The NFL is now a full-on guilty pleasure. ADVERTISING The NFL is now a full-on guilty pleasure. It’s making the Kardashians and pro wrestling look dignified. You can’t keep your eyes off the shoulder of the road for a second.
The NFL is now a full-on guilty pleasure.
It’s making the Kardashians and pro wrestling look dignified.
You can’t keep your eyes off the shoulder of the road for a second. You might miss the next version of a Donald Trump stump speech.
Take Cris Carter’s advice to a room of young players if they planned on flirting with trouble.
“If y’all got a crew, you’ve got to have a fall guy in the crew,” Carter said at the 2014 NFL Rookie Symposium, wearing his yellow Hall of Fame jacket. “I let my homeboys know, y’all want to keep rolling like this? Then I need to know who’s gonna be the fall guy, who’s gonna be driving. Because y’all not going to all do the right stuff now.
“So I’ve got to teach you how to get around all this stuff, too. “
No, not a teachable moment.
With the league battling serious off-field problems, it’s come to light that Carter told a next wave of rookies to be sure they have a patsy available to take the rap. It was like something out of “Goodfellas.”
Obviously, Roger Goodell has been too consumed with taking the air out of the Tom Brady case to notice. Carter’s speech has been there for all to see on the league’s in-house website for months (NFL.com) until, quite comically, the NFL finally removed it Sunday after the uproar.
You can’t make up this stuff. And in the NFL, unfortunately, you don’t have to.
“If you’re going to have a crew, one of them fools got to know he’s going to jail,” Carter said, then paused before adding, incredibly, “We’ll get him out.”
Warren Sapp, the other Hall of Fame guest speaker with Carter, then echoed Carter with a belly-laugh: “We’ll get him out.”
These annual rookie symposiums are, in part, supposed to be the league’s version of “Scared Straight.”
In the real-life exercise, intimidating inmates try to keep at-risk kids out of their natural habitat: jail. Instead of imparting a common-sense parental lecture derived from their dark experiences, Carter and Sapp essentially told players that the person going behind bars just can’t be you: the entitled NFL cash cow.
Even Plaxico Burress — once incarcerated on a weapons charge after shooting himself in the leg in 2008 — knew this was a misguided message. Tweeted Burress, “Wow. I guess I didn’t have a ‘fall guy.’ In all seriousness, I’ve made some choices that have resulted in some consequences that I can never get back. BUT, not one time did I blame someone else.”
Carter is an otherwise passionate and exemplary soul who conquered his drug demons. I hope he simply went overboard trying to relate to the youngsters and wasn’t truly offering them an escape plan. He has since apologized after being admonished by the NFL and its TV bedfellow ESPN, where Carter works as an analyst.
“I would never tell young people to break the law to avoid prosecution. It was bad advice. I really regret my words,” Carter said.
Here’s what’s telling about how the NFL’s bizarro world turns:
It might actually do some good. Carter’s words echo louder and longer because they were captured on the archived video and exposed as so unbelievably, outrageously wrong.
The league should have brought in Burress as Exhibit A or B. Anybody but Sapp. Sapp’s life has plunged into a swirl of arrests and bankruptcy. Maybe the league wanted to scare the rookies straight about how there’s not always a rainbow over retirement either.
The NFL will brush off itself after this latest embarrassing pratfall.
Nothing can hurt the wildly popular $10 billion-a-year monster anyway.
Domestic violence? Gunplay? Substance abuse? Concussions? Cris Carter?
These are mere speed bumps. It rolls on. You can’t stop the NFL — or look away from the wacky reality show it has become.
