As Ed Morrissey notes:

Al Sharpton may get another chance to distract everyone from the massive IRS investigation into his personal and professional finances by seizing on another Don Imus eruption.

And this time around, if Imus is ousted, no one can blame this on anti-Hillary forces engaged in battlefield prep.

Just off the NFL wire, Todd Archer of the Dallas Morning News writes, "Pacman Jones is a Dallas Cowboy":

More than a month after the teams first discussed a trade, the Cowboys and Tennessee have reached an agreement, according to a source, on a deal that will send the suspended cornerback to the Cowboys.

Terms of the agreement are not yet known.

Jones fills an immediate need, but the Cowboys will still consider drafting a cornerback with one of their two first-round picks in the upcoming draft, but there is a question of when he will actually be on the field.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Jones for the 2007 season for violating the league’s personal conduct policy and has said he will review a possible reinstatement before training camp opens in July. Agent Manny Arora is hoping Jones can be reinstated sooner, which would allow his client to take part in mini-camps, organized team activities and the conditioning program.

He'll have to be a model citizen with Dallas, or the Cowboys might want to consider reopening their infamous mid-1990s-era "White House".

"A rented sports utility vehicle is apparently involved in the November shooting of Washington Redskins star Sean Taylor at his Miami home."

Last year, the Orlando Sentinel actually ran a headline that read "SUV crashes into store, perhaps in attempt to steal guns".

Having gotten a taste for larceny, clearly, the killer cars have moved on to even more heinous crimes.

Ace has some thoughts on New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick taping his opponents' defensive signals:

If the Pats had won the Super Bowl, I think it's clear that, human nature and corporate imperatives being what they are, this all would have been buried forever, for the good of all.

But 18-1? Now it's coming out.

BTW, Belichick says it's his belief that the taping of opponent teams' defensive signals was legal. Who knows, maybe the rules aren't clear on this point.

It certainly seems like it was a bit of a gray area at one point, as Jimmy Johnson recently told the Boston Globe:

“When I came into the NFL, back in ‘89, I talked to a Kansas City scout and he said, ‘Here’s what we do, we videotape the opposing team’s signals and then we synch it up with the game film.’ So I did it.”

Johnson admitted it was “borderline” but he ended up stopping because he didn’t think the team got much out of it.

Elsewhere in the world of sports, Roger Clemens is looking for "A Few Good Men"...

The Seattle Seahawks' first quarterback becomes Dan Snyder’s latest head coach.

But given Dan's Al Davis-style track record (without a similar level of pro football success as Al's great run from the 1960s through the 1980s), how long will Zorn last?

Tim MacMahon of the Dallas Morning News writes, "Wow, talk about anti-Cowboys bias":

Sports Illustrated's Dr. Z gave each Super Bowl a grade and accompanying comment. The following comment was so unprofessional that it even made me cringe.

XIII (1979) Steelers 35, Cowboys 31 -- Yeah, it was exciting, with a recovered onside kick at the end and then Rocky Bleier recovering the final one, but this was the heyday of the America's Team arrogance and I wanted to see the Cowboys crushed not merely beaten. Call it B-

So much for the golden rule about no cheering in the press box. But I'm sure Dr. Z is able to put that bias aside during Hall of Fame voting.

I stopped reading the 75-year old Dr Z., aka Paul Zimmerman, after his disgraceful comments following Pat Tillman's death. But at least you know where you stand these days with SI, and whether or not you're wanted as a reader. It's a bit like Spinal Tap going from an act with a mass appeal to one with a much narrower and "selective" audience, but as mass media dissolves into nothing but a series of small niche markets designed to cater to various ideologies, that's inevitable anyhow.

Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard writes (and my fellow Blogway Boy--not to mention Bob Dole--agrees) that Rush has got it bad, and that's not good.

(Of course, MDS is merely a pale substitute for the new and remarkably virulent strain of BDS sweeping the lands--Belichick Derangement Syndrome...)

I hope the Boston Globe is planning to change the title of this Dewey-Defeats Truman book!

(H/T: IP)

Plaxico Burress gets the last laugh:

We're only going to score 17 points?" Brady said with a laugh. "OK. Is Plax playing defense?"

Turns out New England wished it could have scored 17.

Heh.

Chris Berman is better than you--or at least his cameraman and interns:

(Headline explanation here, flashback to Paul Anka meltdown with similar tone, here.)

Fox has wisely ruled that the Super Bowl will be a politics-free zone.

Unfortunately, someone didn't get the message, it seems.

He hasn't even gotten the gig with the Redskins yet, but there's already a "Fire Jim Fassel" Weblog.

Their motto? "Why waste time"!

Found at Theo Spark's:

In a news conference Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for the Packers this coming Sunday. Deanna asserts that she is qualified to be starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while he played QB for the Packers. During this period of time she became familiar with the definition of a corner blitz, and is now completely comfortable with other terminology of the Packers offense. A survey of Packers fans shows that 50% of those polled supported the move.

Does this sounds idiotic and unbelievable to you? Well, Hillary Clinton makes the same claims as to why she is qualified to be President and 50% of democrats polled agreed. She has never run a City, County, or State.

When told Hillary Clinton has experience because she has 8 years in the white house, Dick Morris stated "so has the pastry chef".

Actually, I'd take Deanna and Brett in the White House over the return of Hillary and Bill, any day.

Daily Dollup blows the lid off Diebold rigging New Hampshire for Hillary.

(Don't let Kucinich see this--he might think it's real.)

Update: Don't tell Bill Maher this is a joke--it would be like putting a stake in his heart.

Geoffrey Norman suggests giving the Athlete of the Year award to one of Michael Vick's dogs: "Those dogs played for truly big stakes. If Peyton Manning had blown the Super Bowl, he would have been out a few commercials. The dogs got hanged. Or worse."

As the Vick and Barry Bonds stories indicate, along with Tom Brady fathering a child out of wedlock, and all of the lesser crimes and misdemeanors of the players who make up the NFL, NBA and MLB, professional athletics in general ended 2007 looking awfully tawdry:

And that, in fact, might be the big sports story of 2007: the end, not of illusions, but of disillusionment. After all, in order to be disillusioned, you need illusions. The kid who pleaded, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” to Shoeless Joe Jackson after the White Sox had fixed a World Series for the benefit of gamblers was honestly dismayed. He believed, quaintly, in the integrity of the game.

The games are the back-story, now. The 2007 Super Bowl? Boring, but winning it did get Peyton some more endorsements. World Series? Red Sox and ho hum. NBA finals? Can’t even remember. But the Barry Bonds story? That baby had legs. And the Mike Vick saga? Hard to think of a case, since Icarus, where the fortunes of a single star have soared so high and then crashed so spectacularly. You could have said it was “tragic,” if it hadn’t been for the dogs. Those poor beasts made it merely tawdry; like just about everything else in sports in the unlamented year of two thousand and seven.

Meanwhile, Brent Bozell has some thoughts on the year in entertainment, where no further disillusionment is necessary.

Update: While I mentioned the Patriots' Tom Brady above, I forgot to mention his coach's win-at-all-costs predilection for illicit videotaping, yet another lowpoint for the NFL this year.

Well, after aiding the North Vietnamese and then being forgainst the Iraq War, Senator Kerry has finally found a worthy advisory to fight: the NFL's cable network.

Is Bill Parcells going to rebuild the post-Vick, post-Petrino Falcons? Sounds very likely, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Update: The Dolphins are also fishing for Tuna.

A recurring item in James Taranto's Best of the Web column is his "Wannabe Pundits" feature, which frequently catches sports journalists desperate to sound like the next Bob Woodward or Michael Kinsley by injecting politics into a section of the paper (or Website) where most readers normally go to escape politics and world events. Scroll to midpage for one example Taranto highlighted from a Sports Illustrated writer.

For another example, simply check out this passage from the latest column from Yahoo Sports' Mike Silver:

Yet after last season, Tom Brady actively wooed [Randy] Moss and, once the receiver arrived in New England, he began lauding him for being a "great teammate" and a "great leader." Very few people, outside of some judgmental wackos from the religious right, have anything negative to say about Brady, but it's disturbing to hear the greatest player in football praise Moss in such over-the-top fashion.

I guess if you're a conservative and religious sports fan, Mike doesn't want you reading his column. Does that hold true for Yahoo as a whole?

Of course, God forbid you actually are judgmental, causing you to have strong opinions about someone, based on your life experiences, education, philosophical beliefs and/or religious upbringing. That skill is apparently only reserved for reporters regarding their readers.

At least those readers whose politics and beliefs differ from theirs. And maybe their editors--or lack thereof.

(And in case your wondering, I think Brady's a gifted quarterback having an incredible season, but I could see where some could be concerned over his off-field activies, which involve fathering a child out of wedlock.)

Cause and effect:

I’m going to add that very few people now actually remember what it was like during the period of the feminist movement. Everything was up for grabs. No one knew what to do or how to do it. Betty Friedan ruined a Super Bowl party in my very own home by wearing a black leather miniskirt and swinging her (not bad) legs clad in fishnet stockings back and forth in front of the TV screen so that nobody could see the plays. She radicalized a sizable bunch of neutral men into committed anti-feminists that day.

"Cowboys-Packers game was the top rated cable show in 14 years."

We report, you decide:

The Brutally Honest Weblog believes that "Jason Whilock, a black columnist writing for The Kansas City Star" is being brutally honest in a way that will "piss off the modern day civil rights movement. He's provocatively telling the truth."

On the other hand, Jason Cole, who contributes to Yahoo's NFL coverage, praises Whilock's earlier efforts, but demurs at his latest column: "It's powerful, it's strong, it makes you think. But if it's wrong, it's dangerous."

Austin Bay writes shares his adventures in attempting to watch the Cowboys-Packers game, which was only available on the NFL Network, a channel many cable companies have yet to include in their line-ups:

Thursday around noon: Richard proposed we meet at a sports bar — Third Base, on Sixth Street near MoPac. Sounded fine to me, I’d never been there but I told him the place’ll be packed. We need an infiltration plan with a seize and hold objective. Richard said he’d get there at 6:30 pm. I said I could get there about 7:15 because I had to meet my wife downtown at a Rice University graduate get-together in our favorite Austin, Texas coffee shop, Halcyon. Cool deal.

Except Richard called me on my cell at 6:20 and said the line at Third Base already extended into the parking lot. Nix on Third Base (…a vague suggestion of Abbott and Costello…). My wife suggested I walk around the corner from Halcyon to a bar on Lavaca Street and see if that establishment had the NFL Channel. Indeed the bar did have the channel, but it also had a not-quite elbow to elbow crowd and no open seats or tables to seize and hold.

I phoned Richard and laid out a Yeats’ allusion: “This is no place for old men…who can’t stand up for three hours.”

Richard said to come by his house and we’d watch the game on his super Mac. I trundled in about 7:45 PM and we sat down to watch the game on the computer.

Internet stutter galore, occasionally interrupted by total freeze. Richard decided that NFL.com’s server was overloaded. We followed the game for a quarter-plus via the “game tracker” screen. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small football field where the line of scrimmage moves across the screen as the game progresses. You also get written commentary on the plays.

Well, you get what you pay for, or in this case don’t pay for.

Hopefully things will be easier when we move into a Web 50.0 world--rapidly becoming a necessity as total time spent online ratchets up exponentially. (Thus explaining the corresponding Red Queen's Race to the bottom that’s simultaneously occurring in several competing legacy media.)

"Bronco Fans: Honk If You Want To Go To Court!"

I think this would qualify as the legal equivalent of givin' 'em the business...

Video of a dim NBC Sunday night broadcast, here.

When George Bush was elected president, I was told he would usher in the new dark ages. And they were right!

As exciting a game on the field as the first half of tonight's Cowboys at the Eagles was, the program that NBC built around it sure did have its moments of strangeness:

NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” officially will become a “green” show this weekend, as it kicks off an initiative that will see the broadcaster televise 150 hours of environmentally-themed content this week across its broadcast and cable networks, online sites and mobile platforms. … Green week will start one hour into “Football Night in America,” at 8:00pm ET. That’s when studio host Bob Costas will explain the initiative. … About 90 seconds before the end of the pre-game show, NBC literally plans to turn the lights out, having the pregame crew finish the show in the dark. The studio lights will stay off through the halftime and post-game shows.

I had to not see it to believe it. Whenever I've done videos, I've spent hours getting the lights just so. Who knew it all you had to do was say, "Hey man, we're going dark to be green", and no lights at all are necessary.

Television: It's like radio without pictures!

Seriously though, all religions have their rituals which seem strange, old-fashioned, and just downright rococco to outsiders, and this is yet another example. (But wouldn't turning off the 90 babillion kilowatts of power that light-up a night game at the "Linc" have saved a helluva lot more energy than turning off a handful of Lowel Omnis back at the studio?)

For decades conservatives have complained endlessly about the big three TV networks' biases, only to be rebuffed by television journalists and producers who would respond with a shrug, "Biased? Us? Huh--sorry, I just can't see it, myself." (CBS's Dan Rather, not surprisingly, was a master at this technique.)

But lately, NBC has really let it all hang out, even on a show as mainstream as Sunday Night Football. Pink, the rockerette who screamed the show's theme song last year is a PETA spokeshumanoid. (Happily, this year she was replaced.) Keith Olbermann, who routinely compares conservatives to Nazis on NBC's MSNBC cable outlet appears on the pregame show and at halftime. This week show featured ads for Al Gore's upcoming appearance on 30 Rock, beyond Obama's appearance last night on Saturday Night Live. And elsewhere on NBC, their flagship Nightly News show is hosted by a man who has compared America's founding fathers to terrorists.

Earlier this year, retired Army Col. Ken Allard, then a regular contributor to NBC, had enough:

It is, therefore, possible to argue that NBC is merely undergoing a delicate arabesque in anticipation of changing audience preferences and the long- hoped-for Democratic restoration (although journalists generally seem reluctant to raise the tough questions that should punctuate the 2008 campaign).

But has anyone else noticed the network's precipitous retreat from journalistic and ethical standards? Not only were no apologies given and no pink slips issued for Arkin's outburst, but on his MSNBC show last week, Keith Olberman went out of his way to defend this "valid criticism" of our military.

In January, Conan O'Brien was allowed to escape without apology after airing a particularly tasteless gay skit deriding Christianity: "Oh, Jesus, I love you, but only as a friend." (Just try doing that sometime using Mohammad's name!)

And only this week, questions have been raised about the cozy relationships between CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo and the companies she covers as a supposedly objective journalist. The response by Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE and godfather of the NBC family: "Substantially, I don't think she did anything wrong."

Fine: Let's hope he's right. But sometimes the only way to show where you really stand is to vote with your feet. And so with great reluctance and best wishes to my former colleagues, with this column I am severing my 10-year relationship with NBC News.

At the end of the 2004 presidential election, Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote:

A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

And if anything, that trend has only accelerated.

So thank you, NBC, for letting viewers know where you stand. After after 80 long years of pretending otherwise, doesn't it feel good to finally come clean with your audience?

You can read related thoughts from Sister Toldjah--asuming the lights are still on in your den. And The Sundries Shack would like NBC to disclose each show's carbon footprint--"so I can determine whether they have any grounds on which to criticize me for my lifestyle."

Finally, "I notice they didn’t turn off the bright lighted Toyota sign." Heh.^TM

In Slate, Josh Levin offers some very good suggestions to fix it. But minimizing the number of what James Taranto would call "Wannabe Pundits" (an ongoing phenomenon which hit bottom when SI's writers used Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan to let their BDS run rampant) would help enormously to make what holds itself out as a mass-media entertainment publication readable again to those of us whose worldview wasn't formed on the Upper West Side.

AP sports headline: “Jason, John Garrett coach against brother Judd when Cowboys meet Rams”

Wow, this could be one interesting game! To be fair, the Brothers Judd run a helluva Website, but I'm not sure how we'll they'll stand up against the Cowboys' high-powered offense on Sunday...

Back in November of 2004, after the horrific brawl in the stands of the NBA's Detroit Pistons game at their home arena (in "New Fallujah", as Rush Limbaugh dubbed the city after watching the incident), I compared it to footage of sporting events from what seems like centuries ago--the mid-1960s:

A few years ago, when NFL Films began running its Inside The Vault series on ESPN, I was struck by how conservative and dignified most mid-'60s fans looked. There was little or no team merchandise available, so fans arrived to stadiums on Sunday looking like they had just come from church (which many no doubt had), rather than wearing rainbow-colored wigs, Darth Vader Helmets, or cheeseheads. No doubt, the games had their share of hecklers, but I'll bet that in general, fans of the past were much more subdued than today's members of Raiders Nation, the Philadelphia Eagles' crazed fans, or...the courtside fans of the NBA's Detroit Pistons.

This isn't meant to exclude the players' guilt in Friday's incident: compare atheletes of the past with today's every-millionare-for-himself attitude. (Indiana's Ron Artest, the player who was banned for the rest of the season for being the pointman in the fight, actually asked for time off before the fight--to promote a rap album he was releasing on his recording label!)

But somehow, and without really thinking consciously about it, society has created the notion that sports arenas are a place for fans to go almost literally insane, rather than merely observe the hometown team in person and cheer for them. But the Pistons/Pacers rumble gives sports--and the public that watches them in person--a chance to hit the control/alt/delete keys and reset.

In "The Death of Sportsmanship", Brent Bozell writes that based on the crowds' constant F-bombing of the Navy's football team at a Rutgers home game, that reset button is nowhere to be found.

The week is far from over, but it's already been filled with deja vu all over again. And again.

Or as to paraphrase those parodies of 1930s-era Time magazine, Backwards ran the flashbacks until reeled the mind...

Want to relive 1945? The Washington Post makes Gerald Ford look like a brilliant Cold War historian.

Or maybe you'd like to revisit 1994? OJ's back in the police blotter once again.

How 'bout 1997? Matt Drudge has the dinosaur media p.o.ed all over again.

Or, why not something as recent as 2004! On National Talk Like A Pirate Day, avast maties, for the return of the Captain Dan the Newsman, swashbuckling his way back into the Blogosphere's hearts with a $70 million lawsuit against his former employer.

Or we can set the Wayback Machine back to the new Ice Age predicted by NASA in 1971; and way, way back--to 1492.

...Where it all will end, knows God!

Update: speaking of "a couple of week links", welcome readers of Jules Crittenden and Don Surber!

Roger L. Simon writes:

When people ask me about my relative soft shoe to the political center after decades as a dedicated left-liberal, they usually say something like: “You’re one of those 9/11 Democrats, aren’t you? Like your buddy Ron Silver.” I mostly nod. It’s hard to deny 9/11 altered my view of things considerably. But what I almost always don’t tell them is those views were already changing - because of the OJ Trial. In a sense, weird as this may sound, the Juice prepped me for 9/11.

Read the whole thing.

The NFL was one of the very few consistent bright spots in the otherwise dismal 1970s, as the league enjoyed one of its most memorable decades: the rise of the Cowboys (not to mention their cheerleaders) as "America's Team", the Steelers' four Lombardi trophies, the Dolphins' undefeated season, the "Luv Ya Blue" Oilers, etc. But it speaks volumes about the Decade From Hell and the blight that it cast upon everything it touched that professional football's most celebrated individual athlete during that decade was O.J. Simpson. And still is.

Just to follow-up on our NFL-themed post earlier today, Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett is showing dramatic signs of early improvement after a brutal spinal cord injury which occurred during the Bills' opening game against Denver.

Well, here's one way to build a consistent NFL powerhouse:

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has determined that the New England Patriots violated league rules Sunday when they videotaped defensive signals by the New York Jets' coaches, according to league sources.

NFL security officials confiscated a camera and videotape from Patriots video assistant Matt Estrella on the New England sidelines when it was suspected he was recording the Jets' defensive signals. Sources say the visual evidence confirmed the suspicion.

Goodell is considering severe sanctions, including the possibility of docking the Patriots "multiple draft picks" because it is the competitive violation in the wake of a stern warning to all teams since he became commissioner, the sources said. The Patriots have been suspected in previous incidents.

The Patriots will be allowed an opportunity to present their case by Friday, sources said, most likely via the telephone.

The league also was reviewing a possible violation into the number of radio frequencies the Patriots were using during Sunday's game, sources said. The team did not have a satisfactory explanation when asked about possible irregularities in its communication setup during the game.

Goodell is expected to have a decision no later than Friday but that is not set in stone.

The league refused comment but did confirm Monday that they were reviewing a possible violation by the Patriots.

Back in 2004, immediately after Super Bowl XXXVIII, and its infamous "wardrobe malfunction", when the Pats won the second of their third Super Bowls (so far), Paul Attner of The Sporting News wrote that Bill Belichick has helped the Patriots crack the NFL code. In hindsight, he had no idea just how prescient he was!

(Between this, Kevin Everett's horrific spinal injury, and the dog days of Michael Vick, the NFL is off to some start this year, huh?)

James Taranto wryly notes that "Life Imitates the Movies":

"You've proved to me that all this ultra-violence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned my lesson, sir. I see now what I've never seen before. I'm cured, praise God! . . . I see that it's wrong! It's wrong because it's like against society. It's wrong because everybody has the right to live and be happy without being tolchocked and knifed."--Alex de Large (Malcolm McDowell) in "A Clockwork Orange," 1971

"First, I want to apologize, you know, for all the things that--that I've done and that I have allowed to happen. . . . I was ashamed and totally disappointed in myself to say the least. . . . I want to apologize to all the young kids out there for my immature acts and, you know, what I did was, what I did was very immature so that means I need to grow up. . . . I feel like we all make mistakes. It's just I made a mistake in using bad judgment and making bad decisions. And you know, those things, you know, just can't happen. Dog fighting is a terrible thing, and I did reject it."--dogfighting conspirator and erstwhile NFL star Michael Vick, Aug. 27, 2007

As I've written before, it's Anthony Burgess' world, we just live in it.

(If it's Stanley Kubrick's world, I'd sooner live in this one than the one with the Korova Milk Bar.)

Update: Of course, sometimes the Ludovico Treatment fails...

ESPN reports that the NFL has announced that they're suspending Michael Vick "indefinitely":

The NFL has suspended Falcons quarterback Michael Vick indefinitely without pay following his admission of guilt in a dogfighting scheme.

On Friday, Vick filed his plea agreement in federal court admitting to conspiracy in a dogfighting ring and agreeing that the enterprise included killing pit bulls and gambling. He denied making side bets on the fights, but admitted to bankrolling them.

Friday afternoon, a letter to Vick from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said, in part:

"Your admitted conduct was not only illegal, but also cruel and reprehensible" and regardless whether he personally placed bets, "your actions in funding the betting and your association with illegal gambling both violate the terms of your NFL player contract and expose you to corrupting influences in derogation of one of the most fundamental responsibilities of an NFL player."

Goodell freed the Falcons to "assert any claims or remedies" to recover $22 million of Vick's signing bonus from the 10-year, $130 million contract he signed in 2004.

A few days ago, Yahoo Sports' Dan Wetzel described Vick's recent travails as "Unique talent, inexplicable fall":

We've grown callous to the self-destructing rich and famous of sports and entertainment, be it from drugs or drink, divorce or gambling, even murder and mayhem.

But dogfighting? Did Michael Vick really blow it all – a $130 million contract and multiple endorsement deals – to pursue this barbaric hobby in the woods of Virginia?

"People are going to start looking at me with stupidity," Vick told ESPN during the NFL draft, when he was still declaring his innocence. "That's stupid."

It's beyond stupid. The NFL employs players who have been convicted of spouse abuse, involuntary manslaughter due to drunken driving and obstruction of justice in a homicide investigation, to name a few. It's not called the National Felon League for nothing.

In Hollywood, we've come to treat troubled actors and actresses as theater. In Washington, D.C., political sex and bribe scandals are met with a yawn.

Yet this one shocked America, in part because of the viciousness of the crime and in part because of its senselessness.

Vick isn't some talentless starlet or a hack politician. He was a true star with true ability, and in his prime at 27, set up to be a top player in America's top sport.

The key phrase there is "set up"; not in the sense of being framed, but being coddled by the NFL. For several months, Debbie Schlussel has noted that the NFL protected Vick's image on numerous occasions, including banning sales of Falcons' jerseys bearing his number and his two alter-egos, "Ron Mexico" and "Ookie", both infamous among NFL fans. The league magically caused a sure drug-related arrest at Miami International Airport to vanish. This may or may not be tied in with the NFL itself, but it's also worth noting that the senior Jim Mora lost his radio show after agreeing with a guest that his son's most mercurial player was a "coach killer", an otherwise fairly common phrase amongst sports fans.

Every year, the NFL invites veteran players to address rooms full of newly drafted rookies on the exponentially increased public exposure and off-the-field hazards associated with playing America's most-watched professional sport. And every year, by protecting players such as Vick, the NFL nullifies its own message. Perhaps if they had intervened earlier with Vick, his career wouldn’t have been put on indefinite hold with such a nuclear flameout.

Heh.

On Patterico.com: "Don’t Swallow Whole Just Yet What The Media Is Feeding You About the Vick Plea Deal".

The greatest running back who ever played QB may be about to enter the ultimate dog-eat-dog world.

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports looks at one Giant headache: Michael Strahan not showing up for training camp. "NFL coaches have spent years trying to figure out how to stop Michael Strahan from recording another sack. Who knew the secret just might have been a curly haired suburban mother of twins?"

The cliché is that famous deaths come in threes, but usually not this quickly:

Bill Walsh, the groundbreaking football coach who won three Super Bowls and perfected the ingenious schemes that became known as the West Coast offense during a Hall of Fame career with the San Francisco 49ers, has died. He was 75.

Walsh died early Monday following a long battle with leukemia, according to Stanford University, where he served as coach and athletic director.

Michael Lewis' recent book, The Blind Side documents the revolution in professional football that occurred in the 1980s, as Walsh's West Coast Offense dramatically changed the passing game, and the dominance of Lawrence Taylor had a similar impact on defense. While "L.T." was blessed with once-in-a-lifetime athletic brilliance, Walsh's strategies systematized the NFL offensive game, which is why so many of his protégés have had terrific careers themselves.

"Michael Vick has done something no politician in Washington ever accomplished", Brent Bozell writes. "The star quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons has united nearly everyone against him, indicted for being at the center of a gruesome spectacle of dog-fighting and gambling."

To be fair though, I'm not sure if Yahoo's Dan Wetzel would entirely agree with Bozell on the unanimity of Vick's detractors, though.

In "Racial Divide", Dan Wetzel gives us a snapshot of Michael Vick's day from hell:

Read More »

"California high court ends Raiders lawsuit against NFL".

CBS runs to daylight and makes victims out of aging former NFL gladiators. As an Opinion Journal piece back in February noted, look for more of these stories; "Noticeably absent from this debate is any discussion about the personal responsibility these players bear for their post-career conditions".

But if the networks truly cared, shouldn't they simply drop all NFL coverage? Sure, it would accelerate the speed of TV's ongoing ratings collapse a hundred-fold. But the money created by television advertising is what inspires NFL players to punish their bodies during what they hope will be long, multimillion dollar careers. Aren't the networks enablers themselves, if they continue to air their abusers’ video?

And if television doesn't put a stop to this voluntarily, then all I can say is: C’mon Congress: your next ban on free speech awaits!

(And yes, I'm taking absurdity to its natural conclusion; like a lot of guys, pro football is one of the few remaining network shows I still regularly tune into.)

AP reports, "Donovan McNabb had the same reaction most fans had when the Philadelphia Eagles selected quarterback Kevin Kolb with their first pick in last month's NFL draft":

"It was shocking," McNabb said Tuesday in an interview on WIP-AM radio.

Speaking publicly for the first time since the draft on April 28-29, McNabb downplayed the perception he's upset the Eagles selected his eventual successor.

The five-time Pro Bowl quarterback also said his rehab is going well following surgery for a torn knee ligament and he expects to play in the preseason.

"When you draft somebody at the position you're in, of course you have questions of 'What does that mean?"' McNabb said. "The most important thing for me is to make sure I'm healthy and 100 percent and get back out there competing and do the right thing on the field."

McNabb met with coach Andy Reid soon after the draft, but wouldn't reveal details of their conversation.

Fortunately, Jonathan Last has the exclusive--and rather salty--transcript...

Having only taken office in January, New York's Governor Elliot Spitzer has apparently already resolved every major issue facing the Empire State in record time. How else to explain this?

Normally it is Jersey fans who gripe that they don't get any respect from pro sports teams that play at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford but have "New York" in their names.

But three New York assemblymen recently sponsored a bill to stop football's Giants and Jets and soccer's Red Bulls from using the Empire State's name or abbreviation because they don't play their home games in New York.

"At the very least, the location of the place where a team plays should be accurate, and reflect where they actually play their home games," Assemblyman Ivan Lafayette, of Queens, writes in the bill, as reported by The Record of Bergen County in Saturday newspapers.

As Steven Den Beste writes:

How do you enforce this? If these teams are actually based in Joisey, then a New York State law can't be enforced in Joisey. And if the teams play in New York, then the law wouldn't apply. Besides which, wouldn't this be an infringement of the First Amendment?

And why would New York want to disassociate itself with two NFL teams with longstanding historic ties to the state?

Elsewhere, speaking of sports and naming rights, my wife has some thoughts on advertising and NASCAR over at her business law blog.

Dr. Sidney Theodore Freedman weighs in on the Randy Moss trade from Oakland to New England: "Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice".

Your next NBC's tilting far to the left Talking Points Memo has just written itself. AP reports: "Olbermann to work football pre-game show for NBC".

Update: Scott Whitlock writes:

Readers may recall that, back in 2000, radio star Rush Limbaugh auditioned to join ABC’s "Monday Night Football" broadcast, an act that horrified the "Washington Post" and other liberal outlets. MRC President Brent Bozell discussed the Post’s outrage in a column dated June 6, 2000:

First was Thomas Boswell, who on May 24 wrote, "This week, our trend toward the celebrity-as-universal-expert may have reached a comic peak. ABC thinks maybe Rush Limbaugh can become the next Howard Cosell." Limbaugh, Boswell sneered verbally, "appeals to the right demographic: divorced, couch-potato, gun-worshiping, angry white guys. Sorry, I mean patriotic American males ages 25 to 34."

All that was just the buildup to Boswell’s big cheap-shot finish: "Could [ESPN’s baseball coverage] use another voice in the booth? If Al Michaels gets Rush Limbaugh, maybe, someday, Jon Miller could be lucky enough to team up with John Rocker."

Will the Post and other liberal media organizations decry Olbermann’s selection?

Good luck--heck, Howard Kurtz isn't even sure that Olbermann's on the left.

The day after the death of Grambling coach Eddie Robinson made the