Big Easy will party for Super Bowl
The Super Bowl will take place in New Orleans, which means it will be like Mardi Gras, though with presumably less public nudity. It will still, of course, lead to all sort of trouble.
During Mardi Gras this year there were a total of 1,056 arrests for offences that included drug possession, simple battery, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, drinking and driving, outstanding warrants, curfew violations for people under 16, gun arrests, etc. People had their feet run over by floats during parades, suffered alcohol-induced seizures and asthma attacks, and received fractured teeth and broken noses from overenthusiastically thrown beads.
At the end of it, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said, “Simply stated, the Mardi Gras of 2012 rocked,” and people agreed. Violent crime was actually down, almost everyone had a good time and the city made millions. All the other stuff was just part of the party and, as long as it was kept under control, it was OK.
That, of course, is the difference between New Orleans and the NFL. This week, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell suffered a New Orleans-related public rebuke this week from his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, who vacated the player suspensions Goodell levied from the investigation of the Saints bounty scandal.
The scandal was always kind of strange, since it was the NFL that investigated it and then released its collected evidence to the world, like prosecutors who had uncovered a big corruption ring. Look what we found, they said. Players being paid to hurt one another! In games! And Goodell delivered wrecking-ball suspensions to the coach, assistant coaches, the general manager and four players.
Now, Tagliabue’s 22-page report found a bounty program did exist in New Orleans.
But Tagliabue, asked to review the suspensions as part of the appeal process, also examined a real array of evidence in a way Goodell did not — like Lennie Briscoe taking over for the hotshot rookie cop who sometimes bends the rules on an episode of Law and Order — and decided that Goodell overreached by suspending players Scott Fujita, Jonathan Vilma, Anthony Hargrove and Will Smith.
Tagliabue essentially said yes, bounties have been part of the NFL forever, but before you suspend players you need to make clear that this isn’t acceptable any more and, by the way, in a league full of unguaranteed contracts, it’s hard to hold players this responsible for following the orders of their coaches and general manager.
So yes, this was a blow to Goodell’s untrammelled godlike powers. Meanwhile, without head coach Sean Payton, the Saints have fallen to 5-8 and quarterback Drew Brees told reporters the other day that Goodell has very little to no credibility with players because of the bounty process, and intimated Tagliabue’s involvement felt “staged” to get the league out of its mess.
All of this, of course, is the parade float obscuring the real dark side. Goodell tried to use the Saints to prove that he’s tough on violence that goes beyond the norm and all but announced that he was shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
But whether or not the NFL draws a line in the sand on violence, the normal amount of football-related violence destroys players’ brains and bodies, and doesn’t require cash bonuses.
At least 2,400 former players are suing the league over head injuries. That’s the difference between the dark sides of Mardi Gras and the NFL because in the NFL, the violence is the party.
Last week, this space went 3-12-1, which is almost unbelievably bad, and I know what you’re thinking: How did he get the three?
The picks
Minnesota (+2.5) at St.
Louis Adrian Peterson has run for 1,600 yards in 13 games, which means he needs 168.3 yards per game in his final three games to break the record of 2,105 held by Eric Dickerson, who set the record in his second season, when he was 24. Peterson is trying to break it in his sixth season at 27, one year after a two-ligament knee surgery. Unreal. Pick: Minnesota Detroit (-6) at Arizona Calvin Johnson has 1,546 receiving yards and needs 303 yards in three games to break Jerry Rice’s singleseason record, set in 1995. Weirdly, Johnson only has five touchdowns this season, which is almost as weird as remembering Rice ended his career in Oakland and Seattle. Pick: Detroit Seattle (-5.5) at Buffalo This is the fifth annual regular-season Bills game in Toronto and will be the fifth one that has not sold out. The prices have been reduced and the matchups have improved.
But it’s still the Bills and it still doesn’t matter. Pick: Seattle Pittsburgh (-1) at Dallas The Cowboys won last week after nose tackle Josh Brent killed practice squad teammate Jerry Brown in a drunken car crash in which Brent reportedly had a blood-alcohol level that was twice the legal limit. The NFL has a car service that will take any player anywhere. What a selfish, tragic waste. Pick: Dallas San Francisco (+5) at New
England New England’s three losses: 20-18 against Arizona (when Stephen Gostkowski missed a 42-yard field goal with one second left); a 31-30 loss in Baltimore (on a Ravens gamewinning field goal with no time left), and 24-23 at Seattle (on a Seattle touchdown pass with 1:18 left). Pick: New England N.Y. Jets (+1) at Tennessee
Last week, ex-Jets receiver Braylon Edwards tweeted, “Don’t blame Sanchez. I played there. Blame the idiots calling shots.” This week the Jets signed … Braylon Edwards, who told reporters, “After the tweet, it was like, ‘Yeah, I burned that bridge.’ ” He will spend next week telling supermodels they are ugly. Pick: Tennessee