Shutdown Corner

I was about to let this one pass, but if we're going to call Tony Gonzalez a hero, then we need to extend the same courtesy to The Boz. A hero is a hero, even if they aren't very good at professional football.

Brian Bosworth was motoring along on the Trans-Canada highway, when he saw a group of ambulances and a fire truck. Boz pulled over, got out of the car, and assisted rescue teams in getting a woman out of her totaled jalopy and into an ambulance.

From the Winnipeg Free Press:

The paramedics had to use the jaws of life to get the woman out. Bosworth said they dismantled the vehicle completely. He was asked to take a piece of equipment down to the paramedics and once he got down to the victim, he said it was clear they needed more manpower.

"She was in shock and in pain and we couldn't really move her. Her legs were pinned. We had to cut the steering wheel off. She was screaming every time we moved her," Bosworth said. "It took five or six guys to get her into the ambulance. "

Bo Jackson would have pulled her out of the car himself, performed emergency surgery on the spot, fixed her car, sold it for above market value, and then made sweet love to her to help heal the emotional scars.

Still, thanks for doing what you can, Boz.

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A Chargers fan was enjoying a filet mignon in a Huntington Beach restaurant last Thursday night when a piece of meat got jammed in his throat, blocking the airway. To the rescue came Chiefs tight end Tony Gonzalez, who performed the Heimlich maneuver and saved the guy's life. The man now says he's a Chiefs fan.

Tony Gonzalez saves chokers. So where was he on February 3rd, when the Patriots needed him?

I kid, I kid. Of course, the important thing to note here is that Tony Gonzalez is a great guy, all-around solid citizen, and one hell of a good Samaritan. High fives and respect knuckles.

But there's another moral to the story, and that's that you should learn how to chew. It's filet mignon, it shouldn't be that difficult. Give it a few chomps with the ol' bicuspids. That way, you don't have to interrupt Tony's meal, nor do you have to bail on the Chargers in favor of a division rival because you have lazy teeth.

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Most of my close friends are Steelers fans and spend their Sundays just as you'd think they would ... waking up, going to church, praying to the Rooney family for about an hour, and then watching the Steelers. According to the Wall Street Journal, it's possible that the Rooneys could be removed from that equation.

The Pittsburgh Steelers -- owned for 75 years by the same local family -- is secretly being shopped to potential buyers as the five sons of the football team's founder and their heirs spar over the storied franchise's future.

Steelers Chairman Dan Rooney, the eldest of the brothers, wants to consolidate his control through a 10-year plan to buy out most of their shares, but a well-funded prospective buyer has emerged after some of Mr. Rooney's brothers and their children raised questions about his offer.

Stanley Druckenmiller, billionaire chairman of Pittsburgh's Duquesne Capital Management, has expressed interest in acquiring the Steelers, people briefed on the negotiations said.

The Steelers potentially for sale? Slather me in cole slaw and call me yinzer. It doesn't even seem possible. I always just assumed that as long as human beings were drawing breath on planet Earth, someone named Rooney would own the Steelers, even if they had to pass the franchise on to the principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Dan Rooney, the Steelers current chairman, seems to be the lone Rooney child trying to keep the Steelers in the family.

"I will do everything possible to work out a solution to ensure my father's legacy of keeping the Steelers in the Rooney family and in Pittsburgh for at least another 75 years," Dan Rooney said in [a] statement.

But he's got brothers and other family members working against him, seeking out other potential buyers and an independent Wall Street analysis of what the Steelers are worth.

Who are these other Rooneys? It almost seems like an 80s movie plot, where one noble-hearted brother named Dan is trying to keep the family business alive, but there's some other evil brother, a guy named Brayden Rooney, sitting in a board room, wearing a cravat and a dickie, holding a poodle in his lap, and twirling his mustache trying to scheme something up to ruin his brother's life and sink an entire town.

I just don't believe it. I refuse to acknowledge the possibility that someone not named Rooney would own the Steelers. It can't happen, and it won't happen.

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About a week ago, I poked a little fun at the Kansas City Chiefs for prohibiting standing during games at Arrowhead. Later, the Chiefs clarified their policy a bit, saying that they only wanted to curb "continuous" standing, which is still pretty vague.

Silly, too, given that the NFL wants to be counted as an exciting sport with passionate fans, and markets itself to people with functioning legs.

So here's what I propose. You take the several thousand seats in the stadium that are closest to the field, and you make them the cheapest seats in the building. You can call it the Dawg Pound, Black Hole, Correctional Facility, Drunk Tank, whatever you want.

Fans can get these tickets one of two ways:

1) Declaring on your season ticket application that you want to stand continuously and/or make a lot of noise.

2) The rest go on sale to the general public 48 hours before the game. They're available for purchase in-person only, at the stadium box office.

Ideally, you create an atmosphere where people are camping out for these tickets days in advance. People who watch games with their hands folded neatly in their laps don't camp out for tickets. Crazy melonfarmers do.

So now you've got all the loud, drunk, profane, stand-happy people together, so they don't have to be mixed in with the more genteel crowd. Better yet, they're in front of the genteel crowd, so when they throw beer cans, slices of pizza, snowballs, or severed limbs of opposing fans, they can't hit any nice people in the back of the head.

Hopefully, you could also get some separation behind the crazies, too, so the fans behind them can see over their heads, and also be spared some of the more ear-splitting profanities.

As with many of my proposals, I know this isn't realistic (this is why I've never been known for my excellent proposals). Those seats are generally quite expensive, and no team's going to give up that revenue. But I really think an organization could work around that by offering no amenities whatsoever to the standers (they're all bringing in their own flasks anyway), and jacking up the prices elsewhere while advertising "family-friendly" seats and protection from the evil standers.

You give people options. It's not "one size fits all" ticketing. If a fan won't go to the trouble of camping out for his ticket or buying the cheapest season ticket possible, I won't feel so bad if he or she gets admonished for excessive standing or cheering.

And I haven't even mentioned the best part, which is the real, tangible effect this could have on the outcome of a game. Crowd noise matters. And this way, you get your loudest fans closet to the field, where they can do the most damage. The right group of drunkards could have Rex Grossman crying before halftime.

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Heading into the day, I would have thought that yet another voice being added to the cast of NBC's Football Night in America was just about the last thing the world needed, on the list between "another Incredible Hulk movie" and "higher crude oil prices."

But if it's Dan Patrick, and he and Keith Olbermann will attempt to re-ignite the burning flame of joy that lit up their SportsCenter broadcasts in the mid-90s, then I say hell yes, bring it on.

Now, this is not to say that I expect that Patrick and Olbermann will fall right back into their old routine and shine as brightly as they once did. Things were different back then. No one else was really making sports funny, ESPN had yet to become a 24-hour commercial for ESPN, and Patrick and Olbermann had about 4% of the ego they have now.

So it might not work. But it's worth taking the chance to find out if there's any of that chemistry left. What's the worst that could happen, the NBC set becomes a little too crowded? Goodness me, how would we ever deal with that?

According to the Fifth Down Blog at the New York Times, Bob Costas will remain on the show. What possible purpose he could still serve, I can't imagine. Of course, that doesn't stop NBC from keeping Jerome Bettis around, either.

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Free Safety
Grady Sizemore

Grady is, as the baseball folks like to say, a five-tool player. That means he has power, speed, tremendous eyesight, a torque wrench and a belt sander. And he's a pretty good baseball player, too.

He's 6'2", 200, so I like his size at the free safety position. He's got the speed to cover a lot of ground against the pass, as many Major League centerfielders would. But Sizemore also plays with a fearlessness and disregard for his own body that most centerfielders don't, and he brings some size and power to the table, too.

I could see him, on one play chasing down a Plaxico Burress, and then hurling himself into the path of a stampeding Edgerrin James or Frank Gore the next. At the very least, I could see him making Shaun Alexander curl up into the fetal position and start yelling, "I'M DOWN! I'M DOWN!"

And should the Browns be fortunate enough to share him with the Indians, he'd also bring Grady's Ladies with him to Cleveland Browns Stadium, which would be a welcome addition, as they're just a little more camera friendly than the Dawg Pound.

Previously:
The Honorable Mentions
#11: Yao Ming
#10: Cristiano Ronaldo
#9: Dion Phaneuf

Tuesday:
Non-NFL athlete who would excel in the NFL, #7

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You may remember last year's official NFL slogan, "Who Wants it More" (and there's no way you're ever forgetting it if you were in the Phoenix area for the Super Bowl). This year's official NFL theme is "Believe In Now."

Individual teams have their own slogans for each year, too. They'll use them to sell season tickets, coaches may use them as rallying points, and you might see them printed on t-shirt worn under pads.

The slogan the 2008 Lions have chosen: "Do You Believe in Now?"

That's superb. That might even be the work of Matt Millen himself. All I know is that whoever came up with it is a fountain of creativity. Anyone could have come up with "Believe in Now," but it took a genius to add "Do You" at the beginning and a question mark at the end.

And leave it to the Lions to take something the rest of the league uses as a command and turn it into a question. Every other team in the league an officially licensed "Believe in Now" t-shirt, and none of them end in the interrogative form. It's only the Lions who are unsure.

And for a look at how Lions fans are responding to the question, it's worth a visit to Lions blog Pride of Detroit.

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It had felt like something was missing in all the latest Brett Favre brouhaha. But that something returned today with a vengeance, and better than anyone else has, Peter King laid out the dilemmas facing both the Packers and Brett Favre at the moment.

There are two things Peter King is confident of:

1) Brett Favre, sometime in the next ten days, will officially request that he be removed from the NFL's retired/reserved list, and

2) The Packers would rather change the name of Lambeau Field to "Tony Mandarich Field" than see Brett Favre return.

They don't want him on their team (King used the phrases "makes the Packers wretch" and "desperately want Favre to stay retired"), and the only thing they might want less than that is to see him playing for the Vikings or Bears.

So if taking him back isn't an option, and giving him an outright release (which would likely lead to Favre being a Viking or a Bear) isn't an option, that leaves trade ... and best of luck walking the streets of Green Bay, Ted Thompson, if you end up being the guy who traded Brett Favre for a pack of gum.

There's still the option of telling Favre to stick it, and if they absolutely have to, welcoming Brett Favre back onto the team, but carrying him as a 3rd quarterback and making him play special teams. This is completely unrealistic, obviously, even though I think it would be fun.

King says the best bet might be for the Packers to try to talk Brett Favre out of unretiring, and given that that seems like a real longshot, it really illustrates just what a bind the Packers are in.

No matter what happens here, it's almost certainly going to end with the Packers being unhappy, or at the very least, upsetting their fanbase.

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As it turns out, huffing off in a snit after a loss is not a habit that Bill Belichick has developed recently. He's done it before, as recently as the last Super Bowl, and as this video dug up by Kissing Suzy Kolber demonstrates, he's been that way for quite some time:

Wow. Outclassed by Greg Lloyd. That takes some doing.

But there's still a part of me that believes in the old Vince Lombardi saying, "You show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser." Does behavior like this make Belichick a large bag of warm vinegar and water? Yes. But that attitude is not completely unrelated to other qualities that make him a great coach.

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