The Daily Hat Trick

The Weight of the Game: EPILOGUE Narrated by John Facenda — "The Voice of God" — NFL Films

2026-04-24T06:19:00.002-05:00

The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.

The Weight of the Game is an original work of fiction, conceived and directed by me, developed in collaboration with a writing partner. It is a unique perspective, a hypothetical discussion between legendary football personas, living and deceased. The words are invented. The themes are intentional. I hope that the humanity is real.

In John Facenda's style. In John Facenda's voice. As only John Facenda could deliver it.

John Facenda, "The Voice of God," just press "play." 1

The lights of the room fade slowly, the way autumn fades, not all at once, but by degrees, the gold giving way to something older and darker and more honest. Music rises underneath. Sam Spence's strings, measured and vast. And then...that voice. That impossible, magnificent, sepulchral baritone. The voice that made a third-down conversion sound like an historic legend. The voice that turned a football into a myth and a myth into an America.

JOHN FACENDA:

They came from the flatlands and the river towns, from the hard clay of Mississippi and the broken corridors of foster care, from the golden campuses of great universities and the cold geometry of prison cells. They came with their numbers, their touchdowns and their yards, their consecutive starts and their single-season records, their Pro Bowl selections and their championship rings, numbers that will live in the ledger of the American game long after the men who made them have turned to silence.

They were the chosen ones. The fleet of foot and the strong of hand. The ones the autumn Sundays were made for. The ones the crowds rose to greet like congregations rising for a hymn, seventy thousand voices lifting as one, calling their names into the October sky as if the names themselves were prayers.

And they were great. Let that be said clearly and without apology, here at the end of things. They were genuinely, historically, breathtakingly great at the game they played. The game that America loved above all other games. The game of collision and strategy and controlled fury. The game that asked for everything a man had and then asked again.

But greatness, as any honest accountant of the human ledger will tell you, is a statement about capacity, not character. Capacity and character are different rooms in the same house, and the house of a man's life is only as sound as the room he least frequently visits.

These men visited their greatness every Sunday, in stadiums that gleamed with the particular light of American ambition. They rarely visited the other room. The room where the women they hurt were waiting. The room where the children, their own and those of others, were growing up in the shadow of what their fathers were capable of doing. The room where the poor of Mississippi went without, because a famous name took what was theirs. The room where a young man heard that who he loved was a sin, from the mouth of a man he revered.

The game gave them everything: speed, strength, wealth, fame, the roar of the crowd, the warmth of the spotlight, and the comfort of a system designed to protect its investments. The game gave them everything except the one thing the game is not equipped to give: the capacity to be, in the silence after the final whistle, fully and responsibly human.

There is no shame in what they did on the field. There is no asterisk sufficient to contain what some of them did off it. Both things are true. The yards are real. The harm is real. The Canton busts stand. The victims stand also, in their own way, in a gallery the Hall of Fame will never build.

What makes a man? Not the thing he does in the light, with thousands watching and a scoreboard keeping honest count. Any man can be measured in the light. The measurement that matters, the one that outlasts the highlight reel and the bronze bust and the ring ceremony, is what a man does in the dark, in the private hours. When the crowd has gone home and the jersey is in the hamper and the man remains...just the man...just the choices.

In a room that exists somewhere between memory and reckoning, between the end of the game and the beginning of the real accounting, seven men sat together and said the true things. Not all of them...not perfectly...not without the residue of self-protection that clings to men even in their most honest moments. But enough...enough to constitute something rarer than a touchdown and harder to achieve than a perfect season.

They told the truth, in the dark, without the scoreboard.

And if the game, the beautiful, brutal, magnificent, deeply American game, if the game has a conscience, it was in that room: sitting in folding chairs, wearing no jersey, carrying no number.

Just men....

Finally....

Just men....

[Music swells, then fades, then nothing. The particular silence of a stadium after everyone has gone home. The field still bearing the marks of what was played there. The grass pressed down where the great ones ran. And then, from somewhere, perhaps from habit, perhaps from the Philadelphia newsroom of another era, from the desk of a man who ended every broadcast the same way for thirty years, the voice returns one final time: Quiet now...personal...almost a whisper.]

JOHN FACENDA:

Have a good night tonight. And a better day tomorrow.

Goodnight, all.

A note on authorship: The Weight of the Game was conceived, directed, and shaped by me, including the premise, the participants, the thematic architecture, the dramatic turns, and the decision to treat these men as full human beings rather than symbols. The dialogue was developed collaboratively, in the long tradition of writers who work with creative partners whose names don't always appear on the final page. I've reviewed, edited, and taken responsibility for the content. Any factual inaccuracies in statistics or public record are mine to correct. What you're reading is fiction. Please treat it as such. With that said, I hope it makes you feel something true.

1) Video from youtube.com

The Weight of the Game: A Hypothetical Conversation — Final Scene "The Coach, The Room, and The Reckoning"

2026-04-17T06:18:00.001-05:00

The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.

[The five men — Brown, Payton, Simpson, Phillips, Peterson, Vick, Favre — have settled into something approaching stillness. Not peace exactly. But the particular quiet that follows a long and honest conversation. Then the door — if there is a door — opens differently than it has before. Not tentatively, not with the studied ease of celebrity. Tony Dungy enters the way a man enters who has spent his entire life trying to do the right thing and knows, in this room, that the accounting will be full.

He takes in the room. Seven men. Six Black, one white. Every one of them carrying something. He knows all of their stories. He has lived adjacent to most of them. He stops when he sees Michael Vick.]

Dungy 1

TONY DUNGY: Mike.

MICHAEL VICK: (standing, the only man who stands) Coach.

[They embrace briefly. It is genuine. The room watches.]

TONY DUNGY: Gentlemen. Jim. Walter. (a nod to each) O.J. Lawrence. Adrian. Brett.

JIM BROWN: Tony. Sit down. You've earned a seat at any table you choose.

TONY DUNGY: I've been listening from outside for a while. I wasn't sure I should come in.

WALTER PAYTON: Why not? You're the cleanest man in professional football. Possibly in professional sports.

TONY DUNGY: (a measured pause) That's the reputation. The reputation isn't entirely accurate.

[The room stirs slightly.]

JIM BROWN: Then let's start there. Because in this room we've been trading in accuracy, not reputation.

TONY DUNGY: Yes. I know. I've been listening. Before I say anything about anyone else in this room, before I offer any perspective on what's been discussed, I need to address something about myself. Because to come in here and frame or summarize or offer wisdom without first being honest about my own record would be exactly the kind of thing this room has spent hours calling out.

MICHAEL VICK: Coach...

TONY DUNGY: No, Mike. Let me say it. (to the room) I have a documented history of public statements and affiliations that caused real harm to LGBTQ people. It began publicly in 2007 when I spoke at the Indiana Family Institute's banquet and explicitly endorsed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. It continued through comments about Jason Collins when he came out as gay while he was in the NBA. It continued through my statement that I would not have drafted Michael Sam, the NFL's first openly gay player, not because of his talent but because of what I called "the situation." I tweeted that being LGBTQ is a "lifestyle," implying choice where there is none.

[Silence.]

JIM BROWN: And your defense of those positions?

TONY DUNGY: My consistent defense has been my Christian faith. That my views on marriage and sexuality are rooted in Scripture and that I do not hate anyone I love everyone, including gay people, as God commands. And I believe that is true about my heart. I genuinely believe I am not a hateful man.

WALTER PAYTON: But?

TONY DUNGY: But a young gay man who grows up in Indianapolis watching Tony Dungy, the most respected coach in the NFL, the first Black coach to win the Super Bowl, a man with unimpeachable moral authority on virtually every other subject, and hears that man say that his lifestyle is a sin, that he wouldn't want him on his team, that his existence needs to be constitutionally constrained. That young man doesn't experience my heart. He experiences my words. And my words caused harm. Real, documented harm to real people. I can believe I am loving and simultaneously acknowledge that what I did with that love, in public, with the platform I was given, caused suffering.

BRETT FAVRE: That's more self-examination than most men manage.

TONY DUNGY: I've had time to think. And I've been in this space long enough to know that the accounting here is complete. There's no managing the narrative. I'm also aware of the particular irony, that I have spent years advocating for second chances for men in this room, for Michael particularly. And the grace I extended to men who hurt human beings in very concrete ways, I withheld in a different form from an entire community of people whose only offense was existing as they were made.

MICHAEL VICK: You saved my career, Coach. Whatever else, you went to bat for me publicly when nobody had to.

TONY DUNGY: You deserved a second chance. I believed that and I still believe it. I just wish my circle of grace had been wider. Drawn with less fear and more of what I claimed my faith was actually about.

JIM BROWN: (with respect) That is an honest accounting, Tony.

TONY DUNGY: It's the only kind worth giving in here.

[A pause. Then Jim Brown gestures around the room.]

JIM BROWN: You came in as a framing device, I think. To offer perspective. The room has been talking for a long time. What do you see?

TONY DUNGY: (looking at each man deliberately, unhurriedly)

I see Walter Payton: the most complete football player I ever watched, a man who played the game with a joy that seemed effortless and was anything but, who hid his private pain behind a public brightness until there was no time left to reconcile them.

I see Jim Brown: who may be the greatest pure athlete this game has ever produced, who carried the weight of racial identity and social responsibility that no football player should have to carry alone, and who has spent his entire life telling uncomfortable truths to people who preferred comfortable fictions.

I see O.J. Simpson: who had everything the American dream promised and spent thirty years demonstrating that the dream and the man inside it were not the same thing, and who said something in this room tonight that needed to be said and that took more honesty than most men in his position ever find.

I see Lawrence Phillips: who was failed before he was formed, who was handed to a system that used him and discarded him, and who never got the runway to find out who he could have been if someone had loved him correctly when he was small enough to be shaped by it.

I see Adrian Peterson: who is still alive and still in the middle of his accounting and who has more time than Lawrence did and who I hope uses it, because the talent was real and the love underneath the discipline, however wrongly expressed, was real, and real things can be redirected.

I see Michael Vick: who lost everything, sat in a cell, and came out of that cell as something closer to a full human being than he went in, and who is the most complicated argument for second chances I have ever personally witnessed.

And I see Brett Favre: who is the only white man in this room, who benefited from structures of privilege so embedded in American life that he could mistake them for his own merit, and who said something tonight about Mississippi and race and his own culpability that I don't know if he's ever said out loud before, and that I hope he says publicly before the Parkinson's takes what's left of his time.

WALTER PAYTON: Tony. What's the summary? If this conversation, whatever it is, wherever it lives, had to mean something, what does it mean?

TONY DUNGY: (long pause...he takes his time, because Tony Dungy has always taken his time)

I've coached football for thirty years. I've stood in front of men who were the most physically gifted human beings on the planet and tried to teach them how to win. And the thing I learned, the thing I keep learning, apparently, since I'm still learning it about myself, is that winning on the field is the simplest thing any of us will ever be asked to do.

The field has rules...clear lines. A scoreboard that doesn't equivocate. You either won or you didn't. You either made the play or you didn't. The clarity of it is why we all loved it. Why we all fled into it when the rest of life became complicated.

But the rest of life doesn't have a scoreboard. It has people. And people are harmed in ways that don't show up on any stat sheet. And the game, the beautiful, brutal game that gave every man in this room everything, the game never taught us how to be in the world. It taught us how to dominate it. And those are not the same thing.

(looking around the room)

What I see in this room is not a collection of villains. And it is not a collection of heroes. It is a collection of men who were extraordinary at one thing and deeply, painfully, consequentially ordinary at the harder thing. The harder thing being, simply, how to treat other people with the same effort and intentionality that you brought to third-and-short.

Most of us didn't manage it. Some of us failed catastrophically. A few of us are still trying. And the people who paid the price for our failures: the women, the children, the communities, the strangers who intersected with our worst moments, they didn't get a second half. They didn't get a locker room speech and a chance to go back out there and make it right.

That's the weight of this room. That's what I came in to say. And I don't have a sermon for it. Just...the acknowledgment. The full, unmanaged acknowledgment. We were great at football. And the greatness didn't protect a single person we hurt.

[Silence. Long and total. The kind that follows a truth that has finally been spoken at its proper size.]

JIM BROWN: That's it. That's all of it.

TONY DUNGY: Have a good night, gentlemen. And a better day tomorrow.

[He folds his hands. The room breathes.]

1) Image from sportingnews.com

The Weight of the Game: A Hypothetical Conversation — Part VI "The Only White Man in the Room"

2026-04-10T06:21:00.001-05:00

The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.

The five men — Brown, Payton, Simpson, Phillips, Vick — have settled into a kind of earned quiet following Rae Carruth's departure. Peterson is still processing. Then Brett Favre appears at the threshold. He moves differently from the others. Not with hesitation or the weight of a man who has spent years in prison. He moves with the residual ease of a man accustomed to being welcomed everywhere he goes. Then he registers the room. Five Black men. One empty chair. He stops.

Brett Favre: The Old Gunslinger 1

BRETT FAVRE: Gentlemen.

[The men look at him. Jim Brown in particular takes a long, unhurried inventory.]

JIM BROWN: Brett. Come in. Sit down.

BRETT FAVRE: (sitting, with a self-awareness that wasn't present in his walk) I know I'm the odd man out here. In more ways than one.

ADRIAN PETERSON: (with a genuine warmth that surprises the room) Brett. Man. Good to see you. You were the best teammate I ever had. I mean that.

BRETT FAVRE: (genuinely moved) AD. Same. You made me feel like I could play forever that year in Minnesota. (a rueful smile) Almost did.

WALTER PAYTON: Let's start with the football, Brett. It's where we always start.

BRETT FAVRE: (exhaling, settling into the familiar territory) Twenty seasons. Primarily Green Bay. 71,838 passing yards. 508 touchdown passes. Three consecutive MVP awards...only man in NFL history to do that. Super Bowl XXXI champion...297 consecutive regular season starts...the iron man record. Eleven Pro Bowls...Pro Football Hall of Fame, inducted 2016.

JIM BROWN: The consecutive starts record. Walk us through what that meant to you because I think people underestimate it.

BRETT FAVRE: I played through a separated shoulder, through a broken thumb, through a sprained ankle, through a concussion I probably shouldn't have played through. There were Sundays I got off the bus and I genuinely didn't know if my body would hold up for sixty minutes. And it always did. Not because I was the toughest man alive. Because the game was the one place where I felt completely, unconditionally myself. No pretense. Just football. From Kiln, Mississippi, a town of maybe 2,000 people, to Lambeau Field. Every single Sunday, I was there.

MICHAEL VICK: The 2009 season in Minnesota, I watched that as a man sitting in Leavenworth. I had a lot of time to watch football. You were 40 years old and you threw for 4,200 yards and had a career-high passer rating. That was genuinely astonishing.

BRETT FAVRE: That season was the closest I came to another ring after Green Bay. We lost the NFC Championship in overtime to the Saints after I threw an interception I shouldn't have thrown. Story of my career, in some ways. Making a throw I shouldn't have made.

[The room receives the double meaning of that without comment.]

JIM BROWN: Brett. There's something I want to address before we go further. You're the only white man in this room. And this room has spent considerable time discussing race as it relates to accountability, institutional response, and the distance between who these men were on the field and who they were off it. Your presence here introduces a dimension that I want to name directly rather than let sit unspoken. Are you prepared for that conversation?

BRETT FAVRE: (without flinching) Yes. I've been prepared for it for a while. I just haven't been in a room where people would actually have it with me honestly.

JIM BROWN: Then let's start with Mississippi. The TANF scandal. Your own state. The poorest state in America. A state whose poverty is disproportionately Black. Tell it straight.

BRETT FAVRE: (a long pause, the ease in his posture shifts) Between 2017 and 2019, over $77 million in federal welfare funds, money specifically earmarked for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, meaning the poorest people in Mississippi, was diverted. Not all of it to me. I want to be clear about the scope. But a meaningful portion of it was connected to things I wanted. Five million dollars went toward a volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi, my alma mater, where my daughter played. I lobbied the governor personally for that money. I sent text messages. I attended meetings. I pushed for it.

I was also paid $1.1 million from TANF funds for speeches and promotional appearances that the state auditor says I never gave. I have disputed the characterization of what I delivered in exchange. I eventually repaid the $1.1 million. I have not paid the interest, over $700,000, that the auditor says I owe. I was never criminally charged.

O.J. SIMPSON: Did you know the money was welfare funds?

BRETT FAVRE: (a very long pause — the longest in this entire room) I have said publicly that I did not know. I believed it was grant money. That is my position and I have maintained it under oath.

JIM BROWN: And privately? In here, where there are no lawyers?

[The silence that follows is the most significant silence in this entire transcript.]

BRETT FAVRE: I asked Nancy New in a text message, which became public, whether there was any way the media could find out where the money was coming from and how much it was. I asked that before I received the first payment. A man who has no reason to worry about where money comes from doesn't ask that question.

WALTER PAYTON: No. He doesn't.

BRETT FAVRE: I'm not going to sit in this room and tell you that I was completely without awareness that something about the funding was irregular. I can't say that honestly. What I can say is that I told myself a story, that I was helping my university, helping my community, that the money was flowing through proper channels, that the people around me who were handling the mechanics of it were responsible for the mechanics of it. I built a very convenient narrative and I lived inside it.

JIM BROWN: And the people those funds were supposed to reach, the children in Mississippi living in poverty, the families who applied for TANF and were turned away, the 90% of eligible Mississippians the state was rejecting for assistance during the same period your volleyball stadium was being built, what do you say to them?

BRETT FAVRE: (visibly affected) I think about that. I think about it more now than I did when it was happening. I grew up in Kiln, Mississippi. I know what Mississippi poverty looks like. I've driven past it my entire life. I used to think I was separate from it, that I'd earned my way out and that my success insulated me from responsibility for the structural failures around me. I know now that's not right. My name and my access to the governor's office was used to redirect money away from children who needed it toward a volleyball court where my daughter played. That's the plain fact of it, stripped of every narrative I built around it.

MICHAEL VICK: I want to ask you something that I've been thinking about since you walked in. I went to federal prison for dogfighting. I lost everything. My career was suspended. I was a national villain. And what I did was genuinely wrong and I own that fully. But I want to ask you, man to man, whether you think the response to what you did and the response to what I did reflects something about race in America. Because you are still in the Hall of Fame. Your number is retired in Green Bay. You testified before Congress as an invited expert witness on the very scandal you were implicated in. And I spent twenty-one months in Leavenworth.

[The room goes very still.]

BRETT FAVRE: (after a long pause — he does not look away from Vick) Yes. I think it does. I want to be careful here. But when I ask myself whether a Black man in Mississippi with my level of documented involvement in the diversion of welfare funds would have been treated the way I've been treated, with no criminal charges, invited to Congress, still a Hall of Famer, still "Brett Favre," the honest answer is no. That man would not have been treated the way I've been treated.

MICHAEL VICK: Thank you for saying that.

BRETT FAVRE: It needed to be said. I've known it for a long time and I haven't said it publicly because saying it feels like it comes with an asterisk, like I'm using racial awareness as a shield for my own accountability. But both things can be true. The racial disparity in how I was treated is real. And what I did was wrong. Those two facts coexist.

JIM BROWN: (with measured intensity) That is the most important thing you've said since you sat down. And I want to push it further. Mississippi's population is nearly 38% Black. It is the poorest state in America. The TANF program you helped drain exists almost entirely to serve Black women and their children, because that is who poverty in Mississippi disproportionately looks like. So when you redirected that money to a volleyball court for your daughter at a predominantly white university using your access to a white governor through a network of white officials, the people who were harmed were not abstractions. They were disproportionately Black people. In your own state. That you drove past your entire life.

BRETT FAVRE: I know. I know exactly what you're saying and I know it's true.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I've been sitting here thinking about something. I grew up in foster care in Mississippi and California. I was a Black kid being bounced between homes, invisible to every institution that was supposed to protect me. TANF money was the kind of money that was supposed to buffer what happened to kids like me. And a famous white quarterback from the same state lobbied the governor to redirect it to his daughter's volleyball program. (long pause) I don't say that to attack you personally, Brett. I say it because it needs to be in this room. The money was supposed to reach people like the child I was. And it didn't.

BRETT FAVRE: (looking directly at Phillips) Lawrence. I hear you. And I'm not going to offer you an excuse for that because there isn't one. There is only "I'm sorry." For what it's worth, for whatever it's worth, I'm sorry.

[Lawrence Phillips nods very slowly. It is not forgiveness. But it is acknowledgment. Sometimes that is what's available.]

ADRIAN PETERSON: Brett. Can I ask you about something else? The Jenn Sterger situation. Because we've talked a lot in this room about how institutions protect certain men. And I want to understand where you stand on that now.

BRETT FAVRE: (his posture tightening) Yes. In 2008, when I was with the Jets, I sent unsolicited messages to Jenn Sterger. Voicemails. Text messages. She worked for the organization. She had never met me. She had not consented to contact of any kind. I was a married man. I pursued her through intermediaries, through my celebrity, through the organizational structure that made her professionally vulnerable to me. And when it became public in 2010, the NFL investigated and fined me $50,000, not for the conduct itself, but for failing to cooperate with the investigation. The fine was $50,000. I was making millions. Jenn Sterger lost her job, her career trajectory, and spent years being blamed by the public for a situation she never asked to be in.

O.J. SIMPSON: She said recently that you destroyed her life.

BRETT FAVRE: I've seen that. I've never publicly addressed the harassment allegations directly. I've never said the words. I was wrong; I harassed her; I used my power to pursue a woman who repeatedly said no. I'm saying them now, in here; I was wrong. I used my power. She said no in every way available to her and I didn't stop. And the institution fined me the equivalent of a parking ticket and moved on. And she carried it for fifteen years.

WALTER PAYTON: Why haven't you said that publicly?

BRETT FAVRE: (a long, honest silence) Because saying it publicly has legal implications. Because there are lawyers involved. Because by the time I was ready to be honest about it, the machinery of reputation management had already been running for years and I didn't know how to stop it. That's not a justification. That's the truth of how these things work. The lawyers protect you and the protection becomes its own prison.

JIM BROWN: We've heard versions of that in this room before. The infrastructure of celebrity protecting men from their own accountability.

BRETT FAVRE: Yes. And I'm still alive, which means I can still make different choices. Whether I do, that's what I'll be judged on.

[Michael Vick has been watching Favre carefully throughout. Now he leans forward.]

MICHAEL VICK: Brett. I want to come back to something you said. About the racial disparity in how you were treated versus how a Black man with the same facts would have been treated. I believe you meant it. But I want to push you on what you do with that belief. Because believing it and saying it in a room like this, whatever this room is, is one thing. What does a man do with that knowledge when he goes back into the world?

BRETT FAVRE: (measured) I've thought about this since Parkinson's.

[The room shifts. Some of them already know. Others don't.]

BRETT FAVRE: I disclosed at the congressional hearing in September 2024 that I've been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. I believe it's connected to the head injuries I sustained over twenty seasons. The concussion drug, Prevacus, which also received TANF funds, the drug I invested in and lobbied for, I believed in it partly because I was already experiencing symptoms that scared me. There's an irony in that. Maybe a justice in it. I spent money that was supposed to help poor families in Mississippi partly trying to find a cure for a disease I got playing the game that made me wealthy and famous enough to redirect that money in the first place.

[Long silence.]

MICHAEL VICK: That's the whole American story in one paragraph, Brett.

BRETT FAVRE: (a sad, genuine laugh) Yeah. Maybe it is.

JIM BROWN: The question Mike asked still stands. What do you do with the knowledge?

BRETT FAVRE: I think the honest answer is that I don't know yet. I know I should have spoken up sooner. About Jenn Sterger. About Mississippi. About the racial dimensions of both. I know I used my celebrity in ways that cost vulnerable people more than they cost me. I know that the Parkinson's diagnosis made me think about legacy in a way that the investigations and the lawsuits never fully managed to. Because investigations you can survive with lawyers. Disease you survive differently.

WALTER PAYTON: (very quietly, from experience) Yes. Disease changes what matters.

BRETT FAVRE: I want to use whatever time I have, however long this is, whatever this space is, to say the things I should have said publicly. Not because it restores anything. But because silence was always a choice that protected me at someone else's expense. I'm done making that choice.

JIM BROWN: That's a start, Brett. That's a genuine start.

[The six men sit together: Brown, Payton, Simpson, Phillips, Peterson, Vick, and now Favre. Six Black men and one white man. A room full of football greatness and human wreckage in varying combinations. A room where the game was the entry point and the humanity was the destination. Nobody is absolved. Nobody is condemned beyond what they've already condemned themselves. The air in the room is something that isn't quite peace but is adjacent to it, the particular quality of air that exists when the truth has been said and the saying of it is, if not redemptive, at least finally honest.

Outside, somewhere, a crowd roars. Sixty thousand people who know the name on the back of the jersey and nothing else. The men in the room listen to it fade.]

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: They never knew us.

WALTER PAYTON: No. They knew what we could do with the ball.

BRETT FAVRE: Maybe that was our fault too.

[Nobody disagrees.]

1) Image from post-gazette.com

The Weight of the Game - Part V - "The Switch, The Culture, and the Man"

2026-04-07T20:15:00.007-05:00

The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.

The six men have settled into a kind of collective stillness following Jim Brown's last words. Then footsteps. Adrian Peterson enters the space differently from the others — not hesitant like Phillips, not restless like Vick, not burdened like Carruth. He enters the way a man enters who genuinely does not believe he has done what the world says he did. There is a particular kind of confidence in him that the room immediately registers. Not arrogance. Certainty. The certainty of a man whose moral framework has not yet fully cracked open.

Adrian Peterson: what a talent! 1

ADRIAN PETERSON: (taking in the room) Mr. Brown. Walter. I know who everyone is.

JIM BROWN: Adrian. Sit down.

ADRIAN PETERSON: (sitting, nodding at Vick) Mike. (at Phillips) Lawrence. (pauses at Carruth and Simpson, acknowledging each with a nod)

WALTER PAYTON: We were just finishing a conversation about race and accountability.

ADRIAN PETERSON: Then I'm in the right place. Or the wrong one. Depending on how you look at it.

JIM BROWN: Let's start with the football. Because that's where everything starts in here.

ADRIAN PETERSON: (a small, genuine smile — the football is where he's most comfortable) Fourteen seasons. Nearly 15,000 rushing yards. Second all-time behind Emmitt Smith. Two thousand ninety-seven yards in 2012 — nine yards short of breaking Eric Dickerson's single season record, and I did it coming off a torn ACL and MCL that everyone said would end my career. NFL MVP. Seven Pro Bowls. Four first-team All-Pro selections. Fastest player to 10,000 yards in NFL history at the time. Single game record — 296 yards against San Diego in 2007, my rookie year.

O.J. SIMPSON: The 2012 season specifically...coming back from that knee. Explain what that took.

ADRIAN PETERSON: I tore both ligaments in December of 2011. Full reconstruction. Doctors said a year minimum recovery, maybe fourteen months. I was back in nine months and running for 2,000 yards. People said it was freakish. It wasn't. It was will. I've always believed my body could do what my mind told it to do. Palestine, Texas made me that way. My father made me that way.

MICHAEL VICK: Your father disciplined you physically.

ADRIAN PETERSON: (he sees where this is going) Yes. My father disciplined me. The way his father disciplined him. The way fathers in Palestine, Texas disciplined their sons going back generations. And I stand here, wherever "here" is, as a man who played fourteen seasons in the most physically brutal sport in America, who came back from injuries that end careers, who provided for his family, who never got lost in the streets. My father did that. The discipline did that.

JIM BROWN: Adrian. We're going to have this conversation honestly or not at all. The photos of your son's injuries were documented publicly. Welts on his back, his legs, his buttocks, his scrotum. He was four years old.

ADRIAN PETERSON: I went too far. I acknowledged that. I never intended to harm my son. I was doing what I knew. What I believed in.

WALTER PAYTON: There's a difference between what you intended and what happened.

ADRIAN PETERSON: I know that difference now better than I did then. But I want to push back on something, because this conversation has been about race and I'm not going to pretend the racial dimension of how my case was covered wasn't real. I was put on the front page of every newspaper in America for disciplining my child with a switch. The same week Ray Rice knocked his fiancée unconscious in an elevator and got two games, at first. I got the rest of the season. And then the discourse became about Black parenting. About how Black people discipline their children. About pathology in the Black community. Not about corporal punishment in America broadly, about Black people specifically.

MICHAEL VICK: I made a similar argument about my situation. And I also said both things can be true. The racial disparity can be real and the harm to your son can be real simultaneously.

ADRIAN PETERSON: I'm not disputing that. I'm saying the cultural context was real. Palestine, Texas, my hometown, held a parade for me after the indictment, with hundreds of people. Because to them, what I did was not abuse. It was parenting. It was love expressed the only way they knew. Are all of those people wrong?

JIM BROWN: (carefully) Yes. And they are wrong in a way that has deep and documented roots in trauma. The research on intergenerational transmission of corporal punishment is clear. Children who are physically disciplined become adults who physically discipline. The cycle reproduces itself and calls itself tradition. That doesn't make the people in the cycle evil. But it does make them wrong. And it makes the tradition wrong. And calling it culture doesn't make it right; it makes it persistent.

ADRIAN PETERSON: (sitting with that) My father went to prison when I was young. He was a drug dealer. Before he went in, he disciplined me physically. And I believe...I genuinely believe...that discipline is part of why I didn't follow him into the streets. How do I reconcile that?

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: You might not be able to. Some things aren't reconcilable. They're just true simultaneously.

WALTER PAYTON: The question isn't whether the discipline produced results in you. The question is whether the cost was justified. And whether your four-year-old son had a vote in that transaction.

ADRIAN PETERSON: (long pause) He didn't. No. He didn't have a vote.

O.J. SIMPSON: I want to ask you about something else. Because I've been here long enough to know that the story usually doesn't end where the public thinks it ends.

ADRIAN PETERSON: Go ahead.

O.J. SIMPSON: You're still alive. The 2014 case isn't where your story stopped. There have been other incidents. A domestic situation at LAX in 2022. Child support warrants in Texas in 2024. A misdemeanor assault plea. DWI arrests in 2025. The pattern continued, Adrian.

ADRIAN PETERSON: Yes.

O.J. SIMPSON: So the 2014 conversation, the cultural framing, the parade in Palestine, that was one chapter. But the chapters after it suggest something that the cultural argument doesn't fully account for.

ADRIAN PETERSON: You're right. And I don't have a clean answer for the chapters after. The 2014 case, I can contextualize it. I can trace it to East Texas and my father and a tradition that was wrong but was also love. The things that came after, the airport, the child support, the other incidents, those are harder to put in a box. Those aren't about culture. Those are about a man who didn't do enough work on himself when he had the chance.

MICHAEL VICK: That's honest.

ADRIAN PETERSON: I'm trying. I'm still alive so I'm still in the middle of it. It's easier to be honest in here than out there. Out there there's always a publicist and a statement and a narrative to protect.

JIM BROWN: (with something close to empathy) The game produces men who are accustomed to managing narratives. Press conferences, agent statements, league PR. You get very good at controlling the story. And then the story controls you.

[Rae Carruth has been sitting at the edge of the group during Peterson's arrival, growing visibly quieter. Now he stands slowly. Everyone turns to look at him.]

RAE CARRUTH: I want to say something before I go.

WALTER PAYTON: You don't have to go, Rae.

RAE CARRUTH: (with a quiet dignity that wasn't present when he first arrived) I think I do. Not because I was asked to. Because I've been sitting here listening and I've been honest with myself in a way I maybe haven't been before. And part of that honesty is this: I don't fully belong in this room.

JIM BROWN: Explain what you mean.

RAE CARRUTH: Every man in this room, every one of you, has a football legacy that stands on its own. Jim, Walter, Juice: you're Hall of Famers. Adrian, you're going in. Mike, your career was historically significant regardless of what came after. Even Lawrence, the talent was undeniable, the potential was real, the football mattered in a way that people recognized.

I was a first-round pick. I had one good season...143 catches over parts of four years. That's not a legacy. That's a footnote with a crime attached to it. When people look me up, the football is the footnote and the crime is the headline. For most of you it's at least a genuine debate about which is bigger.

And the other thing, the mitigation. Every man in this room has something that contextualizes what they did. Jim: a society that failed to hold you accountable when you were young and powerful. Juice: legal ambiguity, a racially charged system, a trial that was about more than one man. Mike: a cultural environment that normalized something the broader world found monstrous. Lawrence: childhood trauma that is as well documented as anything in this room. Adrian: a generational tradition that was wrong but was also genuinely love, at least at its origin.

What I did to Cherica, there's no context for it. There's no tradition that produced it. There's no systemic failure that explains it. There's no cultural framework that makes it a gray area. I was a 26-year-old man who was afraid of child support and decided to solve the problem by having the mother of my child murdered. My son Chancellor has cerebral palsy because of what I chose to do. There is no mitigation for that. There is no version of that story where I belong in a room with men who, whatever else they did, produced football legacies that deserve to be remembered.

[Silence. Complete and absolute.]

WALTER PAYTON: (softly) Rae....

RAE CARRUTH: I want to thank you. All of you. For letting me sit here. For not treating me like a pariah. For saying things out loud that needed to be said. I learned something in this room that twenty years of prison didn't fully teach me.

MICHAEL VICK: What's that?

RAE CARRUTH: That accountability isn't a destination. It's not something you arrive at and then you're done. It's something you practice every day. And I've been practicing it badly for a long time. I've been confessing without really feeling the weight of what I'm confessing. In here, listening to all of you, men whose lives had real stakes and real complexity, I finally felt it. The full weight of Chancellor's life...of Cherica's death. Not as an abstraction...as a fact that belongs to me.

(to the room)

I hope his grandmother knows he was thought about in here. I hope he's okay.

[Rae Carruth walks to the edge of the space and does not look back. The remaining six men watch him go in silence.]

[A long moment passes. Adrian Peterson has been watching Carruth leave with an expression no one in the room can fully read. Finally he speaks.]

ADRIAN PETERSON: Is that what full accountability looks like? Because I'm not sure I've gotten there yet.

JIM BROWN: No. You haven't. But you know the direction now.

ADRIAN PETERSON: My son, the one from 2014, I think about him. Whether he's disciplining his own kids someday the way I disciplined him. Whether I put something in him that reproduces. That's the thing that keeps me up.

WALTER PAYTON: Then stay up with it. Don't look away from it. That's the work.

MICHAEL VICK: (to Peterson) The work doesn't stop because the football stopped. That's what took me the longest to understand. The jersey comes off and the work is still there.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: (barely audible) I ran out of time to do the work.

ADRIAN PETERSON: I haven't. Not yet.

JIM BROWN: Then don't waste it.

[The six remaining men sit together. A Hall of Famer who spoke truth his whole life and carried his own shadows honestly. A Hall of Famer who hid behind a smile until there was no time left to stop hiding. A Hall of Famer who spent decades running from his own Blackness and ran straight into history. A generational talent who never became what he was built to be and ran out of time to find out. A quarterback who lost everything and got a second act that most men in this room never received. And a likely Hall of Famer who is still alive, still in the middle of his accounting, with enough runway left to get it right or wrong.]

[Outside, if "outside" exists, the crowd roars again. Faintly. Then fades. Then silence. Then, distantly, what might be a child laughing. Nobody mentions it. But everyone hears it.]

1) Image from britannica.com

The Weight of the Game: A Hypothetical Conversation - Part IV - "The Elephant in the Room"

2026-03-20T05:13:00.003-05:00

The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.

The echo of Jim Brown's last words, "Nobody ever does," is still in the air. Michael Vick had glanced at O.J. Simpson when he said it. O.J. caught the glance. He knows what's underneath it. He's known for the last several minutes. He straightens slightly in his chair.

The elephants in the room. 1

O.J. SIMPSON: Go ahead and say it, Michael. You've been circling it since you sat down.

MICHAEL VICK: I said what I said. About the players who came back from domestic violence charges faster than I came back from what I did to animals. I left it open. I didn't name it.

O.J. SIMPSON: You named it without naming it. Which is what Black men in America learn to do very early. Name the thing without naming the thing so you can't be accused of playing the card.

JIM BROWN: I don't play cards. I'll say it directly. Race is in this room. Race has been in this room since we sat down. The only question is whether we're going to talk about it like men or keep stepping around it like it's furniture nobody wants to bump into.

WALTER PAYTON: Then let's talk about it.

JIM BROWN: Every man in this room is Black. The victims in our various situations were not, for the most part. The institutional responses to what we did, the cultural responses, the media responses, they were not racially neutral. That is a fact. It doesn't excuse a single thing any of us did. But it is a fact and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.

MICHAEL VICK: When I was sentenced, the response from a significant portion of white America was visceral in a way that I had to examine carefully. People who had never attended a dogfighting event, who ate factory-farmed meat without a second thought, who had seen NFL players return from domestic violence suspensions within weeks, they wanted me gone from the game permanently. I had to ask myself honestly, is that because of the specific nature of what I did? Or is some portion of that reaction about who I was and where I came from?

O.J. SIMPSON: The answer is both. And both matter.

MICHAEL VICK: Yes. Both matter. What I did was genuinely horrific. I'm not constructing a racial defense for animal cruelty. But the intensity of the response: the calls for lifetime bans, the death threats, the people who said they cared more about those dogs than about Black men being shot in the street, that intensity had a texture to it that wasn't purely about dogs.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I grew up in foster care with predominantly white families. I was a Black kid who couldn't be placed permanently anywhere. The system that was supposed to protect me was not designed with me in mind. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's the documented history of American child welfare. However, I became a football player and the same institutions that had failed me for eighteen years suddenly had a great deal of interest in what my body could do on Saturdays. Then when I became inconvenient, when I stopped being manageable, those same institutions discarded me with remarkable efficiency.

JIM BROWN: That's the transaction. That's always been the transaction. Black athletic excellence has been welcomed and celebrated and monetized by institutions that had no interest in the full humanity of the people producing it. The NFL was segregated until 1946. The Heisman Trophy wasn't won by a Black player until Mike Garrett in 1965. And we act like those are distant historical footnotes when the men in this room played in that direct lineage.

WALTER PAYTON: I want to push back slightly. Not on the history, the history is indisputable. But I played in Chicago for thirteen years and I never felt like my race was the primary thing people saw. I felt like they saw Walter Payton. Sweetness. Number 34. I worked very deliberately to be that, to be beyond categorization. Was that naïve?

JIM BROWN: Yes. I say that with enormous respect for you, Walter. You were beloved in Chicago. Genuinely beloved. But being beloved by a city doesn't mean the city has transcended race. It means you performed Blackness in a way that was non-threatening enough to be fully embraced. "Sweetness" is a persona that white America could love without complication. I'm not saying you manufactured it cynically. I'm saying the reception of it was racially coded whether you intended it to be or not.

WALTER PAYTON: That's uncomfortable to hear.

JIM BROWN: It should be. I spent my career being uncomfortable for people. There's a reason Cleveland loved me but America found me difficult. I was not "Sweetness." I was Jim Brown who ran over people and spoke his mind about civil rights and Muhammad Ali and Vietnam and didn't smile for the cameras when smiling wasn't honest. The reception I got from white America reflected that. I was respected. I was not loved the way you were loved. And the difference is racial and political and cultural all at once.

O.J. SIMPSON: (with painful self-awareness) Can I talk about my own relationship with this? Because I think it's relevant, and I think it's the most honest thing I can contribute to this conversation.

JIM BROWN: Please.

O.J. SIMPSON: I spent the majority of my adult life actively, deliberately constructing an identity that transcended race. "I'm not Black, I'm O.J." I said versions of that for twenty years. From the Hertz commercials, to the movie career, to the country clubs in Brentwood, I cultivated a life that said to white America: I am safe. I am palatable. I am not a threat. I am not Jim Brown (glances at Brown). I am not that kind of Black man. I am your Black friend. Your golf partner. Your dinner guest.

MICHAEL VICK: And then 1994 happened.

O.J. SIMPSON: And then 1994 happened. And overnight...overnight...I was the most Black I had ever been in my life without choosing it. The same white America that had embraced me for twenty years looked at me in that courtroom and saw something they'd always been prepared to see if I ever stepped out of line. And the Black community, which I had spent two decades carefully distancing myself from, closed ranks around me in ways I hadn't earned and didn't deserve.

WALTER PAYTON: Why did they close ranks?

O.J. SIMPSON: Because the history is longer than I am. Because Black Americans had watched the criminal justice system function as a racial instrument for generations before I ever set foot in a courtroom. And when they saw me, regardless of what I had or hadn't done, they saw the pattern. Rodney King had been beaten on camera just two years before. The acquittal of those officers had just torn Los Angeles apart. The jury in my criminal trial was predominantly Black. They acquitted me, white America was stunned and Black America, a significant portion of it, cheered. The cheer wasn't entirely about me, not really. It was about every Black man who hadn't had Johnnie Cochran. Every man who'd been convicted on less evidence by an all-white jury in a county courthouse nobody televised.

JIM BROWN: That's the most honest thing you've said since we've been sitting here.

O.J. SIMPSON: It cost me something to say it. Because it requires me to acknowledge that my acquittal was partly a product of a historical correction being applied to the wrong case. If I did what the civil court determined I did, and I've said in this room that I believe I did - IF I did it - then twelve jurors applied a legitimate historical grievance to an illegitimate set of facts. Nicole and Ron Goldman paid for that with their deaths going formally unpunished. The Black community's mistrust of the criminal justice system was weaponized in a specific case where it produced the wrong outcome. That's a knot I don't know how to untangle. I don't think it can be untangled.

(Silence. Deep and genuine.)

MICHAEL VICK: I want to say something about that and I want to say it respectfully. What you just described, the way race and justice and historical grievance collided in your trial, that is one of the most consequential things that happened in America in the last fifty years. Not because of you specifically. But because of what it exposed about how differently Black and white Americans experienced the criminal justice system and how little common ground existed between those two experiences. Your trial didn't create that divide. It just put it on television in prime time for eight months.

JIM BROWN: And nothing was resolved. The cameras left and the divide remained and everyone went back to their corners having confirmed what they already believed.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Can I say something that might be unpopular?

JIM BROWN: This is the only room where unpopular things get said.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Race is real in everything we've discussed. The system failed me early and that failure has racial dimensions I can trace clearly. The way the NFL used me and discarded me has racial dimensions. The way America celebrates Black athletes and then turns on them has racial dimensions. All of that is true. And....

The things I did to women, the violence, I can't put that on race. I can contextualize it. I can explain the environment I came from, the modeling I received, the cycle of violence in foster care. However, at some point I have to own that those were my hands. My choices. And I worry sometimes that the racial framework, as true as it is systemically, can become a place to hide from personal accountability. I used it that way for years, and I don't think that's right either.

MICHAEL VICK: That's not unpopular. That's necessary. Both things have to be true simultaneously. The system is racially compromised and we made choices that hurt people. One doesn't cancel the other.

JIM BROWN: That is the most difficult thing to hold. Both hands full at the same time. In one hand, a system with a documented history of racial injustice that shaped every one of our lives and careers and public perceptions. In the other hand, our own agency. Our own decisions. The people we hurt who had nothing to do with systemic racism and everything to do with who we chose to be in a private moment.

WALTER PAYTON: I think I spent my career using the football to avoid holding either hand. On the field I didn't have to think about race or accountability or who I was failing at home. I was just running. And when the football was gone, when the disease came and I knew I was dying, both hands came full very fast and I didn't have the practice to hold what was in them.

RAE CARRUTH: I've been sitting here thinking about Cherica. About whether race had anything to do with what I did. And I don't think it did. I think I was terrified and selfish and I made the worst decision a human being can make. That was personal. That was mine. Race didn't pull that trigger. I did.

The room receives that without comment. It doesn't need comment.

JIM BROWN: I want to leave this part of the conversation with something I've said publicly and I'll say it here again. The most revolutionary thing a Black man in America can do is be excellent and honest and accountable simultaneously. Excellence alone gets you celebrated and then discarded. Honesty alone gets you labeled a troublemaker. Accountability alone gets you used as an example by people who don't actually care about you. But all three together: that's the thing the system is least prepared to handle. Because it can't categorize you. It can't make you a symbol or a cautionary tale or a mascot. You're just a man. Fully a man.

Most of us got one or two of the three right. Some of us got none. But the standard was always all three. And the game, and the culture around the game, never asked for all three. It asked for excellence on Sundays and manageable behavior the rest of the week. That's not enough. It was never enough.

MICHAEL VICK: No. It wasn't.

WALTER PAYTON: I wish someone had said that to me when I was twenty-two years old and the whole city of Chicago was deciding I was Sweetness and nothing else.

JIM BROWN: I was saying it. Nobody was listening.

WALTER PAYTON: No. We weren't.

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The Weight of the Game: A Hypothetical Conversation - Part III - "The Dog Whistles Nobody Wanted to Hear"

2026-03-13T05:48:00.004-05:00

Once upon a time in Michael Vick's career. 1

The five men have been sitting in the aftermath of Walter Payton's last words: "The game didn't do that to them. We did," when a figure enters the space with a particular kind of energy. Not the hesitance of Carruth or Phillips. Not the measured authority of Brown. Something restless. Michael Vick moves like a man who has spent years learning to enter rooms that weren't sure they wanted him.

MICHAEL VICK: I could hear you from a distance. I wasn't sure if I should come in.

JIM BROWN: You're still alive, Michael.

MICHAEL VICK: Yes sir. But this space, whatever it is, it pulled me in. Maybe I needed to be here. (Vick looks around the room, clocking each face) Mr. Brown. Walter. Juice. Lawrence. Rae.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Mike.

MICHAEL VICK: I want to say something before I sit down. I'm aware that I'm the only man in this room who got a second act. A real one. I played again. I went to the Pro Bowl again. I had a career after. Most of you didn't get that. I want to acknowledge that before anything else.

WALTER PAYTON: Sit down, Michael. You don't need to audition for the room.

MICHAEL VICK: Old habit. I've been auditioning for rooms since 2009.

JIM BROWN: Let's start with the football because that's where everything starts in here. What do you want people to understand about what you were as a player?

MICHAEL VICK: That nothing like me had existed before at the quarterback position. I don't say that with arrogance — I say it as a football fact. When I came out of Virginia Tech in 2001 and Atlanta took me first overall, I was genuinely unprecedented. The things I could do with my legs, my arm, my instincts — coaches didn't have a framework for it yet. They were still trying to fit me into a traditional system when my entire value was that I broke traditional systems.

O.J. SIMPSON: Your 2006 season particularly...before everything collapsed.

MICHAEL VICK: That year I rushed for over 1,000 yards as a quarterback. I threw for 20 touchdowns. My passer rating was climbing. I was 26 years old. I was just beginning to understand the position at the level I was capable of playing it. Then April 2007, the raid on the property in Surry County, Virginia. And everything stopped.

WALTER PAYTON: Tell it straight, Michael. You can tell it straight in here.

MICHAEL VICK: Bad Newz Kennels. Dogfighting operation on property I owned. I funded it, I was aware of it, I participated in it. Dogs were trained to fight, dogs were killed when they underperformed. They were drowned, they were electrocuted, and they were hanged. I pled guilty to federal conspiracy charges. I served 21 months in Leavenworth. Lost everything: the contract, the endorsements, the house, declared bankruptcy. Then the Eagles signed me in 2009. Tony Dungy advocated for me publicly. And I came back.

RAE CARRUTH: How did you do it? Come back. Practically and emotionally.

MICHAEL VICK: Practically? Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb and that Eagles organization treated me like a human being when a lot of people were publicly arguing I shouldn't be allowed back in the league at all. Emotionally, I had to genuinely reckon with what I did, not for the cameras, not for the press conference where I cried and said the right things. I actually had to sit in a cell and ask myself how I got there and what it said about who I was.

JIM BROWN: And what did it say?

MICHAEL VICK: It said I came from a place, Newport News, Virginia, where dogfighting was culturally normalized in the circles I moved in growing up. That's not an excuse. But it's the context. I had money and I had access and I had a group of people around me from home who I didn't know how to separate myself from. And I made choices that reflected where I came from instead of where I was supposed to be going. I let the culture I was trying to escape follow me into a mansion in Virginia.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: The people who knew you before the money. They're the hardest ones to leave behind.

MICHAEL VICK: They are the hardest. Because leaving them feels like leaving yourself, and I hadn't built enough of a new self to feel safe doing that yet.

WALTER PAYTON: Did you love the dogs? By the end of it? After the education, the work with the Humane Society, did something genuine change?

MICHAEL VICK: Yes. And I want to be careful saying that because I know how it sounds: convenient, performed, rehabilitated for public consumption. But my daughter has a dog now. I helped choose it. I watch them together and I feel something that I can only describe as grief for what I was capable of doing to animals before I understood what they were. I didn't understand they felt things the way they feel things. That sounds impossible given what I did. But it's the truth of where I was mentally.

JIM BROWN: The public has never fully agreed on whether to forgive you.

MICHAEL VICK: They never will. And I've accepted that. Black America largely supported me through it. There was a cultural dimension to the backlash that people talked about openly. Some people felt the punishment exceeded what white players received for crimes against human beings. That comparison is uncomfortable but it was made loudly and it wasn't entirely without basis.

O.J. SIMPSON: Say more about that.

MICHAEL VICK: I'm not going to litigate it here in full. But I will say that I watched players with domestic violence convictions return to football faster and with less institutional resistance than I experienced. Whether that reflects the specific horror of what I did to animals, or whether it reflects something about which victims America prioritizes, that's a question I'll leave open. I have my own thoughts. But I'm aware I'm not a neutral observer.

JIM BROWN: Nobody in this room is a neutral observer on anything.

Walter Payton has been listening with particular attention to Vick. Something in his expression shifts, recognition, perhaps.

WALTER PAYTON: Michael, can I ask you something personal?

MICHAEL VICK: Anything.

WALTER PAYTON: When you were at the absolute bottom in Leavenworth, bankrupt, the league hadn't decided yet if you'd ever play again, what did you miss most? The football or the person you were before you understood what you'd done?

MICHAEL VICK: I've never been asked it that way. I missed the football first. For the first six months inside, all I thought about was the game. The routes, the reads, the feeling of extending a play with my legs when the pocket collapsed. That was where I lived.

And then somewhere around month eight or nine, something shifted. I stopped dreaming about football and started dreaming about my kids. My daughter. My son. I started missing them more than I missed throwing a football. And that was the moment, I think, when something real began to change in me. When the person started to matter more than the player.

WALTER PAYTON: I never had that shift. The player was always bigger than the person in my own mind. Even at the end.

MICHAEL VICK: I think the prison forced it. I hate that it took that. But it did.

JIM BROWN: Let's talk about the Hall of Fame question because it's going to come up.

MICHAEL VICK: My numbers, straight up, are incomplete because of the lost years. The interrupted prime. I threw for over 22,000 yards career, rushed for over 6,000 as a quarterback. That rushing record at the position may never be broken. Pre-prison, I was tracking toward something genuinely historic. Post-prison, I had good seasons but not transcendent ones. The knee injuries accumulated. The lost years at 27 and 28...those are the years that separate good careers from immortal ones.

O.J. SIMPSON: Canton?

MICHAEL VICK: I don't think I'll get in. And I've made peace with that. The voters will weigh the interrupted career against what's required and the numbers won't quite be there. The off-field history will be a quiet presence in the room even if nobody formally cites it. Same mechanism you described with Sharper, you don't have to vote against someone for off-field reasons if the on-field case isn't airtight enough to override the discomfort.

RAE CARRUTH: That's almost a mercy. A clean procedural answer that doesn't require anybody to say the hard thing out loud.

MICHAEL VICK: Maybe. Or maybe it's just math. I genuinely don't know. But if I'm being honest, there are days I think the Hall of Fame is the least important part of my legacy at this point. The most important part is whether my children are proud of who I became after 2009. That's the Hall of Fame that matters to me now.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I never got to find out what I'd become after. The after never came.

Michael Vick looks at Lawrence Phillips for a long moment. Something passes between them. They are two men from difficult places who made catastrophic choices, but whose trajectories diverged completely at the moment of reckoning.

MICHAEL VICK: I know. And I don't know why mine came and yours didn't. I've thought about that. About how much of recovery is character and how much is circumstance and timing and who happens to be in your corner when the door opens. Tony Dungy was in my corner. Andy Reid was in my corner. You deserved someone like that earlier, Lawrence. Much earlier.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Maybe. Or maybe I would have wasted that too.

MICHAEL VICK: Maybe. But you deserved the chance to find out.

Jim Brown stands again, his habit when something needs to be anchored. He looks at the six men assembled. A Hall of Famer who rushed for 12,312 yards and left on his own terms. A Hall of Famer whose jersey number was retired in Chicago but whose private life told a different story. A Hall of Famer whose name will always mean two things simultaneously. A convicted murderer-for-hire whose son bears the physical cost daily. A man who died in a prison cell at 40 having never become what he was built to be. And a quarterback whose comeback became one of sport's most debated second acts.

JIM BROWN: Six men. Between us we have Hall of Fame inductions, Heisman Trophies, Super Bowl rings, rushing records, MVP awards, Pro Bowls and federal convictions, domestic violence histories, a murder conspiracy, a double homicide civil judgment, an animal cruelty plea, and a suicide in a state prison. All of it real. All of it ours. The football and the wreckage belonging to the same men.

WALTER PAYTON: What does that mean? In the end?

JIM BROWN: I think it means the game selects for a particular kind of person: fearless, competitive, and physical, willing to impose your will on another human being within the rules of the game. Then it deposits that person back into ordinary life and expects the imposition to stop at the sideline. And sometimes it does. And sometimes it doesn't. The Hall of Fame and the Heisman Trust and the NFL itself have never built an honest framework for what to do when it doesn't, because building that framework would require them to look at the pattern. The pattern implicates the game itself.

MICHAEL VICK: Nobody wants to look at the game itself.

JIM BROWN: Nobody ever does.

The six men sit with that. Outside — if outside exists in this space — the sound of a crowd roars faintly. Then fades. Then silence.

1) Image from atlantafalcons.com

The Weight of the Game: A Hypothetical Conversation - Part II - "Canton and the Heisman"

2026-03-06T04:51:00.003-06:00

Before 1

Before 2

After 3

The five men remain in the same weightless space. Lawrence Phillips has gone quiet, retreating into himself. Rae Carruth stares at nothing. Jim Brown, sensing a shift in the air, steers the conversation deliberately.

JIM BROWN: There's something that's been sitting unspoken in this room. Might as well say it directly (looking at O.J.).

You're still in the Hall of Fame, Juice. Your bust is still in Canton. And Darren Sharper, a man whose career statistics place him among the greatest safeties in the history of the game, will almost certainly never get in. The numbers are not in serious dispute. The institution's own rules say off-field conduct is not supposed to be considered. And yet here we are.

O.J. SIMPSON: I've thought about this more than you'd expect.

WALTER PAYTON: Walk us through it. Because from the outside, it looks like a contradiction that the Hall of Fame hasn't found the courage to resolve.

O.J. SIMPSON: It is a contradiction. That's the honest answer. I was inducted in 1985. First ballot. The murders, Nicole, Ron Goldman, that was 1994. Nine years after I went into Canton. The Hall has no mechanism to remove an enshrined player for anything that happens after induction. That's not a loophole. That's a structural decision the institution made. Whether it's the right one is a separate conversation. But it's what it is.

JIM BROWN: And Sharper?

O.J. SIMPSON: Sharper became eligible in 2016. By then, the guilty plea was a matter of public record. Twenty years federal. Sixteen proven victims. The Hall's bylaws technically say voters cannot consider off-field conduct. One of the most prominent voters, Peter King at Sports Illustrated, publicly said he'd resign from the committee before violating that rule. And yet Sharper never made it past the nomination stage, not once.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: So they found a way around their own rules.

O.J. SIMPSON: They found a way to not have to enforce their own rules. There's a difference, but it's a thin one. The voters simply didn't elevate him to finalist status. Nobody had to officially vote against him for off-field reasons because he never got far enough for it to matter. The system allowed them to look the other way without ever having to formally look anywhere.

WALTER PAYTON: And his numbers?

O.J. SIMPSON: Legitimate. Sixty-three career interceptions, sixth all-time. Eleven returned for touchdowns. Five Pro Bowls. A Super Bowl ring with New Orleans after the 2009 season. Led that Saints defense that was genuinely transformative for that city. By pure position value among safeties, you're talking about a player in the conversation with Ed Reed, Ronnie Lott, Paul Krause. That conversation is real. And it will never happen in Canton.

RAE CARRUTH: So the institution found an informal solution because it lacked the courage for a formal one.

JIM BROWN: That's exactly what happened. The Hall doesn't want to be the entity that either enshrines a convicted serial rapist or the entity that formally changed its own rules because of him. So it did neither. It just let the process absorb him quietly. And nobody had to take responsibility for the outcome.

WALTER PAYTON: (to O.J.) And your situation is the mirror image. Already inside. No mechanism to remove you. So the institution is also protected from having to make that decision.

O.J. SIMPSON: Yes. The Hall lowered its flag to half-mast when I died in 2024. They published a formal news release. There are people who found that unconscionable. I understand why. And I don't have a clean answer for it. My bust is in Canton. It will remain there. That's simply the reality.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Does it mean anything to you? Still being in?

O.J. SIMPSON: It meant everything once. I was a first-ballot inductee. That's the highest validation the game offers a player. To go in unanimously, on the first try, alongside players you idolized. That was the capstone. And then everything that came after (trails off). The bust doesn't change. It just sits there. And what it represents has become completely disconnected from what I am in history. "O.J. Simpson, Hall of Fame running back" is now a footnote inside a much larger story that has nothing to do with football.

JIM BROWN: Does it feel like you still deserve to be there? Based on what you did on the field?

O.J. SIMPSON: On the field? Yes. The 2,003 yards in fourteen games. That happened. First player to break 2,000 in a season. Four rushing titles. That body of work is real. Whether a man who did what I did, "allegedly," deserves to be honored in any public hall of anything? That's a different question. And I'm not sure I'm the right person to answer it.

WALTER PAYTON: Can we talk about the Heisman for a moment? Because that's a separate institution with a separate set of decisions.

O.J. SIMPSON: My Heisman. Yes. 1968, USC. I won it by what was then the largest margin in the history of the award. The Heisman Trust has no bylaw to rescind it. So I am a Heisman Trophy winner permanently, on paper. My name will always be on that list.

JIM BROWN: But the physical trophy?

O.J. SIMPSON: That's where it gets strange. After the civil verdict, $33.5 million to the Goldman and Brown families, my assets were auctioned to pay the judgment. My Heisman was sold in February of 1999 for $255,000. The money went to the Goldman family. Ron Goldman's family owns the proceeds of my most prestigious athletic honor. There's a poetic justice in that, I suppose, that I'm not in a position to argue with.

WALTER PAYTON: Where is the trophy now?

O.J. SIMPSON: Last I understand, it's in a private collection in Nevada. A man named Reviglio. It's his centerpiece. He bought it quietly. It sits in his home, not in a museum, not on public display, but in a private room, behind closed doors. Maybe that's appropriate. Maybe the things I earned deserve to be somewhere private and out of sight.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: USC kept their copy on display.

O.J. SIMPSON: They did. USC has the school's version. Two trophies were always made, one for the player, one for the institution. Mine left. Theirs stayed. And USC itself went silent when I died. No statement. No tribute. No acknowledgment. That silence was the most articulate thing they could have said.

JIM BROWN: So to bring it back to Sharper. Here's the central irony that I keep turning over. Darren Sharper's crimes were more systematic, more deliberate, and more numerous than anything in this room. And he will likely be remembered primarily as a cautionary tale, not as a football player. His statistics will appear in the footnotes of conversations about Hall of Fame omissions. Meanwhile the Hall itself has O.J.'s bust, and the Heisman has O.J.'s name permanently on its list of winners, and both institutions made their peace with that reality through inaction rather than decision.

Sharper with the Saints in 2009 4

WALTER PAYTON: The institutions protected themselves first.

JIM BROWN: Institutions always protect themselves first. The game comes second. The victims come nowhere in the official accounting.

RAE CARRUTH: Nobody built a mechanism to account for the victims because nobody expected to need one.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Or because building one would require looking honestly at the pattern. And the pattern is bigger than any one player.

O.J. SIMPSON: The bust stays in Canton. The name stays on the Heisman list. Sharper's name stays off the plaque in Canton. And none of those outcomes were arrived at through any deliberate moral reckoning. They were arrived at through institutional inertia, procedural gaps, and the very human tendency to avoid a hard choice when an easier one is available.

WALTER PAYTON: The women Sharper drugged and violated don't appear anywhere in this conversation about Canton. They're not part of the Hall of Fame debate. They're referenced in the context of why he won't get in, but not as people. As a "reason," there's something wrong with that. Their suffering became a procedural footnote in a football argument.

JIM BROWN: That's the most damning thing you've said in this entire conversation, Sweetness!

WALTER PAYTON: I know. And I include myself in the indictment. Because Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman are similarly framed in the public conversation, not as people, but as the reason O.J.'s bust feels uncomfortable in Canton. We've turned victims into institutional problems to be managed. None of us, in this room or anywhere else, has a clean answer for that.

(Silence. Complete and prolonged. The kind that follows a truth nobody can improve upon.)

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: The game didn't do that to them. We did.

No one disagrees.

1) Image from espn.com

2) Image from cbssports.com

3) Image from latimes.com

4) Image from jacksonville.com

The Weight of the Game: A Hypothetical Conversation - Part I

2026-03-01T16:47:00.111-06:00

The Daily Hat Trick has remained dormant for six years. If it appears the following creative inspiration is random and spontaneous, it is because it is random and spontaneous. I hope you enjoy it.

Only One Is Not at the Table 1

JIM BROWN: Walter. Juice. Good to be in the same room, finally — even if the circumstances are what they are.

WALTER PAYTON: Jim. You know, I used to study your film constantly. Fullerton Avenue in Chicago, late nights. You were the standard.

O.J. SIMPSON: Same. Jim, when I was at USC, I had your rushing record in my head every single carry. 12,312 yards. That number lived in me.

JIM BROWN: And you both went and made it complicated for me. Walter, you finish with 16,726. That stood for what, almost twenty years after you retired?

WALTER PAYTON: Eighteen years before Emmitt Smith got there. But I'll tell you what, I never once thought about the record while I was playing. Every yard was about winning. The Bears needed me in '77, we went 9-5, I rushed for over 1,800 yards, won the MVP. That felt like something.

O.J. SIMPSON: That '77 season was remarkable. But talk to me about being overlooked. I run for 2,003 yards in a single season, 1973, first man ever to break 2,000, and somehow the conversation always ends up somewhere else.

JIM BROWN: It shouldn't. That was a legitimate all-time performance, Juice. Fourteen games, by the way; people forget it wasn't even sixteen games yet.

WALTER PAYTON: The yards-per-carry, too. Jim, yours might never be touched: 5.2 for a career. That's absurd for a running back who carried the ball as many times as you did.

JIM BROWN: I left at the top. That's the part people don't always understand. I was 29. Hollywood called, and I walked away clean. Nine seasons, never missed a game due to injury. I wanted to leave people wondering what could have been.

O.J. SIMPSON: (quietly) I wonder sometimes what my legacy would have looked like if I'd had that kind of discipline. Just…walked away clean.

(A pause. The air shifts.)

WALTER PAYTON: We should talk about it. There's no point pretending. We're past the point where it matters to protect anybody's image.

JIM BROWN: I'll go first, since I'm the oldest. I've had my own shadows. The domestic violence accusations over the years, multiple incidents. I know what was said. I know what some of it was. I told myself for a long time that I was a product of my era, that men weren't held to the same account. That's not an excuse. It's an explanation of how I justified it. I'm not proud of that.

O.J. SIMPSON: Mine is… different in scale. Nicole. Ron Goldman. June 12th, 1994. I know what the world decided. I know what the civil court decided. The criminal trial acquitted me, but I've lived with that verdict, both of them, for thirty years. I've had a lot of time now to sit with things that I couldn't sit with when I was alive.

WALTER PAYTON: I'm not going to judge either of you. I have my own accounting to do. My foundation and my public face: "Sweetness." But I had affairs. I struggled privately with pain medication in my final years. I had a rare liver disease, PSC, and I was on the transplant list and didn't get a liver in time. But before all that, I wasn't the husband or father I should have been. My wife, Connie, knew. My kids eventually knew. The public got a version of me that was curated.

JIM BROWN: That's the thing about being a symbol. People need you to be a certain thing. The sport makes you larger than life, and then you spend the rest of your life managing the distance between who they think you are and who you actually are.

O.J. SIMPSON: I became something nobody could have scripted. The trial of the century. The white Bronco. I spent nine years in prison in Nevada on the robbery conviction. I died in 2024 from prostate cancer. And I'll tell you, toward the end, you think about everything. Every choice. I think about my children. I think about what I took from people.

WALTER PAYTON: Do you say it? Out loud?

O.J. SIMPSON: (long pause) I think I did it. I think...yes. And I think there is no redemption that makes that okay. There's just the truth, and what you do with it, even if it's too late for anyone else to hear it.

(Silence)

JIM BROWN: We were all great football players. Genuinely great. And we were all deeply flawed men. I don't think those two things cancel each other out, in either direction.

WALTER PAYTON: The yards and the touchdowns, they happened. They're real. But so is everything else.

O.J. SIMPSON: I just hope Ron Goldman's family, and Nicole's family...I hope they found some peace. That's the only thing left I can offer. And it's nothing, really.

JIM BROWN: It's something. It's a start.

Rae Carruth approaches hesitantly. The three men look up. There's a long moment of recognition.

Rae Carruth released from prison in 2018. 2

RAE CARRUTH: I... hope it's alright. I heard you talking. I played too. Wide receiver. Panthers. First round, 1997.

WALTER PAYTON: We know who you are, Rae. Sit down.

RAE CARRUTH: (sitting, subdued) I don't expect anything from you all. I just... haven't had a real conversation about football in a long time. Nobody talks to me about football.

JIM BROWN: What were your numbers?

RAE CARRUTH: Four seasons — well, parts of four. 1997 was my best. Fourteen touchdowns receiving that year, counting the full season. Career — 143 catches, roughly 1,500 yards total. It wasn't much time. I was developing. The Panthers believed in me enough to take me 27th overall.

O.J. SIMPSON: A first-round receiver in the late '90s — that's real. That's not nothing on the field.

RAE CARRUTH: (quietly) No. It wasn't nothing. Steve Beuerlein, Kerry Collins — we had something building. And then I... I ended it. All of it. My own career, everything. I threw it away. And that's the smallest part of what I did.

WALTER PAYTON: Say the rest of it.

RAE CARRUTH: Cherica died. My son Chancellor has cerebral palsy from the oxygen deprivation when she was shot. He's in his mid-twenties now. Being cared for by Cherica's mother. And I spent eighteen years in prison and got out in 2018, and the world didn't care that I was out. Nobody was waiting. There was no comeback story. There was nothing.

JIM BROWN: There's a difference between our situations and yours, Rae. A significant one. Walter had personal failures. O.J.'s case, whatever you believe, had legal complexity that became cultural. My history involved incidents people debated. Yours had a verdict and a child with brain damage living as the proof of what happened.

RAE CARRUTH: I know that. I know the difference. I'm not here to compare.

WALTER PAYTON: Then what are you here for?

RAE CARRUTH: I guess I just wanted to sit near people who understood what it felt like to run out of a tunnel. To have seventy thousand people there because of you. Because of what your body could do. I had four years of that. And then I made choices that meant nobody would ever remember the catches. Only the crime. My son will never know me as a football player. He'll never know me as anything good.

O.J. SIMPSON: That's a weight I understand. Children knowing you only through what you cost them.

JIM BROWN: The difference is you have a son who is alive and bearing what you did in his body every single day.

RAE CARRUTH: Yes. That's the difference. Chancellor is the difference. And there's no speech I can give, no reflection I can offer, that changes what his life is. I used to dream about what my career stats could have looked like. Five, six good seasons...maybe a thousand yards receiving, a Pro Bowl. That was possible. I had the talent. Instead my Wikipedia page is a crime summary and a prison sentence.

WALTER PAYTON: The game doesn't redeem anybody. I thought "Sweetness" was me. It was just a nickname. The real accounting happens away from the field. You know that better than most.

RAE CARRUTH: I do. I just wish I'd known it before.

JIM BROWN: You had talent, Rae. That part was real.

RAE CARRUTH: (under his breath, almost inaudible) It wasn't enough to matter.

The four men, Brown, Payton, Simpson, Carruth, sit in the same weightless space. The silence after Carruth's last words still hangs. Then, from the periphery, another figure appears. Younger than the others. Moving with the residual athleticism of someone whose body was once a marvel. Lawrence Phillips stops at the edge of the group, uncertain.

JIM BROWN: Lawrence.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: (surprised to be recognized) Mr. Brown.

JIM BROWN: Don't "Mr. Brown" me. Sit down.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I wasn't sure if I belonged here.

WALTER PAYTON: Nobody here was sure of that about themselves. What year did you get here?

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: 2016. March. I was 40.

(No one asks how. They already know. Phillips died in his prison cell, presumably suicide, while serving a 31-year prison sentence for an attempted murder conviction.)

O.J. SIMPSON: I watched you at Nebraska. 1994, '95. You were something different. Something genuinely different.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: People kept saying that. Different. Special. Like it was a promise somebody made on my behalf without asking me first.

WALTER PAYTON: Sixth pick overall. 1996. St. Louis.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Yeah. Dick Vermeil cried when he drafted me. Actually cried. Said he was going to save me. (pause) I don't think I was save-able by then. I'm not sure I ever was. But I didn't know that yet, and neither did he.

JIM BROWN: Your first season — ten touchdowns. Over 1,000 yards from scrimmage.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Should have been more. Would have been more. But I couldn't stay out of my own way for more than six weeks at a time. There was always something like an incident, a fight, or a woman I put my hands on. The Rams cut me after two seasons. Then Miami. Then San Francisco. Each stop shorter than the last. By the time the NFL was done with me I'd played parts of three seasons and the league had given up. I don't blame them.

RAE CARRUTH: How many teams gave you a chance?

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Three NFL teams. Then NFL Europe. Then the Arena League. Each one a smaller stage. Like the universe was slowly turning down the volume on me. (beat) I hurt people along the way. Women, mostly. There was one incident in college with my ex-girlfriend, Kate McEwen, that Nebraska and Coach Tom Osborne decided wasn't worth losing a national championship over. They suspended me six games and brought me back. We won the title. I was named offensive MVP of the bowl game.

JIM BROWN: That decision by Osborne to reinstate you...that's on him too. Institutions protect their interests and call it second chances.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I've thought about that. It gave me cover I hadn't earned. Made me think consequences had ceilings. They don't.

WALTER PAYTON: Where did it end, Lawrence? The final accounting?

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: It ended in 2005. I drove a car into a group of teenagers after a flag football argument. Three kids hit. Then later, I strangled a woman, in an apartment. I said I didn't do it. The jury disagreed. The judge gave me thirty-one years. I was in Kern Valley State Prison and I just... I couldn't see thirty-one years. I couldn't see the end of the corridor. So I made a decision in that cell and that was that.

(Silence. Heavy and complete.)

RAE CARRUTH: (to no one in particular) We were all running backs and receivers, made successful by our speed, and the one thing none of us could outrun was ourselves.

JIM BROWN: That's either very profound or very convenient, Rae. I haven't decided which.

RAE CARRUTH: Probably both.

O.J. Simpson has been quiet for a moment, looking into the middle distance.

O.J. SIMPSON: Can I say something about someone who isn't here? Someone who should be having a version of this conversation but maybe isn't capable of it yet?

WALTER PAYTON: Go ahead.

O.J. SIMPSON: Darren Sharper. Safety. Vikings, Packers, Saints. One of the best to ever play the position. Eight Pro Bowls-caliber seasons. Interceptions like he could read minds. Won a Super Bowl with New Orleans after the 2009 season, one of the feel-good championships in NFL history, post-Katrina, the city needed it. He was a centerpiece of that defense.

JIM BROWN: I know who he is.

O.J. SIMPSON: What he did — what came out after — it wasn't passion. It wasn't a moment. It wasn't poverty or foster care or a childhood that broke something fundamental. He drugged women. Systematically. Across multiple states. At least sixteen victims that were proven. He did it during his playing career. He did it during that Super Bowl season. While the city of New Orleans was celebrating, while he was being called a champion — he was doing that.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: (visibly disturbed) That's...that's a different category.

O.J. SIMPSON: It is. And I say that as someone who has no moral high ground. But there's a difference between a life that collapsed into violence and a man who constructed a hidden architecture of predation while maintaining a public face of excellence. The Super Bowl ring and what he was doing to women existed simultaneously. Deliberately. That takes a kind of compartmentalization that isn't about emotion or weakness. It's about deciding that certain people don't matter.

WALTER PAYTON: He got twenty years of hard, federal time.

O.J. SIMPSON: He did. And he'll carry the Hall of Fame numbers that will never get him into the Hall. That's the footnote his career became. Not the interceptions. Not the Super Bowl. The footnote is sixteen women and a federal conviction. And unlike most of us, there's no "but" available to him. No complexity to hide inside.

JIM BROWN: Some legacies don't survive contact with the truth.

(Another pause. The group sits with that. Lawrence Phillips is looking at his hands.)

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Can I ask you something, Mr. Payton? Walter?

WALTER PAYTON: Of course.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: Did you ever feel like the football was the only place where things made sense? Like between those lines was the only time the noise stopped?

WALTER PAYTON: Yes. Absolutely yes. The game was the one place where what I did translated directly into something clean. You run hard, you gain yards, the crowd reacts, it's simple. The rest of life, marriage, fatherhood, who you are behind closed doors, that's all ambiguous. You can tell yourself stories. On the field the scoreboard doesn't lie.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: That's it exactly. That's what I've been trying to articulate for years. When I was running the ball I was just... a body doing what it was built to do. Everything else required me to be a person and I didn't know how to be a person. Nobody taught me. Foster care, twelve different homes before high school; you learn to survive, not to relate. Not to love anything that can leave you.

JIM BROWN: I came from a different kind of absence. My father wasn't around. My great-grandmother raised me in Georgia. But I had Manhasset High, I had mentors, and I had football coaches who saw something worth developing. You didn't have that infrastructure, Lawrence.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: No. I had Tom Osborne, who needed me healthy enough to play on Saturdays.

JIM BROWN: That's a brutal thing to say. And probably true.

WALTER PAYTON: I think about what I'd tell my younger self. Before the fame calcified into identity. I'd say...the jersey comes off. Every single Sunday night the jersey comes off and then you're just a man. And you better have something built underneath the jersey or you'll spend your whole life trying to get back inside it.

RAE CARRUTH: I was 26 when everything ended. I didn't have anything built underneath it. Just fear and bad decisions made at speed.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: I was 24 when the league gave up on me. I spent the next sixteen years proving everyone right about me. That's the thing I regret most: not the opportunities I wasted, but the people who believed in something I couldn't sustain. I regret what I cost them. Vermeil especially. He was genuine.

O.J. SIMPSON: Genuine people pay the highest price for believing in the wrong ones. That's not their fault. But it's our accounting.

Jim Brown stands slowly, not to leave, but just to stand. He looks at each man in turn. Brown, who rushed for 12,312 yards in nine seasons and never missed a game. Who carried his own shadows. Who outlived most of his era and watched the game he defined become something unrecognizable. When he speaks it's without judgment but without softness either.

JIM BROWN: We were all, at our best, extraordinary. Every man in this room had gifts that the vast majority of human beings will never possess. Speed, vision, instinct, physical courage. The game asked for all of it and we gave it. That part is real and it doesn't disappear.

But the game is also the most effective hiding place ever constructed for a man who doesn't want to be known. Seventy thousand people watching and not one of them seeing you. Just the number on your back. Just the highlights. We hid in plain sight, most of us. Some of us hid things that were merely sad. Some of us hid things that were unforgivable.

(pauses)

The question I keep returning to, and I don't have an answer, is whether the gifts and the damage come from the same place. Whether whatever makes a man fearless between the lines is the same thing that makes him dangerous outside them. I don't know. But I think about it.

WALTER PAYTON: I think about it too.

LAWRENCE PHILLIPS: (whispering) Every day.

Rae Carruth says nothing. He doesn't need to. Chancellor's face, which he barely knows, is answer enough. The five men sit together in the particular silence of people who have run out of defenses. Not at peace. Not forgiven. But present, finally, without the jersey.

1) Image from https://www.facebook.com/groups/mosportstalk/posts/2767626706924912/

2) Image from NBC News.

Strange Times

2020-08-25T11:16:00.003-05:00

The Daily Hat Trick is like a sleeping giant, doing more sleeping the last few years. Still, remarkably, someone is looking at this dormant contribution to the Internet zeitgeist more than a thousand times every month.

For that reason, I thought it would be fitting to share an occasional thought about the sports world. After watching the first couple of episodes of HBO’s Hard Knocks, featuring the two Los Angeles NFL franchises, today’s thought can be summed up in a parody of a hip-hop one liner:

Wuhan Clan ain’t nothin’ to fuck with!

Philip Rivers's absence from the Chargers is the least strange thing about the 2020 NFL season. 1

1) Image from http://m.youtube.com

I Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer

2019-06-30T21:39:00.000-05:00

Another NBA season has come and gone and we have a new champion as the Toronto Raptors won their first, ever, NBA Championship in a 4-2 series win over the two-time defending NBA and five-time Western Conference champion Golden State Warriors. Often, when a dominant champion is dethroned, the door is opened to a changing of the guard. While this season is no different, the manner in which said door was opened for a change of the guard is through changes of address.

RENT A TITLE

When the San Antonio Spurs won their fifth NBA Championship in 2014, it appeared the torch of their long-term dynasty would be passed from Tim Duncan and Tony Parker to then-third year sensation Kawhi Leonard. Leonard began to showcase the possible limitless ceiling of his talent with a breakout performance during the Spurs' series loss in the 2013 NBA Finals to the Miami Heat. Since then, Leonard was consistently discussed as a candidate or awardee of Most Valuable Player, Defensive Player of the Year, All NBA, First Team, and other superlative recognitions.

Rumors abound, the relationship between Leonard and the Spurs completely deteriorated by the end of the 2018 season, stemming from a dispute over the rehabilitation of an injury. A return of Leonard to the Spurs for the following season was an impossibility. A trade was necessary. The beat writers ascertained Leonard wanted to continue his NBA career in Los Angeles, either with the Los Angeles Lakers, with LeBron James, or the Los Angeles Clippers, coached by championship coach Doc Rivers. The Toronto Raptors, however, upped the ante. Despite Leonard being in the final year of his contract, with absolutely no assurances (or appearances) Leonard would re-sign in Toronto, the Raptors traded their long-time, All-Star shooter DeMar DeRozan and other considerations to San Antonio to receive Leonard.

Realistically, the Raptors, always a bridesmaid but never a bride in the NBA's Eastern Conference, had a narrow, one-year window to win a championship. Against the long odds of getting over the hump in the Eastern Conference and dethroning the Warriors' dynasty, the Raptors passed through that window and hoisted the Larry O'Brien Trophy earlier this month. Leonard's message: enjoy today; I won't be here tomorrow.

Reports have surfaced that the chances of Leonard remaining in Toronto are "fading." Though Raptors President Masai Ujiri expressed confidence in retaining Leonard, his desire to play out west is no secret. Next week, Leonard is meeting with Lakers legend Magic Johnson and Lakers Owner Jeanie Buss. It appears the lure of being a God in North America's fourth-largest on a team with the potential to be a dynasty in the making pales in comparison to the opportunity to join LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and the new Showtime Lakers or their arena-roommates, the Clippers, in Leonard's home town of Los Angeles.

The Raptors' championship will affect the balance of power. Toronto's success appears likely to open up opportunity for all in the Eastern Conference and loosening the grip of the Warriors' absolute dominance of the Western Conference.

Don't be sad, Toronto, because it's over, or that it was brief, or that it was expensive. Be glad that it happened. 1

NEXT YEAR CAN WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT YEAR

The Golden State Warriors assembled the most prolific scoring lineup and explosive NBA offense in recent memory with the one-two punch of the Splash Brothers, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, with a "supporting staff" that would occupy spots on All-Star rosters and in NBA Finals MVP memberships, including a probable future Hall of Fame defender and enforcer in Draymond Green. The problem? The best player on the planet, LeBron James was assembling his own championship contender in Cleveland, teaming up with All-Stars Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. Suddenly, what appeared to be a chance to win not one..."not two...not three...not four"...NBA championships for the Warriors was shaping up into a battle royale in the spirit of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics.

The Warriors and Cavaliers would meet in the NBA Finals in the next four consecutive seasons. At the end of the 2016 Finals, the Cavs and Warriors each earned a title against the other. The Warriors appeared built to run through any team without LeBron. Then came Kevin Durant. The rest is history. The Cavaliers and Warriors would play nine NBA Finals games in the next two seasons. The Warriors would win eight of those games, earning back-to-back NBA Championships.

Due to a calf injury, Kevin Durant was invisible from the Warriors 2019 Western Conference Finals drubbing of the Portland Trailblazers and the first four games of the Finals series against the Raptors. "Bad" would become "worse" as Durant, clearly not recovered from the injury, ruptured his Achilles tendon in the second quarter of Game 5 after scoring 11 points in 12 minutes of play. The Raptors won the series in six games and the Warriors dynasty, as it was, ended.

Despite being very likely to miss the entire 2020 season, Durant and the Brooklyn Nets reportedly agreed to a four-year deal worth more than $160 million. The Nets also announced that they will sign All-Stars Kyrie Irving and DeAndre Jordan. With the fall of the Warriors comes the rise of the Nets, not next year, but in the year after next. The Eastern Conference, overnight, can expect a titanic battle for the conference honors between at least three teams: the Nets, the Milwaukee Bucks and 2019 NBA Most Valuable Player Giannis Antetokounmpo, and the Philadelphia 76ers with their host of young superstars.

NBA free agency...! To the victor goes the trophy. To the losers go the spoils.

The Eastern Conference's newest Big Three. 2

1) Image from the Japan Times.
2) Image from clutchpoints.com.

Chick Pic of the Day -- June 3, 2019 -- Ciara

2019-06-03T15:16:00.000-05:00

The Daily Hat Trick has never been above gratuitous pictures of famous (or not-so-famous) people showing skin, and it won't start today.

Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson is living a charmed life: NFL superstar . . . big contract . . . married to Ciara. Ciara has been trending on Google of late so why not reboot the Daily Hat Trick Chick Pic with the signer and fitness enthusiast?

Ciara reportedly lost fifty pounds. I'm taking notes. 1

Automatic, supersonic, hypnotic, funky fresh. 2

And...one, two step. 3

After...Ciara. 4

Before...ex-wife Ashton. It keeps getting better for Russell. 5

1) Image from pintrest.com
2, 3) Images from leanmuscularbody.com
4) Image from etonline.com
5) Image from sbnation.com

Assumption of Risk

2019-05-31T14:58:00.001-05:00

You've been warned. 1

This past Wednesday night, a four-year-old girl was hospitalized after being hit by a foul ball rocketing at over 100 miles per hour off of the bat of Chicago Cubs centerfielder Albert Almora, Jr. during the fourth inning of the Cubs' game at Minute Maid Park against the Houston Astros. Major League Baseball had several high-profile incidents of fans being injured by foul balls hit into the stands. In 2018, all thirty MLB clubs extended netting at their parks to the ends of the dugouts. That same season, a 79-year-old Dodgers fan, Linda Goldbloom died four days after being hit by a foul ball, despite the extension of the protective netting. It was not enough.

Linda Goldbloom, shortly before being stuck by a foul ball, resulting in her death. 2

Major League Baseball has been immune from negligence under the so-called "Baseball Rule," an inconspicuous disclaimer on the back of its tickets for admission declaring that the fans assumes the risk of injury a a result of the game of baseball. The general legal principle of "assumption of risk" is that a plaintiff who voluntarily assumes a risk of harm arising from the negligent or reckless conduct of the defendant cannot recover for such harm. 3 The result, under the law, has been a blanket immunity for baseball clubs from liability for injuries to spectators resulting from missiles and shrapnel in the form of foul balls and broken bats. However, the notion that a four-year-old or a 79-year-old assumes the risk of hospitalization or death from a night at the ballpark strains credulity, at best, and, in the view of this blogger, is ludicrous.

FIX IT

While the vast majority of normal, decent human beings, including MLB executives, likely have compassion for people injured in these infrequent, yet potentially tragic, accidents, compassion alone will not help the people who are hurt, nor will it reduce the future chances of such carnage upon its fans, who are the reason there is revenue in baseball. There are two simple solutions to further minimize the risks of these atrocious consequences during what should be a family friendly outing. The first is Major League Baseball extends its protective netting, all but invisible to the spectator's naked eye, to the foul poles (or farther if reasonably necessary), shielding fans from line drives blasted off of the bats of world class athletes. The second solution is the legal system ruling that fans do not reasonably assume the risks of maimed children or dead parents from watching baseball, hitting MLB and its multi-billion dollar revenue stream where it could hurt. People respond accordingly to pain.

Another possibility is the display of this video with full audio before every at-bat. 4

1) Image from https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/fan-sues-red-sox-owner-john-henry-after-fenway-foul-ball-injury/

2) Image from https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2019/02/05/dodger-stadium-woman-killed-foul-ball/

3) Source: Restat 2d of Torts, § 496A (2nd 1979)
4) Images, in part, from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJSScYHHcl4

Redemption of a Tiger

2019-04-18T17:33:00.000-05:00

WAIT. YOU'RE STILL ALIVE?

The Daily Hat Trick--once a daily blog, true to its name--has been retired for nearly five years. In late 2017, scratched the itch to revive the blog, but never followed through. In many ways, this is like a preview of a possible reboot.

Rule 1 of blogging, for most people, is that the first phase of blogging is like talking into an empty room. With that said, I thought that I would memorialize my thoughts on Tiger Woods' remarkable comeback to the world of elite golfers.

CALL IT A COMEBACK

Tiger Woods reached the highest of highs and, after Michael Jordan's second retirement in 1998, was the biggest, most famous, most marketable, and successful athlete in the world, by any measurable, reasonable standard.

He brought himself to successive new rock bottoms, starting with his serial womanizing, the public collapse of his personal life, then his drug addiction caused by his deteriorating back, followed by the cops discovering him in a ditch in a pain-pill induced stupor, where he literally did not know where in the world he was.

The image of Woods winning the 1997 Masters is like that of a ghost. 1

NEW LOWS...ALL-TIME HIGH

Woods could not walk without assistance, let alone play golf, because of his back problems. Despite all of that...Woods could have walked away, still been the G.O.A.T. (that's "Greatest of All Time for you older readers), and never needed to earn another nickel in his lifetime.

To go through the rehabilitation, the training, and the work just to compete in the PGA...just to make the cut, let alone win the MASTERS.... Woods put himself in a huge hole that he never had to bother coming out of because of his past success and nobody would have questioned him. Instead he pulled himself out.

Sports are often a microcosm of life. Woods' self-made redemption is truly remarkable. It tells us that we can earn second chances, seemingly no matter how far we fall, if we're willing to make it happen.

It has been a long time coming. 2

1) Image from businessinsider.com.
2) Image from usatoday.com.

Deja Who Dat?

2017-11-15T22:51:00.000-06:00

The Daily Hat Trick has, more or less, been retired since late 2014. Changes in life, new opportunities, and new family dynamics have made it prohibitive to produce regular content, though I am very thankful for the roughly four-plus years of regular readers that visited the Hat Trick. While this post is not likely to be read by all but a handful of Facebook friends and Twitter followers (as the search standing of a dormant blog PLUMMETS) a handful of topics have compelled me to come out of hibernation.

Who knows? Perhaps a handful of you still check every once in a while to see if there is new Hat Trick content. The Daily Hat Trick still gets a little more than twenty hits per day (twenty more than the author gives it) and I thank those of you who still check out the oldies!

WHY NOW?

Most recently, the Daily Hat Trick remembered sports figures who passed away in 2016, commented on the 25th anniversary of Magic Johnson's HIV announcement, and the nonstop hot water the the New England Patriots and Tom Brady stayed in because of the "Deflategate" scandal.

About a month ago, I could never have imagined seriously writing on this subject. However, I've stopped laughing at the thought as a fan's optimism. It is worth discussing among serious sports fans: the New Orleans Saints are legitimate Super Bowl contenders in 2017.

SMALL STUMBLE

The Saints started 0-2 with consecutive, and convincing, losses to the Minnesota Vikings and New England Patriots (two of a small number of other serious contenders to hoist the Lombardi Trophy in February). The same old story was playing out: great offense led by a Hall of Fame quarterback in Drew Brees and a mad scientist offensive mastermind on the sideline in Head Coach Sean Payton...a defense that--due to inexperience, bad chemistry, lack of discipline and maybe a lack of talent--could not stop a runny nose, let alone an NFL offense.

Then it started to happen. The defense began getting pressure on opposing quarterbacks. Rookie cornerback and Saints 2017 first round draft pick Marshon Lattimore's pro talent began to visibly blossom more with each passing week. Injured players returned to--and remained in--the lineup. The offense, already potent, appeared to be more in sync with passing weeks.

An unexpected, must-win, road victory over the favored Carolina Panthers, NFC South champions in two of the last three seasons, kept the Saints on life support. The patient could then breath on his own and was released from the hospital after a shut out win over the Miami Dolphins in London. Utter destruction of an offensively potent Detroit Lions team put the Saints noses above the .500 water level for the first time since 2013. "Maybe they won't suck this year," I thought.

Adrian Peterson doesn't have Sean Payton to scream at, anymore. 2

WHO DAT LEADING THE PACK?

After a stroke of misfortune for the Green Bay Packers--Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone, ending his season--becoming the good fortune of the Saints, who would visit the Packers on the following Sunday, the Saints have looked like, and played like, one of the best teams in the NFL this season.

During nearly every sports team turn-around story, there is a moment in which an observer thinks, "This is a different team...this team is 'for real'." For this blogger, that moment came this past Sunday. The Saints went to visit the Buffalo Bills, a (then) 5-3 team, loaded with defensive talent, which takes the ball away from opponents as well as any team in the league. They utterly demolished the Bills, leading by as many as 44 points the Saints' largest margin of victory away from the Mercedes-Benz Superdome since 1987.

Last Sunday's win made a statement for a number of reasons. The Saints were away from home. Drew Brees threw for fewer than 200 yards and did not throw a touchdown pass; the running game was dominant. The defense only allowed three points until the final two minutes of the game. Buffalo has a winning record. This is the Saints seventh consecutive win, their longest winning streak since 2011 (arguably their best, ever, regular season in the 51-year history of the franchise).

Saints running back Mark Ingram even had time to have a beer with the fans. 1

SUPER TALK IS SUPER SOON

The Saints only won seven games in each of the last three seasons and have already matched that total. The Saints still have seven regular season games remaining, including contests at the Los Angeles Rams (7-2), hosting the Carolina Panthers (7-3), and home-and-away matchups against their archrivals, the defending NFC Champion Atlanta Falcons. They are in a great position, but have ensured nothing at it relates to the postseason. For any of the efforts of the last two months to matter, they have to continue winning, especially within their division.

Still, there is a momentum and an optimism surrounding the Saints that only happens, to this degree, once every few years. This is only the seventh time in the franchise's half-century history in which it has started a season this well through nine games. Super Bowl talk is not far fetched.

Need more proof? Today, I saw the first new Saints Super Bowl song and video that I've seen in several years. Who Dat!

Actually, this is a few years old, but it's new to me.

Video from YouTube.com
1) Image from www.usatoday.com
2) Image from www.totalprosports.com

In Memoriam 2016

2017-01-03T13:44:00.001-06:00

https://youtu.be/fNMmJkLOfDo

America

2016-11-10T15:16:00.001-06:00

It is rare that I post anything political to this sports blog. Still, the election of a new President is a rare occurrence. The system of government and the rights we have under the United States Constitution make this blog and countless other forms of expression possible.

I understand that there are a lot of people who are stunned and acutely disappointed with the election of President-elect Donald Trump. The bottom line is that we live in a democracy and the people have spoken. For those feeling this sense of stunned disbelief and disappointment, remember that this is a COST of democracy.

The President is an institution. It is bigger than one man. We have a system of checks an balances. A plethora of the things said and promised by the President-elect are alarming and/or offensive to a great many people. However we are a nation of hundreds of millions of people. We don't have monarchs. While Trump took it to the greatest extreme I can recall in my lifetime, many politicians run their mouths and are then confined by the reality of the responsibility of their elected office.

This same nation elected a black man, a liberal Democrat, to two terms during the past eight years. Power does not yield easily yet rarely remains in the same hands over greatly extended periods. Yet time and time again, while our nation goes through many ups and downs in its short runs, over the long run it always trends up.

Speak up. Stay involved. Vote. We'll all come out okay.

For those who voted for the President-elect, it is my sincere hope that the decision was guided by your better angels. Many supporters of Mr. Trump and Mr. Trump himself have made public statements that potentially appeal to and suggest otherwise.

While I think the lion's share of voters in any election are driven by positive intentions with the goal of a brighter future, the divisiveness of the rhetoric employed by Candidate Trump inevitably appealed to the angrier, more malevolent, and baser instincts of a significant number of voters.

November 7, 1991

2016-11-07T12:06:00.001-06:00

I was doing chores in the kitchen, emptying and loading the dishwasher, getting ready to head out to our high school’s homecoming football game. The local news was on in the living room. I heard Channel 6 news anchor Lynn Ganser announce, “Tragic news.” Immediately assuming someone famous had died, I stopped what I was doing, entered the living room and focused my attention on the news.

The next thing I heard triggered the type of physical reaction that accompanies shock. “Los Angeles Lakers star Magic Johnson…,”

Magic Johnson died?

“Announced that he is retiring from basketball…,”

WHEW! Wait, that’s surprising, not tragic.

“…after testing positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.”

WHAT?!?!?!?!?

PROFILE OF COURAGE

On November 7, 1991, Magic Johnson announced to the world that he tested positive for HIV. I am 41 years old. I was not alive for the Kennedy assassination. I was not alive when Pearl Harbor was attacked. In my lifetime, there have been three “I’ll never forget where I was when I heard,” tragedies – the Challenger explosion, 9/11, and Magic Johnson announcing he was HIV positive.

That Magic Johnson is alive and well 25 years later makes this day in history remarkable. That HIV/AIDS is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when Magic Johnson is mentioned is remarkable. That HIV is no longer a death sentence with the same Grim Reaper connotation it had 25 years ago is remarkable.

We would never know any of this had Magic not had the courage to step up and share his illness with the world and do more for awareness of this devastating disease in minutes than all of the death and carnage in the prior 10 years in which the medical world was aware of and attempted to spread awareness of AIDS.

Patriot Games

2016-07-14T13:15:00.000-05:00

A federal appeals court recently rejected New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s appeal to overturn his four game suspension, effective at the start of the 2016 NFL regular season. Brady was determined to have been involved in the deflation of Patriots footballs before prior to the one-sided 2014 AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts in January of 2015. The Patriots would advance to and win Super Bowl XLIX over the then-defending Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks.

Brady’s final option would be to appeal the case to the United States Supreme Court. Legal analysts have opined that it is improbable that the Court would hear the case, meaning that Brady will probably miss the first four games of the coming regular season. This would be the final turn in a story with more twists than a pretzel.

IT'S ALWAYS SOMETHING

The Patriots organization is not new to controversy. As far back as the Spygate scandal in which Patriots personnel was caught filming opponents’ sideline signals, the organization has been on NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s “naughty radar” for much of the past 10 years. When questionable competitive practices arise involving this team, a common response is, “It’s always something with the Patriots.”

The issues at play include the degree of Goodell’s power in disciplining players and the arbitrary manner in which discipline is handed out for various offenses. In addition, Brady, a player, may be receiving enhanced punishment in the form of a four game suspension (as opposed to a fine for equipment tampering) for the past iniquities of the organization. The Patriots are a regular Super Bowl contender. Losing Brady for a quarter of a season and replacing him with Jimmy Garoppolo, who is high on potential but short on experience, will probably have some substantial impact on the competitive landscape of the AFC race in 2016.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

I am no fan of Tom Brady or the Patriots. However, I am more with them than against them in principle. Equipment tampering is a minor offense and is ordinarily punishable by a relatively small fine under league rules. Goodell has said publicly that past indiscretions of the organization play a role in his response to the Deflategate incident.

The far reaching and very un-prescribed disciplinary power of Commissioner Goodell, notwithstanding the fact that the power was ceded to Goodell in the 2011 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the NFL Players Association and the league, has been the topic of repeated controversy in player discipline cases. At what point does the far reaching power of a singular individual begin to have a negative impact on America’s pastime of NFL football?

At what point, if any, could Goodell overstep his legal authority in these matters? The current CBA expires in 2021. The possibility of this issue reaching a boiling point and either being addressed in negotiations or via a labor stoppage is not far-fetched. Should that happen, the NFL game and its fans will pay the price felt by the more far reaching price.

It's just another day in Foxboro.

Image from www.jetsrant.com

Retweet of The Day

2016-05-24T12:00:00.000-05:00

I love Magic Johnson. He is one of my favorite athletes of all time. I also think that there are many facets of his life after which people should try to model their lives more. Profound tweeting is not always one of those facets.

The Los Angeles Lakers were awarded the second overall pick in the 2016 NBA Draft in last week's NBA Draft Lottery. The Hall of Fame Los Angeles Lakers point guard dropped this food for thought in the wake of the good news. A week later, it still makes me do a face palm. Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) ‏delivered today's Daily Hat Trick Retweet of the Day.

"Laker fans all over should be happy with the No. 2 pick because the Lakers will get another really good player."

Magic never owned any newspapers, did he?

Image from http://live-av.info

Strange Bedfellows

2016-05-23T18:30:00.000-05:00

Hate is a strong word, in its pure, original form. However, Americans throw the word around in casual conversation, usually having a true meaning of “strong dislike”, “slight dislike”, or a meaning produced by the use of that word in jest. I do not genuinely hate anyone that immediately comes to mind. In the sports fanhood context, I hate Tom Brady and the Bill Belichick era New England Patriots.

If you know me personally or read this blog regularly before its recently discontinued hiatus, this is no secret. They’re arrogant. They’re entitled. They are not likable. And the bastards won’t go away like cockroaches and toilets after a nuclear bomb; they keep on winning.

Over the years I have found myself in the ironic and reluctant position of either defending or mitigating the criticism of Tom Terrific, The Hoodie, and the Minutemen amidst their many controversies. I thought the Tuck Rule was a stupid rule, but it was a rule and was applied to its letter in the infamous Tuck Rule Game that launched Brady’s stardom and the modern Patriots dynasty. I thought Spygate was unethical, but I don’t think it warranted any punishment until the league asked the team to discontinue its sideline filming practices. There is no evidence (not even circumstantial evidence) to show that the Patriots filmed the St. Louis Rams’ walk-through before Super Bowl XXXVI, yet detractors of the Patriots organization often freely toss the allegation around a though it were fact.

THEY ARE NOT ANGELS

I think that the Patriots organization and Tom Brady are guilty as sin in the Deflategate controversy in which Patriots footballs used during the first half of the 2014 AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts in January of 2015 were allegedly deflated below league specifications after the game officials inspected the balls. I also think the impact on the lopsided Patriots victory was between “zero” and “negligible”. More importantly, I think that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell overreached in his punishment of Brady and his team. As reported my multiple news outlets, the penalty on the books in the NFL at that time for equipment tampering is a fine up to $25,000. The Patriots were exponentially fined beyond that threshold, were penalized draft picks, and Brady was suspended for four games at the beginning of the 2015 NFL season.

Of course, the long arm of the real law, not that of Sheriff Goodell, reached out and slapped the NFL, enjoining Brady’s suspension. The court opined that Goodell overreached in his authority, notwithstanding the collective bargaining agreement in place between the league and its players, Brady played the entire 2015 season without interruption. An appellate court recently ruled that the lower erred in its ruling and reinstated Brady’s four game suspension, effective at the start of the 2016 NFL regular season.

BLACK MO

If Goodell is the Sheriff in this western style legal drama, then NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith is Black Bart. And he is coming for the sheriff. This morning on ESPN’s SportsCenter, Smith described the intent of the Players Association to take legal action to, once again, invalidate Brady’s suspension and possibly put some handcuffs on the sheriff in the long run. Smith described his disdain for the far reaching authority of Goodell in player discipline issues. With the existing collective bargaining agreement in place until 2021, Smith acknowledged the challenges in curtailing Goodell’s authority. However, the appeals to public opinion and use of the court system are within Smith’s wheelhouse and have proven effective in the past.

We need a new sheriff in town. 3

HOLDING MY NOSE

In this chapter of NFL drama, I am (not so) reluctantly on the side of one of my least favorite players in NFL history. This case is much bigger than Tom Brady or the Patriots and, to a degree, it is bigger than football. In so many words, this is about The Man putting his boot on the throat of the little guy. As rich and famous as Brady is, he is just an employee in and being used as a pawn by the National Football League.

Goodell’s arbitrary exercise of power has become increasingly egregious and grown exponentially during the past several years. What was once an effort to maintain the public image of the league through player and organizational discipline has mushroomed into an untargeted dispersal of power to send a message from one man, the Commissioner, to the people under his authority. It is to the long term detriment, not benefit of the game of football at the professional level.

"His balls"...what a dick. 4

1) Image with dogonews.com

2) Image from http://ymswwc.wordpress.com

3) Image from http://satiriclyric.wordpress.com

Pivotal Game 2

2016-05-18T12:43:00.001-05:00

The Oklahoma City Thunder stunned the defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors by unexpectedly ripping away Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals at Golden State. Notwithstanding an egregious non-call following an obvious travel by Thunder guard Russell Westbrook (24 PPG, 10 APG, 8 RPG) in the final minute of what was still a single-possession game, the Thunder outplayed, outcoached, out manned, and out physicaled the Warriors in the second half of Game 1.

Many observers expected the Conference Finals to be trip down a short cobblestone road on the way to a like showdown and rematch with the 2015 runner-ups, the Cleveland Cavaliers. The road would not necessarily be smooth, but nonetheless quickly and successfully traveled. The Thunder dispelled the certainty of such a mindset on Monday night.

The cliché about a playoff series not starting until the road team wins (or Game 7 – whichever comes first) became a cliché for a reason. It is more difficult to win away from home in any organized competitive sport at any level; it is not easy to win on the road against any opponent in any professional sport, and it is difficult to win on the road in a professional sport in a playoff series. This axiom is especially true against a quality opponent and even more so in basketball, a sport in which the crowd is close to the action, loud, and the depth perception of home team, when shooting, need not adjust to an unfamiliar arena.

This series “started” (so-to-speak) after Game 1. Golden State will have to prevail at least once at Chesapeake Energy Arena in Oklahoma City to defend its crown. While the Warriors, with an NBA regular season record-breaking 73 wins in the 2016 season, are as talented and offensively potent as any team in the Association to ever defend a championship in the, the task of taking a Conference Finals game on the road while running the table at home will not be a proverbial slam-dunk. A loss by the Warriors at home tonight in Game 2 will change Golden State’s mission from “not a slam dunk”, to “a steep uphill climb”.

Simply put, the “pivotal” distinction normally reserved for Game 5 of a best-of-seven playoff series applies early, in Game 2, of the 2016 Western Conference NBA Finals. The team that wins tonight is likely going to win the series. Will the Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Warriors make a Splash or be Thunder-struck?

1) Image from mercurynews.com

You’re FIRED!

2016-05-17T21:22:00.000-05:00

The Atlanta Braves announced the firing of Manager Fredi González today, ending yet another underachieving chapter in the story of the Atlanta Braves franchise. The Braves are 9-28 as of Tuesday morning. González was 434-413 (.512 pct.) in his sixth season as the Braves’ manager.

González filled the huge shoes of Hall of Fame Manager Bobby Cox in 2011. In spite of inheriting a wealth of talent, the Braves only reached the postseason twice, in 2012 and 2013, being eliminated in the Wild Card Game and the National League Divisional Series, respectively. The last three seasons, inclusive of 2016, have been nothing short of disastrous in Atlanta.

The Braves are the only Major League team that can confidently remove any thought of playing in the postseason, with single digit wins in the middle of May. Its talent has completely eroded and gone undeveloped. While the Braves’ front office did González few favors with some of its player transactions, González did little to help himself with a series of questionable lineup, rotation, and in-game decisions.

Interim manager Brian Snitker is the next man up. Expect more of the same throughout the duration of this already-lost 2016 Atlanta Braves season. Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. That the Braves have been the most successful franchise in the National League in the last quarter-century yet only have one World Series championship to show for it appears to be a product of insanity.

Only a visit from Milton to the Braves headquarters can right this ship.

1) Image from memegenerator.net

Backup Chick

2014-12-04T11:00:00.000-06:00

Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel is still the backup quarterback, for now. With yesterday's announcement that Brian Hoyer would start against the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday, Manziel learned that he was not yet "the man" in Cleveland. Manziel, however, has had zero shortcomings in the ladies department.

Manziel's girlfriend, model Colleen Crowley, is getting starting playing time in front of the camera and on the Internet with good reason. Hoyer may have the job, but Manziel has the chicks. Ms. Crowley is the subject of today's Chick Pic.

Nothing wrong with a backup.... 1

Like Johnny, she's a team player. 2

Geek chic 3

And she shares with others.... 5

Maybe there will be an opening in Denver in a few years. 6

Lights, camera, action! 7

Don't hate the player hate the game (which he isn't even in yet...much). 8

1) Image from www.chatsports.com
2) Image from www.rantlifestyle.com
3, 4) Images from www.gamedayr.com
5) Image from www.talksports.net
6) Image from www.fabwags.com
7) Image from www.larrybrownsports.com
8) Image from N Sports via www.youtube.com

Retweet of the Day - December 3, 2014

2014-12-03T23:04:00.000-06:00

Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel saw extensive playing time last week during the Browns' loss to the Buffalo Bills. Current starting quarterback Brian Hoyer has been ineffective of late. The move to Manziel late in the Bills game, in which Manziel led the Browns on a touchdown drive, fueled rampant speculation that Manziel may start this coming weekend against the Indianapolis Colts.

Cleveland Browns Head Coach Mike Petine stopped the rumor mill yesterday when he announced that Hoyer would start on Sunday. It is only a matter of time before Manziel gets the ball, but that first start can never come soon enough for an NFL quarterback. Today's retweet, from His and Hers (@HisandHers), illustrates that, literally.

"When Johnny Manziel heard Brian Hoyer will be the starting QB this Sunday…" (play video)

Image from www.gifsoup.com

NFC Division Gone South

2014-11-25T14:50:00.001-06:00

With five weeks remaining in the NFL regular season, the NFC South has 13 wins. There have been twelve weeks played, and the division averages a win per week. Let me repeat that: the Atlanta Falcons, Carolina Panthers, New Orleans Saints, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers – four NFL teams composing an entire division – have a total of 13 wins.

THE SYSTEM…THANK GOODNESS FOR THE SYSTEM

What do you call the guy who graduated last in his medical school class? A doctor! The ultimate goal of every NFL team at the beginning of each season is to win the Super Bowl. To win the Super Bowl, a team must first reach the playoffs. The most favorable way to get into the playoffs is to win one’s division as it results in the first playoff game being at home for that team.
So what do you call the team with the worst record among the four conference division winners? A playoff host….

THE POSSIBILITES

Tampa Bay Buccaneers - The Bucs are two games out of first place. However, they don’t do anything particularly well and are surrounded by inexperienced players with potential and veteran journeymen. As much as this division continues to go up for grabs every week, the Buccaneers have almost no chance of winning the South with the Cincinnati Bengals, Detroit Lions, and Green Bay Packers on their schedule.

Carolina Panthers – This team has found new and creative ways to shoot itself in the foot. Poised to run away with this mediocre division earlier this year, the Panthers went on a six game winless streak. Their last win came on October 5th. It’s unclear where this team’s next win will come from.

Quarterback Cam Newton has not been healthy this season and compounding that problem, he’s getting inadequate pass protection. The defense is made up of talented individual parts that never seem to be in sync enough to help deliver a win. However, three of its remaining games are against division opponents. I think the odds of them winning two or more of those games are about 50/50. That may be all it takes for the defending NFC South champions to retain their crown.

Atlanta Falcons – By virtue of winning the tiebreaker from their Week 1 win over the Saints, if the season ended today, the 4-7 Falcons would be the NFC South winners. This team has lost some very close games in some very unusual manners and could easily have a winning record if a few balls had bounced differently for them. The offense under quarterback Matt Ryan can keep up in a shootout with the best NFL offenses. Their defense can’t stop a runny nose.

Notwithstanding that, the Falcons finish the season with two division games – at the Saints and hosting the Panthers. It is not inconceivable that the Falcons could still control their own playoff destiny at 4-10 heading into Week 16.

New Orleans Saints – This team is the favorite to win the division. I use the term “favorite” very loosely. However, the Saints do have some tangible advantages over the comically mediocre field. The Saints travel to Pittsburgh next Sunday to play the Steelers. That is the last regular season game the Saints have against a team that currently have a losing record. The Saints are 3-1 against losers this season.

In addition, the other teams in the division either have no exceptional facets of their game or are one dimensional. The Saints offense is spectacular and the defense, while mediocre, is good enough for the offense to have a chance to win every week. Of the Saints’ seven losses, five were by a touchdown or less, four were on field goals either in the final seconds or as time expired, and two of those were in overtime. Yes, I’m a Saints fan. Yes, I’m biased. But I would still put my money on this team winning this pitiful division.

IRONY

Should New Orleans win the division as a losing team, Saints fans will have a chance to witness delicious irony. In 2010, the then-defending Super Bowl champion Saints finished 11-5, but were two games out of first place in the NFC South and entered the playoffs as a Wild Card. The Seattle Seahawks won the NFC West with a 7-9 record, meaning the Seahawks would host their Wild Card opponent, the Saints.
In a game in which defense was thrown out of the window, the teams engaged in a shootout. Seattle put the game out of reach with one of the most spectacular plays in NFL postseason history. Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch went “Beast Mode” on a 67-yard touchdown run during which nine Saints players made contact with Lynch but none brought him down. The play included six broken tackles and a stiff armed Saints defender as the Seahawks eliminated the defending champs, 41-36.

Fast forward to 2014. The defending Super Bowl champion Seahawks will likely need to enter the playoffs as a Wild Card team, two games out of first place with only five games remaining. Should they have the better record of the two Wild Card teams, they would have to travel to play to play the NFC South winner, possibly the Saints who would likely not have a winning record, yet have not lost an NFC game at home during regulation play in four years. Revenge, in any form, can be sweet.