No Pacman Fever :(

So today the NFL suspended Pacman Jones and Chris Henry, the former for the entire season and the latter for half. I must say, what a wonderful decision on the part of the NFL. Truly Roger Goodell is showing that he is the new sherrif in town, and he is not going to take no guff from no one. Good show! Umm...I...er...

Hmm...

I'm sorry. Give me a moment.

Ya know what? I don't care. There we go. Right out there. I do NOT care about the indecscretions of players off the field. I try reeeeally hard to care that someone decided to "make it rain" at a strip club, and that these incidents led to three people getting shot. Off the field, yes, it's terrible. If Jones had anything to do with the shooting (especially if he ordered the shots to be fired), then he should be punished severely.

Except he should be punished severely by the law.

Today on Sportscenter, Chris Mortensen made the argument that this policy is simply concurrent with the policies of almost every other organization and business around. To be sure, most employers hold the right to terminate an employee if said employee is charged with a felony, just like universities have the right to expel students who get in similar trouble. However, the employee rights handbook at Target should have nothing to do with the NFL players policy because it's different. Most jobs don't involve the need for a high level of skill to perform the necessary duties. The NFL does. Those businesses can plug just about any Tom, Dick or Pacman into their roles and be on their way. I'd really like to see anyone off the street return four touchdowns in an NFL season.

I understand why these issues are becoming more prevalent: Sports have gone from being covered in the daily paper to having 24-hour news cameras pointed towards it. Every move is analyzed and commented upon, and then bloggers get to have the fun of picking it all apart. I don't necessarily believe more viewpoints to be a bad thing, but I do believe that once sports loses that separation from reality it has lost something terribly valuable, and we no longer can have fun watching our favorite team.

Rather than "What's the score?", all we will ask is "What's that guy getting paid?"