of more than three months. There’ll be no more side projects, no more sandbagging. You take one woman at a time, and keep her satisfied until your heart desires in a proper, respectful manner befitting a professional athlete. Players will be allowed to perform one exceptionally challenging sexual position per calendar year, and all female receptacles must be properly sterilized to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
No More Click-Clacking: 2/1
Under Armour wear no longer contributes to the positive image Goodell wants to project. There is too much yelling in the commercials, the imagery is too thuggy, and the clothing itself shows a quarter-inch more nipple that is becoming of a player in the new NFL. If players would like to wear clothing underneath your uniform, it mustn’t be tight, nor comfortable, and it must cover the midsection. Oh, and jock straps and underwear must be worn at all times, now. There have been too many loose snakes in the garden and too many sweat-shooting anal crevices on national television. It’s bad for business.
Tattoo Covering: 2/1
If players have tattoos, they can’t be scene on the playing field or anytime they’re out in public where cameras are visible. The league will hand out bottles of flesh-colored body paint according to each player’s skin tone, which will be considered part of a league mandated uniform. (If players choose to have their tattoos removed, they’ll be rewarded bonuses.) And there will be fines assessed for any new tattoos the player receives during his tenure as an NFL employee.
Swear Jars: 1/1
Players will be fined for each curse word based on the severity of the curse word uttered: “Damn” is $20; Racial epithets are $1,000; “Steaming bag of pony cunt”, “Cock-swallowing toilet rapist”, “Dead lady pussy breath”, et al are all $20,000+. Each week, Goodell will meet with Steve Sabol and his NFL Films crew to go through each individual teams’ games and sideline banter to tally up the totals.
A couple weeks back, in my preview of the New England Patriots’ upcoming season, I jokingly compared them to the People’s Republic of China, another mysterious nation with incredible resources and potential entering this football season. After this most recent spying scandal and the backlash from players across the league, those parallels are even clearer now.
As with football, every single first world country spies on each other — it’s part of the proverbial game, right? (Heck, America even spies on our own allies!) (Ed. Note: And its own citizens.) But China, like New England, really gets under America’s skin when it does it. People forget, but just seven years ago, before 9/11, America was obsessed with the fact that China was stealing our nuclear secrets. There was the Cox Report in 1999, then news that China was retrofitting passenger airliners into spy planes, and finally, poor Wen Ho Lee, who was falsely accused of spying on America. Last year, China even pulled a Mangina and retaliated against America’s attempts to spy — firing laser beams at U.S. spy satellites, effectively blinding them.
It’s only fitting that the New England Patriots were hit with $750,000 in fines — $500,000 for Belichick and $250,000 for the team — and lost a high-draft pick. These are the exact same economic sanctions that a country like China gets slapped with when they break the rules — it’s not like the U.N. can suspend Chinese leader Hu Jintao for a few games.
Right now, fans of the Patriots are feeling pretty beat up. The hyperbolic national media are dog-piling on, adding asterisks to all those Super Bowl wins. Rival coaches and players are blaming their devastating losses on underhanded tactics, instead of the fact they choked. All perspective is lost at how much, if at all, that cheating led to wins in favor of a convenient, one-size-fits-all excuse to cover past failures.
But keep in mind — all that China scandal shit was seven years ago — and no one even remembered any of it until I just brought it up. Now, when Americans think of China, it’s: I like their food. They’re hosting the Olympics. Yao Ming. What about that poisonous dog food, huh? And maybe, if you’ve been to Chinatown on a hot summer day: I wonder if the whole country smells that terrible. No one thinks about spy scandals.
With these sanctions, the Patriots Republic of New England has truly become the NFL’s version of China, feared and loathed by the rest of the league. Bill Belichick is Chairman Mao, an utterly disgraced visionary, a controversial figure whose good deeds (three Super Bowl rings, the transformation of a backwards, rural country into a world power) are balanced off by a litany of bad deeds (cheating at football, killing tens of millions of innocent Chinese in the name of “progress”).
And with a leader like Belichick, a man compulsively unable to stop himself from seeking every possible advantage, no matter the consequence, I like the Patriots’ chances against San Diego even more now. After all, there’s nothing more dangerous than a disgraced tyrant with an arsenal of wide receivers and a pissed-off defense playing at home.
The only people who seem happy about this are the folks at Draft Kevin Durant, who are feeling awfully good about themselves. Mostly, though, we’ve been impressed by the outpouring of sympathy and sadness toward Oden. For a guy who could turn out to be a rather major draft disaster, everyone’s certainly on his side. From Blazers’ Edge:
Greg, you have nothing to apologize for. Of course everybody was disappointed over the results from yesterday. How could you not be? But everyone was disappointed for you, not about you. We want to see you play. We look forward to the day when you put on that uniform and take the court to a thunderous standing ovation. We’re eager to watch you mold the game around you as you’ve shown you can do. We’re going to have to wait another year to do that. But it’s not the end of the world…for you, for us, for anybody.
In the coming year I suspect you’re going to learn something about what it means to be a Trailblazer. That rally at the downtown square after you were drafted? It was only the tip of the iceberg. For every one of the thousands of people that came that day there were a hundred more who couldn’t come but felt the same way. Nobody’s going to stop thinking about you. Nobody’s going to stop cheering you. Nobody’s going to stop believing in you. Every person you meet in the coming year is going to smile and shake your hand and wish you well and a speedy recovery. You’re going to be as welcomed and accepted for riding a stationary bike and doing rehab exercises as you would be if you were notching 20 and 20 every night. That’s what it means to be part of the Blazers. We don’t leave our own. We don’t give up on our own. Even if you never played another minute in your life you would still be a Blazer–one of us–and we would still love you for it. This ain’t L.A. or New York where you perform or get forgotten. This is Portland, baby, and Portland never forgets its own.
Man, Portland sounds like heaven on earth there. Well, unless you commit a crime. Then you’re dirt.
So as you have probably heard, the hammer of justice finally came down on Bill Belichick and the Patriots late Thursday. How hard? That depends on who you ask. What, I’m supposed to be an expert on video spying? I can’t even work the can opener (to paraphrase Woody Allen). All I can say is that when I coached Tom Brady, we never pulled that crap. So I’ll leave it to electronic espionage experts such as The Lone Gunmen and Michael Wilbon to opine on Belichick’s punishment; $500,000 fine, loss of a first-round draft pick in ‘08*, but no suspension. And there are plenty of those opinions to go around.
• Michael Wilbon says the punishment is not nearly enough. [MSNBC]
• It’s pretty much unanimous among columnists: Belichick got a slap on the wrist. [New York Daily News]
• Belichick issued a somewhat half-assed apology following the ruling. [ESPN]
• A nationally recognized expert on sports law and copyright law — albeit from Boston College — says that the NFL treated Belichick quite fairly. [Sports Law Blog]
• Meanwhile, the second-guessing begins. Some Eagles players think that they may have been robbed in 2005, for instance. [Yahoo Sports]
• The Chargers are looking for a little payback on Sunday. [Boston Globe]
Whatever your opinion on the matter, the one thing that’s clear is that this isn’t going away soon, as Belichick and the Patriots hope. After all, they’re writing freaking ballads about it (see above). Whatever Belichick and the Patriots accomplish in the future, it will always smell a little funny. That may be unfair, but that’s the way it is.
* = Team is also fined $250,000, and draft pick will be lower if Patriots fail to make the playoffs.
[The rabbi’s] main trope was that people should act as as though God is always watching them. Not a bad lesson, except that in making her point she must have made an endless number of references to acting like you’re being videotaped. This was awkward. Somewhere in the middle of the sermon, she somehow managed to stumble onto a story about Cal Ripken, Jr. and what a positive role model he is (why she referenced Cal Ripken of all people, I have no idea-this sermon was all over the place). Her basic point was that Ripken always knew he was being recorded on the field, so he behaved accordingly. This was especially significant, she said, in this modern age where “sports scandal” is so prevalent.
This was really awkward. The guy sitting next to my dad leaned over and whispered, “Does she even know Bob Kraft goes to this Temple?” and a hefty portion of the congregation craned their necks over to Kraft’s pew toward the front.
You know, if Kraft would have scouted correctly, he would have been prepared for the speech and sat in the back, where no one could see him. He really should have had tape on that rabbi.
Can I come back? Can I come back? And if ya’ll don’t pay my money I ain’t never comin’ back. So fuck dat. They say should I be scared cuz Pri-Ho (presumably Priest Holmes) coming back, he embarrassing himself. So I’m a say it, I’m a leave it like that. Cuz I’m the n____ runnin this mutherfucker here.
Fuck Carl Peterson, the GM is running it. They see me. They want to treat me like I’m running it. I wouldn’t give a fuck if I’m not coming back. I’d rather play for another team because I’d rather be a running back.
Johnson says not only that it’s not him (which is possible), but that it’s just some random person impersonating his voice (which isn’t). There are pictures of Johnson all over the site, and the band members even point out, as if to “clarify,” that even though Johnson does rap with the group, he’s not a full-fledged member.
Johnson can claim it’s not him on that audio, even though he has connections with the group, pictures of himself on the site and the voice sounds amazingly like his. He can pretend that it’s just random people doing Larry Johnson impersonations. He can even say he doesn’t know anything about it. But he’s lying.
Alternate headline: Everybody Hurts (Sometime). If there’s such a thing as momentum in sports — as if games are a rolling wheel of cheese and players are stumbling down a grassy English hill — then the Yankees just lost it on the eve of their most important series of the season. A.J. Burnett pitched eight strong innings and Frank Thomas singled home the winning run in the ninth as Toronto beat New York 2-1, ending the Yankees’ seven-game winning streak.
Thanks to The Big Hurt, the Yankees’ chances to win the East just got a little harder. But the bigger news is that, with 16 games remaining, the Yankees are still in it at all. They’re only 5 1/2 games behind the Red Sox in the East; 4 1/2 in the loss column. After a three-game series between the two beginning tonight in Boston, New York could find itself 2 1/2 back. Does that seem right? Could New York actually win this thing? I just kind of anointed the Red Sox as winners of the East a long while ago, and if they gag this up, it’s going to leave me with a lot of mental paperwork. The schedule even favors the Yankees, who have six games with Baltimore and three with Tampa Bay among their 16 remaining. Boston has 15 games left, and closes the season against Oakland (two) and Minnesota (four). If you’re going this weekend, by the way, Wang vs. Matsuzaka on Saturday is your best bet, one would think.
• Fun At Safeco. With Will in the upper deck madly waving his Yuniesky Betancourt sign, the Mariners beat the Tampa Bay Pectoral-Finned Filter Feeders, 8-7, led by Betancourt’s game-tying double in the eighth. The Mariners had to overcome a poor start by Jeff Weaver for their 41st comeback victory.
• My Kind Of Town, Chicago Is. Chicago is back in sole possession of first place (later today they’ll relinquish it; you know the drill), after a 6-2 win over the Astros. Alfonso Soriano, Aramis Ramirez, Daryle Ward and Cliff Floyd all homered for Chicago, which moved a half-game ahead of idle Milwaukee in the Central. The Cubs open a four-game series at third-place St. Louis tonight.
• Oh, NOW The Phillies Bullpen Comes Through. Chase Utley (two-run homer) and five relievers combined to give Philadelphia a 12-4 win over the Rockies, who can pretty much forget about the playoffs now.
AJ Daulerio’s Cultural Oddsmaker runs every Friday. Email him to let him know what you think.
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Alternate headline: Everybody Hurts (Sometime). If there’s such a thing as momentum in sports — as if games 