Brunt: Mud doesn't stick to the NFL, By: Stephen Brunt
Never has the Teflon covering the National Football League been more obvious, or more necessary, than in the season that concludes this weekend.
Consider first how it is in other sports.
In the National Basketball Association, hands are still being wrung over the New York Knicks-Denver Nuggets brawl, which in truth, really didn't amount to much. But the echoes of 2004 fight night at The Palace of Auburn Hills and panic about the league's thug culture (at least from those dress-code enforcers charged with marketing the game to middle-class, white audiences), led to severe punishment from the NBA's supreme ruler, David Stern, who felt the need to draw a very hard line.
It was a big story.
In baseball, we are now only days away from the announcement of the 2007 Hall of Fame class, which of course will again focus attention on Mark McGwire, baseball's ongoing steroid scandal, sports morality, the Barry Bonds witch hunt, the question of which records ought to count and which ought to be expunged from the books, and all the rest.
McGwire never tested positive for anything because there wasn't any testing in baseball, admitted only to using a substance that the sport (at the time) didn't see fit to ban, was the focus of all kinds of informed speculation, and then performed very badly in front of a U.S. congressional committee.
When he doesn't get in to the Hall on his first opportunity — as will be the case — it will be a big story.
So basketball has its sucker-punchers and slap-fighters, baseball has a home-run king disgraced largely by innuendo, and it all sticks like glue.
While in the NFL, without even considering the various legal entanglements of various Cincinnati Bengals players, there has been a star player nailed for steroids and a key member of a very good, high-profile team charged with an actual, serious crime, then bearing close witness to a murder, and the business of the game rolls on mightily without any big-picture debate at all.
Well, perhaps that's not entirely true. This week, Jason Taylor, the very fine defensive end from the Miami Dolphins, suggested it might "send the wrong message" if his main rival for the league's defensive player-of-the-year award, San Diego linebacker Shawne Merriman, is so honoured.
In midseason, Merriman failed a drug test — though he makes the familiar claim that a tainted supplement was the cause. In itself, that's more than McGwire or Bonds ever did.
The punishment: a four-game suspension. One quarter of one regular season. The key discussion point in the football press: How would the Chargers fare in his absence?
Merriman will be in the Pro Bowl, he may be in the Super Bowl, and yet that appears to present no moral quandary. The NFL has managed to frame using steroids, and being caught using steroids, as purely a football issue, as a cost of doing business, understanding that the consumers are just fine with that.
Meanwhile, defensive tackle Terry (Tank) Johnson of the Chicago Bears was back at practice this week, and will play Sunday against the Green Bay Packers, after an eventful fortnight in which he was charged with a misdemeanour weapons offence (while already on probation for a previous legal issue), and then watched as his "bodyguard" Willie B. Posey was shot to death outside a Chicago nightclub. (The alleged shooter apparently began the altercation by "bumping" Johnson on the dance floor.)
The punishment (so far): a one-game suspension. The larger discussion: How much the Bears missed Johnson in his absence, how his teammates stuck by him, how those two weeks away from football have left him refreshed and ready for the playoffs.
It just slip-slides away.
And a few weeks from now, when Roger Goodell takes his first star turn as NFL commissioner when he presides over the annual Super Bowl news conference, it's a safe assumption that he'll handle these issues in the manner of his predecessors Paul Tagliabue and Pete Rozelle: With grave concern and an air of moral authority, without a hint of self-recrimination, without letting any of it besmirch the great sports/entertainment colossus.
However he says it, in the hurly burly of Super Bowl week, it won't be a big story at all.
Stern and baseball's Bud Selig can only look on in wonder.
