Matt Jones Calls Joey Porter Gay

Or at least he seems to be implying that much:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jacksonville receiver Matt Jones snapped back at Joey Porter on Thursday, a day after the outspoken Miami Dolphins linebacker questioned how Jones could still be playing despite having a felony cocaine charge against him earlier this year.

“I don’t even know why he’s even thinking about me,” Jones said. “I mean, maybe he likes other men and sits up and thinks about stuff, so I don’t know. … Is Joey Porter the commissioner? Then why would I even worry about it?”

Maybe he likes men?

NFL TV Maps

Which games are you getting this Sunday?

Mike Singletary Strips, Communes with the Dead

I was intrigued by the RSS headline from ESPN: “Singletary explains reasoning for dropping pants.” Amazingly, nowhere in the article does the author share the most pressing question about this incident. I had to go to this column to learn that “he was considerate enough to keep his boxers on.”

My goodness, are we really only one game into Mike Singletary’s tenure in San Fran? There are already so many great moments to choose from. This one, not of his making admittedly, is my favorite so far. Sadly, the video has been removed from most places by the fascists in the NFL offices, but you can still see it in all its glory as part of Deadspin’s weekly wrap-up.

Browns still QB shopping

Cleveland might be willing to trade Derek Anderson this offseason and turn the offense over to Brady Quinn, who went 3-for-8 in limited action on Sunday, with two potential TDs dropped.

If I were a Browns fan, I would be concerned that Romeo Crennel is the one making the call on this. After all, he started freaking Charlie Frye in the season opener this year, only to trade him after week one and go with the vastly superior Anderson for the rest of the season. Apparently, Crennel couldn’t figure out that one of his QBs was far better than the other through the entire preseason, and making the right call initially might have given the Browns a chance in that first game and a chance to be in the playoffs this weekend. Now Crennel is being called on to make a franchise-changing decision on the QB of the future, but is he up to the task of evaluating talent at the position?

Don Banks Says Samuel Will Cave Soon

Don Banks filed a report from Patriots training camp, including this bit about the Asante Samuel holdout:

We’re probably in the face-saving stage of the stand-off, and you can tell that by the noticeably softer tone coming from Samuel’s agents in recent days. Samuel needlessly took a hard-line stance early on in negotiations, threatening to hold out for the season’s first 10 weeks unless he received a new long-term deal. That’s not going to happen, because Samuel isn’t going to walk away from any of the regular-season game checks that come with his $7.79 million franchise tender.

Now it’s probably just a matter of Samuel staying away from camp long enough so that it doesn’t look like he quickly caved in to the Patriots after talking so tough all offseason. Just after New England plays its second preseason game is a reasonable date to expect him.

I was never clear on how this “sit out the first ten games” threat would work out in practice anyway. Would Samuel really expect the team to welcome him back after skipping more than two months of the season in a contract dispute? Wouldn’t the Patriots Keyshawn him at that point?

It sounds like we won’t find out how this would’ve gone because it won’t be happening. That’s comforting to hear in light of the news that Chad Scott, who would’ve been Samuel’s likely replacement at cornerback, was carted off the practice field with a knee injury on Friday.

Michael Vick in Better Days

With the Michael Vick dog fighting arraignment hitting the national news today, it has come to my attention that there are plenty of people out there who are not aware of Vick’s body of work on the football field over the years. Specifically, my dad earlier this evening was wondering about who this Vick character was, and I explained that I’ve enjoyed seeing him play many times.

In thinking back on my favorite Vick-watching moments, I realized that his Virginia Tech performances left the deepest impression on me; exciting as Vick has been as a pro, he has never attained the lofty potential people saw in him and has always been considered a tantalizing disappointment. But when he first burst onto the football scene in 1999, he was an absolute sensation.

That’s all by way of introduction to a few YouTube clips. Here’s the game-winning drive in Tech’s win over West Virginia in November 1999, a victory that kept the Hokies alive for a berth in the national championship game (they lost to Florida State). On the drive, just when the Mountaineers look ready to claim the upset, Vick pulls of a scramble down the sideline to set up a late field goal.

The following season, I vividly remember seeing Vick play a game at Boston College where he simply could not be tackled by the defense. The 82-yard touchdown run, where Vick shakes off a defender who face masks him just before getting to the end zone, is just ridiculous.

I couldn’t find any clip, but I would have to say that the game Vick played in the Falcons 2002 tie at Pittsburgh is one of my favorite NFL viewing experiences ever. The wild card win at Lambeau field was also a lot of fun.

In conclusion, I hope these memories can remain, despite the awful imagery of dead animals that will now seemingly surround Vick’s name forever.

Tony Dungy, Bookie

Peter King:

If I’m Tony Dungy, I have my perfect pre-training-camp speech. “No one thinks we’re going to win it again,” he could say. “Look at Vegas. All you did last year was answer every challenge, and all our major pieces are still in place, and we had a great draft. And the oddsmakers start you at 6-1 to win the Super Bowl, drop you to 7-1 and now you’re 8-1? If that isn’t the biggest lack of respect I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is.”

I really doubt the bible-thumping Dungy is watching the Vegas line on his team that closely, but who knows.

My Drew Bledsoe Appreciation

The news that Drew Bledsoe is retiring from the NFL has put me into nostalgia mode. I was a 12-year-old Patriots fan back when Drew was drafted #1 overall in 1993, and I saw him bring the Patriots back to respectability in the years that followed, culminating in the Super Bowl appearance in early 1997 against Green Bay (I was a sophomore in high school by then). Sure, Drew was a statue standing in the pocket, he was easy to ridicule, and he was the source of plenty of aggravation to me over the years, but I will always remember that he gave his all and was a class act. Despite his limitations, Drew had a gun of an arm and was a big part of the Pats’ success in the 1990s, obviously.

What I will remember most about Drew is how gracefully he handled the Patriots’ 2001 championship season, a tough year for him that began with a serious injury in the Jets game in September (a Mo Lewis hit nearly killed Drew in that first game after 9/11) and that saw him lose his starting job to some unknown named Tom Brady. Drew could’ve caused a big scene about it and torn the team apart. He was a good soldier though, even responding to media inquiries with “next question” responses on the very day that Belichick announced that Brady was keeping the starting job over the now-healthy Bledsoe, who was visibly seething. That must have been a devastating time for Drew personally. Here he was, the franchise quarterback with the $100-million dollar contract, and his life had changed dramatically and suddenly. Still, he didn’t poison the locker room as the team came together for the playoff run.

The script couldn’t have been written any better for the AFC Championship Game that year in Pittsburgh. With Tom Brady knocked out of the contest with an ankle injury, Drew Bledsoe sprinted off the bench to throw a rousing TD to David Patten and give the Pats a 14-3 lead in the second quarter. It was a beautiful scene with Bledsoe, who had dutifully accepted his role, able to contribute one last time. The next week, Drew told Brady to “just sling it” before the game-winning drive in the Super Bowl against the Rams. Brady did that, leading the team to its first-ever NFL championship and one of the biggest upsets in the history of the big game.

Bledsoe was happy and reflective after the Super Bowl. He must have known he was moving on, and on draft day in April 2002, the team traded him to Buffalo for a second-round pick. It was sad to see Bledsoe the last few years bouncing around the league, getting replaced in the starting role by two other young hot shots. He always remained classy, even with the dented pride of a one-time franchise QB reduced to a backup role.

Cheers to Drew Bledsoe for giving as much as I could expect from a pro athlete.

Pacman’s Interview Couldn’t Save Him

UPDATE: This post was linked in Slate’s blog roundup. Christopher Beam excerpted my uncertainty about the exact status of certain legal problems Jones is facing, and in my defense, Pacman has had several run-ins with the law that are hard to keep straight. There were actually two separate spitting incidents, one in August 2006 (charges dropped on condition he stay out of trouble) and another in October 2006 (which led to a one-game suspension). Just wanted to update and be accurate considering this post is referenced by a legit web site, and visitors clicking through that link would probably feel compelled to set me straight in the comments if I didn’t do this… [What follows is the original post.]

The NFL suspended Pacman Jones for the entire 2007 season today, a week after an attempted whitewash in an interview with Deion Sanders on NFL Network. Peter King highlighted the following excerpt in his MMQB column yesterday:

Sanders: Why do you think trouble follows you?
Jones: “Like I said man, it was the people I was hanging around. I made some bad decisions. I am not living a lie. I promise you that I am on the right track, but I have made horrible decisions about who I am with or who I am going places with….Two of my friends who had never driven a Bentley, I let them drive my Bentley one night just because. Not just to show them the upside, but I never had anyone do that for me. It is the little things. It is always the little things that get me in trouble.”

The bit about the Bentleys shows, shall we say, a lack of perspective on things. He admits to “horrible decisions” but the first example he cites is letting friends drive his expensive cars — not spitting in a woman’s face (was this charge dropped recently? I can’t remember) or instigating a nightclub fight that left a bouncer paralyzed (probably didn’t bring that one up on advice of his lawyers). Anyway, my point is that the Bentleys remark goes beyond trivializing his extensive past record of bad behavior.

I wonder if the Sanders interview was a last gasp effort by the NFL Network to see if Jones’s image could be revived at all before the commissioner had to put down the hammer (it’s only fair to the Titans to let them know how screwed they are before the draft later this month). This columnist for the Tennessean decries the NFL’s cable channel as a propaganda network that lobbed softballs at both Jones and fellow law-breaker Chris Henry of the Bengals, who earned an eight-game suspension of his own today.

The proliferation of sports media outlets that are controlled by the leagues and teams that they cover does create all sorts of big questions about journalistic integrity. For example, the Red Sox are partially owned by the New York Times Company, which also owns the Boston Globe, the team’s big hometown paper. The Red Sox games are all broadcast on NESN, a TV network the team owns. This is a recipe for biased coverage, of which other examples surely abound, and the NFL may be getting caught up in similar issues now too.

Things that Apparently Aren’t Torture

Judge Marcia Cooke of the federal district court in Miami rejected on Monday the claims of Jose Padilla’s lawyers that he was unfit to stand trial because of the torture he had been subjected to while in US government detention. This will allow Padilla’s trial to go forward next week.

It’s worth looking closely at what Padilla has endured while in government custody. In December, the New York Times reported on a video that was released of Padilla’s trip to the dentist:

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to Mr. Padilla’s lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla’s electronic court file late Friday.

To Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their client during his military detention from mid-2002 until [2006], when the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami.

In case you don’t have Times Select, I’ll skip ahead to the most interesting bits about Padilla’s interactions with his lawyer.

Mr. do Campo said that Mr. Padilla was not incommunicative, and that he expressed curiosity about what was going on in the world, liked to talk about sports and demonstrated particularly keen interest in the Chicago Bears.

But the defense lawyers’ questions often echo the questions interrogators have asked Mr. Padilla, and when that happens, he gets jumpy and shuts down, the lawyers said.

I wonder if the lawyer was allowed to tell him the Bears lost the Super Bowl?

Anyway, the actual trial should be under way next week, barring some other delay, and I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about the Padilla case then. With today’s ruling, though, it sounds like the conditions of Padilla’s confinement will be set aside during the next court proceedings.