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While the NFL fully relies upon our business to stay in business — big business — nothing else seems to be any of our business.
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While the NFL fully relies upon our business to stay in business — big business — nothing else seems to be any of our business.
Your job is to buy PSLs; tickets; expensive trinkets; $10 cups of warm, flat beer; cable TV or satellite packages; at least two of four or five per team jerseys; NFL and team phone apps; “official” cars, plumbing supplies and salad dressings of NFL teams; TV money-ordered bait-and-switch schedule flexes; price-gouged parking spots; and now sucker-betting opportunities supplied by the league and its teams.
But as Bernie Madoff clients understood, in return for promises of 15 percent returns, just “don’t ask any questions.”
Yet one question remains worth asking, answering, or at least addressing, as it continues to grow and persist: Why are so many NFL players, mostly physically imposing college men, busted for carrying weapons, often the kind designed to spray many bullets and kill many people?
Where do they go, why, when and with whom that they find it essential to carry guns? If they expect life-threatening trouble, why go there? If they expect to have to defend themselves with deadly force why is that a logical destination?
The arrest of NFL (and even college players) for illegally packing has become a weekly occurrence. If your employees were regularly arrested for carrying weapons, you’d demand to know why, among many other particulars, for the sake of the business and its clean employees, no? And changes would be made.
But then there’s Roger Goodell’s NFL.
Last week, Chiefs defensive end Frank Clark, a former student-athlete at Michigan, was arrested in Los Angeles for carrying an Uzi, a submachine gun, as if he were expecting that kind of trouble.
His attorney, Alex Spiro, said that the Uzi belonged to Clark’s “bodyguard.” Help me on this, Barrister: In what environment would Clark — a 6-foot-3, 260-pound NFL defensive lineman — need not just a bodyguard, but a bodyguard with a submachine gun?
It was this arrest that brought to light Clark’s arrest in March on another gun charge, thus two separate gun charges in three months.
In 2012, he was arrested for a felony home invasion — stealing a laptop from a dorm room. He was sentenced to one year of probation but played on as a student-athlete. In 2014, he was dismissed from Michigan following an alleged violent episode with his girlfriend in a hotel room. He plea-bargained to a charge of disorderly conduct.
No matter, no big deal. In 2015, Seattle selected him in the second round of the NFL draft. Traded to the Chiefs in 2020, he signed a $105 million contract, $63 million of it guaranteed. Now he has two different gun charges in three months.
Also last week, rookie Vikings defensive tackle Jaylen Twyman, drafted out of Pitt, was shot four times while visiting family in Washington. His agent, blustering Drew Rosenhaus, explained Twyman was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Well, that answers it. Which of his clients have been shot for being in the right place at the right time? Beyond that, how often are such drive-by shootings done at random?
Two weeks ago, Giants defensive back Sam Beal pleaded guilty to 2020 gun charges. Since March, there have been at least five arrests of NFL players on gun charges. On a single Saturday in 2020, four were arrested on gun charges in three separate incidents.
Yet, the Nero Fiddles League plays stupid, as if working off a copy of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to decriminalize crime while the voices of the NFL’s partner TV networks only concede that players have “off-field issues,” which now cover anything from a flooded basement to aggravated domestic assault.
So back to the top. Why do so many players carry guns? Nothing so prevalent can be a coincidence. Perhaps Goodell doesn’t see it as a problem, or is just counting on it to go away by itself. He knows he can count on the sports media to keep it on the down-low.
Yet if the answer remains that it’s none of the NFL’s business, why should it be any of ours? And if the NFL doesn’t care about the integrity of its product, why should we? You’re supposed to pay the freight, sit down and shut up. And make lots of bad odds bets.
Amazin’ voices expose seven-inning distortion to the game
As Gary Cohen and Ron Darling discussed Friday during the first doubleheader game between the Phillies and Mets (both games went eight innings), such new-rule games destroy whatever sense is left in them.
With Philly leading 1-0 in the fifth inning, Darling said the teams were approaching the presumptive end of the game, which changes everything.
Cohen: “There’s no way you pinch hit for your pitcher in the fifth down, 1-0, in a nine-inning game, but you do in a seven-inning game.”
In other words, the next softball team needs the field.
And because this game was tied after seven, the eighth was played with automatic runners on second. All aboard for Somewhere Else!
Anyone old enough to recall the jingle, “Vote, vote for Miss Rheingold”? Can’t have that anymore. Tough to find a woman — er, biological female — who “identifies” as a beer.
Anyway, ranked voting, as witnessed in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary, is nothing new.
Years ago, when TV network employees were assigned to vote on Sports Emmys, those we knew at NBC received their orders:
Vote NBC’s goods first. Anything worthy of winning that wasn’t NBC’s was to be ranked last, and all CBS and ABC’s submissions placed as low as possible. One honest voter could mess up the whole thing!
Then there was the late agent and character, Art Kaminsky, who stuffed the ballot box in a long-ago Post survey to determine readers’ favorite news anchor among CBS’ Dan Rather, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and ABC’s Peter Jennings.
The winner? In a stunning upset, write-in candidate Forrest Sawyer, then a “CBS Morning News” anchor — and Kaminsky client.
CWS KO’s MLB on ESPN
Reader Damian Digiulian much prefers ESPN’s College World Series telecasts to its MLB versions, because less is more. The CWS productions have no artificial additives in the form of that “silly strike-zone box to distract me from seeing the actual pitch and deciding for myself whether it’s a strike.” Wonder if kids enter MLB parks these days confused as to why that box isn’t visible.
Then there are readers such as Patrick Rice, who recognize silly, look-what-we-can-do graphics, in this case a Game 6 Lightning-Islanders posting that appeared over the live form of Tampa Bay’s Steven Stamkos to let us know the fascinating news that “Stamkos [is] 4-of-7 on face offs.”
And it appears that fat THE YES APP, like one of those pillow tags threatening arrest if one removes it, is going to remain on the screen this entire Yankees season.
Pitchers of seven-inning no-hitters will now be rewarded with unlimited edition Rob Manfred trophies that come attached to bells with clappers so they’ll always have a hollow ring to them.
This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick
