True to NFL life

April 26, 2016

Whenever I wonder just how true my upcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” is about the NFL, I encounter a story that reestablishes my equilibrium.

Such a story is contained in John Branch’s “In Manziel, a Draft Machine’s Human Cost.” It’s a by-now-familiar tale – the rise and fall of a big-time college football star. Johnny Manziel, aka “Johnny Football” – who won the Heisman Trophy as the best college player when he was a freshman quarterback at Texas A&M – was the main event in the 2014 NFL Draft, the 2016 version of which gets underway Thursday, April 28. ...

Whither Kaepernick in the game of musical quarterbacks?

March 13, 2016

So I’m sitting in a sports bar in Tallahassee that has, according to my nephew James, 59,000 TVs, most of them tuned to college basketball, this being March madness. But a few are checking out the NFL Combine and the new prospects like Ohio State defensive star Joey Bosa, all glorious 6 foot, 6 inch, 276 pounds of him.

But there was no time to measure his defensive pulchritude as the networks quickly moved on to the game of musical quarterbacks. With Peyton Manning retired from the Denver Broncos, Brock Osweiler would’ve seemed to have had a lock on the job, but no, he bolted – a favorite verb of sportswriters – to the Texans. The Broncos then traded for Mark Sanchez, formerly of the New York Jets and Philadelphia Eagles, but no one thinks he’s a permanent first-string solution (except probably Mark Sanchez). ...

The NFL’s perception problem

February 6, 2016

On this Super Bowl weekend, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told Robin Roberts of “Good Morning America” that people around the world will be watching Super Bowl 50 Sunday, implying that the game is the center of the universe.

People may be watching the Super Bowl around the globe, but that doesn’t make it a global sport the way soccer or tennis is. Few people in Indonesia beyond some ex-pats care about the NFL – a subject I address in my forthcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding.” But there seems to be a disconnect between public and internal perceptions of the game.

For Goodell the game is one he’d be happy having a son play; arrests are down 40 percent among NFL players, with the players more upstanding than non-players in their demographic group; and, as for concussions, he actually said there’s a risk in sitting on the couch. Really.

Meanwhile, Johnny Manziel – aka Johnny Football, the soon-to-be-former Cleveland Browns quarterback – has imploded. It’s the usual – trouble with drugs, alcohol and women. ...