Football, food fights, kneeling and needing an accurate homeless count

Gang, there’s so much to get to today that we are making a four-paragraph-or-less pledge for our Saturday installment of bits and pieces. Deal?

We’ll start with this headline: “Tennessee’s Republican, Democratic legislators split on governor’s opioid plan.” Is there a possible way to finish the sentence “Tennessee’s Republican, Democratic legislators split on … ” that actually proves untrue?

Puppy cuteness? Hollywood’s hypocrisy? OK, we got the only way possible to make sure we could get everyone in Nashville on the same page: “Tennessee’s Republican, Democratic legislators agree that Pat Summitt was awesome.”

NOT ALL KNEES THE SAME

We have all spent a lot of time discussing people taking a knee in football games, and it has had little to do with running out the clock. We all know about Colin Kaepernick, who started the pregame protests during the national anthem before the 2016 NFL season to, in his words, call attention to the treatment of minorities by police officers.

Well, a much-lessheralded kneeler on a sideline has not been afforded the same freedom of choice in the eyes of the courts. Meet coach Joe Kennedy, a high school head coach in Washington, who was fired after he took a knee for a silent and solo prayer after a game in August.

After being terminated, Kennedy appealed to the legal system. On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit refused to hear his appeal of the decision upholding his termination. The Court of Appeals wrote: “When Kennedy kneeled and prayed on the fifty-yard line immediately after games while in view of students and parents, he spoke as a public employee, not as a private citizen, and his speech therefore was constitutionally unprotected.”

Protests during the anthem on a knee are OK. Silent prayers on a knee after a game are forbidden. Read that again.

FOOTBALL, I

Earlier this week, Vince McMahon, who has made a ton of money as the ringleader of professional wrestling for the last few decades, announced he is going to restart the XFL in an effort to challenge the monolith that is the NFL. Now seems to be the right time, considering all of the issues confronting the NFL.

While McMahon’s vision is somewhat unclear beyond eight teams playing a 10-week schedule starting in 2020 — and man can we all say a silent prayer that Johnny Manziel and Lane Kiffin are involved in this project — here’s a suggestion: Bring a team to Chattanooga.

Think about it this way: Finley Stadium and its 20,000-or-so capacity is the perfect-size venue. Being in the heart of the SEC would allow a great tie-in if you go regional in terms of prospects. And heck, it’s not like we couldn’t put Mr. McMahon up in that swanky suite at the Westin, right?

“No one has approached us about that,” Tim Morgan, the president of the Chattanooga Sports Committee, said Friday through a hearty laugh. “But we are always willing to listen.”

Hey, maybe Allan Jones could buy in and jump-start the Chattanooga (Loan) Sharks or John Thornton could get the Chattanooga Thunder going. And hey, if he owned the team, he wouldn’t have to pay seven figures to run through the T before the game.

FOOD FIGHTS

Wow, we know that people are passionate about food. Every time there’s a new restaurant story on the TFP website, it is always the most viewed. But here are a couple of stories that take the love of food over the top.

Let’s go to Moundville, Ala., during the holidays when two brothers engaged in a fistfight because the younger brother felt slighted by the size of the piece of cheesecake the older had sliced for him. When authorities arrived, the Moundville police chief was asked if he thought the slice was “big enough for a grown [expletive] man.” The chief thought it was, so there’s that.

And if we are going to talk about hangry — the condition when people get so hungry they become noticeably angry — we need to mention James De Paola, a 55-year-old Georgia man who was arrested for fighting with his wife because the grilled cheese she made him was too cheesy.

James told his wife she should have used two pieces of cheese rather than three. He was arrested after trying to prevent his wife from calling 911 and destruction of property. Egad.

SATURDAY STARS

Thanks to the excellent story from this paper’s Rosana Hughes this week, we got to meet the volunteers helping with the annual point-intime count of the homeless, an unofficial census coordinated by the Chattanooga Regional Homeless Coalition and other local agencies.

This work is important. Most important on that list is the clear denial city and local governments want to cling to about the growing number of homeless people in their cities. That’s understandable because, as much as every city wants to claim growth and lower unemployment, no one wants to tout its surging homeless population.

Just on the eye test alone, it feels as if the homeless contingent in Chattanooga is growing, and here’s hoping the point-in-time folks give some accurate counts so our city can try to find ways to address the issue.