See you in 2015, Tribe: While We’re Waiting…
September 15, 2014Kyrie Irving wins FIBA MVP honors, leads USA to gold medal
September 15, 2014Nobody is going to go out and try to claim that the NFL had a good week last week. Despite kicking off its season and having plenty of games to talk about, the talk in and around NFL football was dominated by Ray Rice, Roger Goodell, and eventually Adrian Peterson. Rice and Goodell were topics for obvious reasons, but late in the week Adrian Peterson could be found turning himself into authorities in Houston for an incident that happened over the summer involving corporal punishment of his 4-year-old with a switch. There are other names too, like Greg Hardy, but it’s not overly important to obsess about every bad thing, which is what Brian Hoyer said to Peter King.
“On Friday,” Hoyer said, “after the Adrian Peterson thing, I said, ‘Can this week get any worse for the NFL?’ But the NFL is made up of a kaleidoscope of people, all very young. Some of them make mistakes. But there are 32 teams, with 53 players on a team. That’s a lot of people. And the vast majority of them are really good guys chasing a dream. The good stories don’t often get told, but there are a lot of them.”
None of this is to minimize the off-field things that the NFL is dealing with. It’s just to say that the off-field things are the exceptions, and right or wrong, they’re being maximized by the media right now in their coverage. Maybe that’s the right call from a news standpoint, but it’s certainly not telling the story, nor are these cases indicative of, the average NFL player who is working hard and staying out of trouble.
Good to have a little bit of perspective even as we deal with one of the most tumultuous periods the NFL has ever seen.
6 Comments
Unfortunately nobody wants to hear about the good stories except during the Olympics.
And 100% of those 53 players on each of the 32 teams – save for the guys who are lucky enough to not be good enough to play – will end up with some form of brain damage. #beautifulstories
Someday football will only exist as a video game and we’ll be fans of dudes hurting their thumbs with controllers. There will be controversy as the league denies knowledge of degenerative thumb disease from practicing too many hours.
Training time will be limited in training camp. December will be designated purple shoe month in honor of the victims of degenerative thumb disease. The NFL will live on to fight another day and the Haslam family will sell the team to Nick Gilbert for $11 billion.
And Nick will commission a sculpture of a football that looks exactly like a football for outside the stadium.
Hey now–only 33% will end up with long-term issues, according to the league itself. Nothing to see here, folks!
My heart breaks for the cash cow known as the NFL! There’s a “golden calf” element to all of this.