"Football players say the entire name of their sport...."

[captainsblog]

"Because they tend to forget, because they get hit on the head quite hard."-  Robert Klein.

Two stories from the past week brought back that old line.  The one surfacing over the weekend was just sad.

Probably even the furthest-from-fans of football have heard of a guy named Peyton Manning. There were a few news items about him in recent weeks. What even fans of his may not remember, though, is that in his entry-draft season, there was serious controversy over whether he was the best, or only the second-best, available quarterback to be selected. By the day of the draft, it was unclear who would be picked first.  A newspaper polled NFL general managers at the time, and 14 of the 20 respondents placed Manning second. Yet the Indianapolis Colts picked him, leaving San Diego with that still-sainted other collegian to be their franchise quarterback.

Anyone remember his name? Unfortunately, he's been in the news recently, as well:

Just two days after being arrested for burglary and possession of drugs, Ryan Leaf has been arrested again. Showing the kind of consistency he never did as a professional quarterback, the most recent arrest was, once again, for burglary and possession of drugs.

Details of this most recent arrest haven't been released, but the good news is that he can't do it again. He's being detained this time on a violation of his probation.

The second-overall pick in the 1998 NFL Draft, Leaf's history of abusing prescription drugs is long and, evidently, ongoing. In 2009, Leaf was charged with breaking into a home, and seven counts of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud. He was eventually fined $20,000 and sentenced to 10 years of probation.

All of this came after Leaf's very short, very unspectacular professional career. In 1998, Leaf was thought to be the equal of Peyton Manning as a quarterback, and there was much debate over who would be the better professional. Manning will eventually be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Leaf retired at the age of 26, having played just three years in the NFL with a quarterback rating of 50.0. And the unfortunate truth is that his NFL career may have gone better than his life after football.

Warning: the mug shots attached to that story are disturbing.  Yet not nearly as disturbing as the audio you can hear as a part of this story:

With the audio released by documentary filmmaker Sean Pamphilon, as first reported by Yahoo! Sports, there is no disputing the intent that Williams conveyed during a fiery pre-game speech to his defense on the eve of the Saints' playoff game in San Francisco nearly three months ago.

That Williams talked of "killing the head" in order for the body to die — a favorite expression of the coach — sets a tone but is hardly enough to confirm the intent of the alleged bounty scheme.

It's tough talk, motivational stuff that is hardly exclusive to Williams.

No doubt, the NFL coaching ranks is filled with tough talkers.

Yet Williams clearly crosses the line when he implores his players to blow out Crabtree's ACL, repeatedly "touch the head" of 49ers players amid all the hyper-sensitivity in the NFL about head injuries, and to find out how fragile 49ers receiver/returner Kyle Williams was after battling concussions in the previous weeks.

In the 12-minute recording that Pamphilon secured while working on a documentary, The United States of Football, Williams is heard urging his players to clip tight end Vernon Davis' ankles around the pile. He talks of laying (expletives) out.

While the coach utters another favorite phrase about a "remember me" shot on quarterback Alex Smith, Pamphilon says that Williams rubs his fingers together as a signal for cash and implies payment.

"The first one's on me," Williams says.

"The first one" may ultimately refer to his being the first-ever lifetime suspension from the league.  Even before this audio surfaced, the commisioner had suspended him indefinitely and at least for the entire 2012 season. How they will ever find a way to bring him back in the face of this evidence, I can't fathom. Strangest of all was the dude's going on about such things WHILE HE KNEW A FILMMAKER WAS RECORDING IT. It probably didn't even seem the least bit wrong to him.

Williams was a wunderkind assistant who got the Bills' head coaching job about a decade ago. He was a know-it-all blowhard then, and obviously being fired a few years later didn't do much to take him down any pegs.  I have no use for the apologists who think these suspensions are encouraging football "sissies" or that the government will soon outlaw tackling, but if stuff like this keeps surfacing, I don't think I'll be able to watch this game anymore.

Comments

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

I will confess to being completely unsurprised that Williams was offering bounties or that he thought he was either being clever or was above the rules of the game. I hesitate to judge people by their familiars, but his wife was notorious for insisting that the EMS crew stationed right next to her box not come into her sight (or be visible to anyone in the luxury box). I guess the sight of working class/poor people was only acceptable if she was looking out over them from her lofty position. *rolls eyes*

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

"We don't have emergencies. Emergencies are for the little people."- Leona Williams

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

The recordings of the Saints' coach were very disturbing. That he just blathered on while he knew someone was filming it speaks volumes to the notion of the practice not being any big deal. That's disturbing in itself.

All sports have "enforcers," and I suspect that it's more or less blatant, probably less so now that all this is coming out. Hockey's the same way, though. You know how goons are hired to be goons, and it's not all showboating to get the crowd riled up... Shoot, even in baseball you see instances where someone gets brained by a fastball just to remind them what's what.

The sad fact is that professional sports is a huge money-maker, and what in American society provokes lots of money being spent? Violence... And what's the quickest way to prove your might? By exercising your physical strength.

Sadly, I think these things aren't going to go away, they're just going to get smarter about the way they do it. I do yearn for the past sometimes, when things seemed simpler, but then I watch a docu by Ken Burns and I realize that it's always been this way, just manifested in different ways.