The Nonstick Football League is back
Before I vent about Tyler Brayton's America's Funniest Videos moment in the Monday Night game last night, let me thank the readers for their support of my observation that this is more of an NBA city than people want to admit. Wonder if that might actually lead to, say, a radio affiliate for the games (which, I've heard, at least one station here is interested in).
Anyway, back to the topic, which might seem like one that's being beaten into the ground here. But it's been about a month since this column was written about how the NFL overall gets away with antisocial behavior that other leagues never can. Now we have an NFL player, in the closing minutes of a game in which his team is being routed on national TV for the second time this season, grabs an opposing player by the jersey, winds up and drives his knee into the player's groin. (Apparently it was not a direct shot, because the player, the Seahawks' Jerramy Stevens, didn't immediately fall to the turf, clutch himself, curl up in the fetal position and start crying like a little leaguer catcher who forgot to wear his cup. But still.)
So, then. Since the playoffs in January, this league has featured players who:
* Spit on another player.
* Stomped on another player's head while he was lying on the ground without a helmet.
* Wrenched another player's head around by the facemask, leaving that player motionless for several minutes.
* Yanked another player down, and then up again, by the hair hanging from the back of his helmet.
* Cracked another player in the unmentionables with his knee.
As suggested in the column, players now don't even have respect for each other anymore. Anything goes. As brutal a game as this can be, there did at one time used to be a code, in which you never messed with someone's livelihood or take blatantly cheap shots, no matter how emotional things got. That code may still exist, but it's being violated way too often. And if a league has to legislate against things that should be common sense and, again, understood because of that code - leg-whipping, helmet-to-helmet, crackbacks below the knee, horse-collar tackles - then there's a real, serious, potentially life-threatening problem.
Yet even with the universal condemnation of Brayton and of the Raiders by the commentators (with the exception of Warren Sapp, who was on TV last night justifying it by saying Stevens was a "punk'' and a "sissy''), not a single person has been heard to say or write, "What in the hell is going on in the NFL these days? When are they going to straighten this out?'' (Someone may have by now; feel free to let me know.)
Because no one associates this with the league, just with the individuals, without concluding that it says something about the culture in the league at large. Now, do I have to say this part again? I don't want to. But I probably have to. Do you think that if what has happened in the past year - heck, the past month - in the NFL happened in certain other sports leagues, that the wrath of God and Middle America wouldn't have been brought down upon it, with calls for the entire sport to be shut down until Congress can conduct a full investigation?
But no. Not in the Nonstick Football League. So we'll see what happens next week, and which body part gets violated in front of a stadium full of people and a nationwide audience.
