The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
I made the switch from Espn.com to Yahoo Sports a couple of months ago. While there are some good feature writers at the ESPN site, particularly Elizabeth Merrill, I just couldn’t take it anymore. The general buffoonery that has long been a hallmark of the cable channel had started to overrun their web page. The final straw came when muting their incessant videos could no longer be a default option. That’s right: every time I went to the site, the sound immediately started blaring. Not only is that the very opposite of “work-friendly,” it’s absolutely infuriating. I simply lost patience with them.
I’m now finding that Yahoo Sports is only modestly better. To be sure, it’s calmer and has far less idiocy. But less doesn’t equal none. In particular, some of the columnists seem astonishingly clueless. For the most part, it’s just the boring, obvious pablum you’d expect from the majority of sports journalists. But every now and then you get a real head-scratcher.
If ESPN boasts the inane and desperately unfunny Rick Reilly, then Yahoo has its own lesser bete noir: former Miami Herald beat writer Jason Cole who covered the Dolphins for 15 years.
I can’t tell you how happy I was to leave Reilly behind after abandoning ESPN. If you want an idea of how profoundly lacking in wit the former Sports Illustrated and current ESPN.com scribe really is, just watch Leatherheads. Reilly penned the script. It’s so bad, even 
George Clooney couldn’t make it funny. However, after wandering over to Yahoo, I now find that Cole is giving Reilly a run for his money. But instead of being the unfunniest funny-man around, Cole seems to specialize in the kind of preachy, sanctimonious nonsense that drives me nuts.
First came a July 20 piece in which he got amazingly indignant about how the lockout settlement was going to affect the Brady v. NFL lawsuit.
To refresh your memory, at the beginning of the recent labor dispute the National Football League Players’ Association de-certified as a union, a legal tactic for dealing with the lockout. Then ten high-profile players including Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and Drew Brees filed a class action lawsuit against the NFL. Since there was no longer a union, the players filed on their own behalf, but of course the suit was all part of the NFLPA’s carefully plotted strategy.
In other words, the the whole point of the Brady v. NFL was to give the players leverage. It was a tool, a means to an end, not the end itself. Which is why the suit pretty much laid out all of the things the NFLPA was hoping to gain a new labor contract with ownership. It was a sword of Damocles hanging over the owners’ heads: deal with us at the negotiating table, or risk losing it all in court.
Needless to say, when a negotiated settlement ended the lockout last month, the case was quickly settled out of court, thus becoming an irrelevant footnote to history, right?
Not according to Jason Cole.
Cole practically sobbed with indignant rage, claiming that when the NFLPA settled with the owners to end the lockout instead of seeing the suit through to its conclusion, it was doing nothing short of throwing those brave Brady plaintiffs under the bus.
Huh?
Cole’s argument is jaw-droppingly stupid, and I don’t use that word lightly. The the whole point of that lawsuit was to force a labor deal, which is why many experts though it would never even go to court in the first place. That it did is merely a reflection of how long the lockout dragged on.
Cole defending Brady et al. a
gainst this supposed betrayal by their fellow players is akin to thinking a victorious boxer is betrayed by the referee who stops the fight on a technical knockout instead letting it go the distance so it can be decided by the judges’ scorecards.
As bad as that column was, Cole apparently is not done mucking around in the world of labor law. This week, he got up on his high horse to tell us “how important” it is for the NFL to deny former Ohio State Quarterback Terrelle Pryor’s bid to join its supplemental draft later this year.
Why? Because Pryor was a bad boy in college, accepting gifts (specifically discount tattoos) against NCAA rules, and then refusing to cooperate with NCAA investigators.
Cole takes pains to say he’s not being moralistic. “This is not a morality issue,” he says. But his entire argument is that Pryor should be denied access to a labor market so as to teach him and Ohio State a lesson about being honest and facing up to your mistakes.
Seriously, you can’t make this kind of stuff up. The double-speak is mind-boggling. Here are Cole’s own words:
None of this is the NFL’s concern. It’s not here to teach right from wrong. It’s an entertainment company. That said, colleges are supposed to teach right from wrong, and the NFL has an important relationship (both economically and philosophically) with the colleges.
By giving Pryor a chance to enter the draft now, the NFL is rewarding a guy (and a college) for avoiding the truth.
It sounds like he’s lecturing a seven year old. Rewarding a guy and a college for avoiding the truth? How about they’re following basic U.S. labor law by allowing an eligible adult citizen to petition for employment. Which is why a day later, the NFL ruled that Pryor is eligible for the supplemental draft.
Apparently by giving Yahoo Sports the benefit of the doubt over ESPN.com, I too was avoiding a truth: there doesn’t seem to be a general sports site out there that isn’t an intellectual embarrassment.
I’m open to suggestions any readers of “The Sporting Life” might offer.