Just another nerd.
This is quite the anecdote, supposedly from the September 2003 issue of Playboy, reported by ESPN at the time,
Bucs head coach Jon Gruden, interviewed in the Sept. issue of Playboy, reveals that he lost his virginity at age 17, in South Bend, Indiana. “I lost my virginity to the Notre Dame fight song,” Gruden says. “There was a band?” asks Playboy. “No, not even music,” Gruden replies. “But it was in my mind.”
I thought I’d seen the worst of the Jay Cutler jokes, but The Onion delivers an incredibly brutal take on the announcement of Cutler’s recent divorce.
Jay Cutler’s Marriage Completion Percentage Drops To Zero
Ouch. Too far.
ESPN’s Seth Wickersham has an excellent look at the inside workings of the worst team in football and, apparently, one of the most poorly run organizations in sports–the Cleveland Browns.
The version of the Browns that emerges from Wickersham’s profile is the mother of all train wrecks, and this is typical of the sort of “can’t quite get anything right” nature of the organization.
Marketing executives wanted employees to see how fans were engaging with the Browns on social media, so they projected the Browns feed onto a giant wall at the facility. It was like broadcasting talk radio over the entire building, and one day in particular, it was worse than that. One of the marketing staffers entered a search for #dp — for Dawg Pound. The problem was, that hashtag carried a few different meanings, one of which triggered an array of porn to be broadcast onto a wall for the entire office to see for more than 20 minutes, until a tech employee killed the feed.
LOL.
Johnny Manziel, for those who don’t follow American sports teams, is a quarterback for the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns. Well, he is until March 2016 when the Browns will almost certainly cut him from the team.
Manziel achieved a great deal of fame in 2012 when, as a freshman, he broke a number of NCAA Division I football records. He played so well that year, that Manziel won the Heisman Trophy–college football’s most prestigious award and one that no freshman had ever won.
After playing two years of college football, he entered the NFL draft and was selected as the 22nd pick by the Cleveland Browns. That was a bit of a letdown for Manziel as he had been projected to go as high as a top-5 pick by NFL commentators. Numerous off-the-field incident–including apparent alcohol and anger management issues–made a lot of teams unwilling to take a chance on him.
So far, his NFL career has validated the concerns of those teams who passed on him. Manziel has been in one controversy after another. He appears to have a substance abuse problem, and has had several disturbing domestic violence-related run-ins with police. As Slate summarizes Manziel’s latest off-field incident,
NFL quarterback Johnny Manziel’s personal and professional problems took a turn for the (more) serious on Thursday with a Forth Worth police report alleging the Heisman winner assaulted and threatened to kill his ex-girlfriend over the weekend. Colleen Crowley, who dated the quarterback for two years before splitting in December, outlined to police an alleged assault that began after a dispute in a Dallas hotel room and ended at her Ft. Worth apartment. Crowley told police she feared for her life and that Manziel pulled her hair, hit her, and said he would kill them both.
This and similar incidents this year indicate Manziel is a danger to himself and others. And yet, there are craven sports writers such as Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel who put the blinders on and calculate the costs of Manziel’s ongoing breakdown solely in football terms. Wetzel describes Crowley telling police that Manziel threatened to kill himself and her and then writes (emphasis added),
Even if this latest incident didn’t happen, as Manziel contends, he’s almost assuredly not “stable,” “safe” or “secure.” Manziel, in desperate need of calm in his life, continues to find himself in the middle of drama, whether it’s pictures of him partying or despicable allegations showing up on police reports.
“I know I’ve been having fun,” he told TMZ, “but I just need to get my body right. I’m 100 percent committed to playing football.”
Manziel can only hope there is still an NFL team out there that sees enough in him that they are willing to spend time, money and resources to chase the witnesses and video footage, and sign a guy to a camp contract while covering their eyes and hoping next week doesn’t bring another incident.
Wow. Are you kidding, Dan? What Manziel should hope for is that he can find another NFL team to overlook his off-field unraveling so he can keep playing football? Does Manziel have to actually follow through on his threat to kill Crowley before it might occur to Wetzel that NFL should back away from Manziel entirely and stop enabling his behavior?
Here, lets rewrite Wetzel’s last paragraph as if a human being had written it,
Manziel can only hope there are no NFL teams willing to continue spending time, money and resources to enable his self-destructive behavior. Instead of covering their eyes and hoping Manziel’s problems just go away, the NFL should make it clear that if he ever intends on playing professional football again, he needs to make dealing with his personal problems his only priority.
Back in March the Washington Post published an in-depth look of “medicine” as practiced by NFL doctors. As the article title aptly summed it up, NFL medical standards, practices are different than almost anywhere else. Despite the nonsense spewed by NFL apparatchiks about how player safety always comes first, there is little resemblance between NFL medicine and the way real doctor’s actually perform their duties.
For example (emphasis added),
. . . an ordinary citizen would receive a shot of the powerful painkiller Toradol for acute pain only after undergoing surgery, and typically for no more than five days. But in the NFL, doctors administer it weekly despite dangerous side effects that include renal failure, and its ability to mask pain to such a degree that a player injured during a game may not even be aware of the extent of his injury.
In a 2002 academic paper, 28 NFL physicians reported administering Toradol every game day, injecting up to 35 players per club. Though NFL doctors say use has declined in recent years, several current and recently retired players said the drug continues to be administered freely — and the NFL Physicians Society felt compelled to issue guidelines on its usage last season. “It is not a legitimate thing to offer a player on a weekly basis without a proper indication,” said Andrew Bishop, an orthopedist who for 11 years was the Atlanta Falcons’ team physician.
I suspect in the long-term these medical problems and potential liability they create will drive the NFL out of business.