Recent events prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the power of the National Football League...
And two stories demonstrate just how much more important the NFL is over Major League Baseball.
On December 14th, 26 year-old Chicago Bears receiver Sam Hurd was busted by the feds for trying to buy more than 500 grams or more of cocaine. It was disclosed that he and others planned to purchase and move several kilos of cocaine WEEKLY. In other words, it was a multimillion dollar drug ring, because clearly this was not Sam’s first big time deal. You don’t just start out at that level.
Sammy and crew were moving on up into the big, big, big time.
Hurd explained that several other players were involved, and remember he was once a Dallas Cowboy.
Hurd was a well-paid backup player. He’d signed a three year deal with the Bears and got a $1.35 million signing bonus. Guess that just wasn’t enough.
However since the case exploded last year we’ve heard…NOTHING!
Why?
The power of the NFL to dump the story nationally. At some point Hurd will plead guilty, name nobody in the league and get a reduced sentence. All very quietly. The NFL and the government do not want this to get out of hand.
The NFL is the nation’s mental release and most important amusement away from daily headaches.
They can’t have it burned…not now…not ever. Not at this level. So it’s a dead story and that’s power baby.
It’s well known that MOST NFL players take some type of steroids. That’s no secret. Yet there’s almost no drug testing for players for roids, just other illegal drugs. HGH is not on the test list, nor is weed. Why? Most players use both. Yes most! And that’s not a secret either.
How does this compare with Major League Baseball?
National League MVP Ryan Braun is daily news over his use of steroids.
And MLB calls it CHEATING. The NFL calls it no big deal.
You never have heard the word CHEATING, when NFL players and roids are mentioned.
Most likely Braun used, but a technicality got him out of it – a "bad chain of custody."
My question is, why is it O.K. for NFL players to juice up but not baseball players?
Either way, the NFL has proved through these two simple cases that they have the most clout.
Numbers Game
Greg Hall’s last three columns have 257 combined comments.
Maybe You Can Work For Him
Call him for work. No need reading our little read articles. We suck.
Didn’t even know about Greg Hall. Probably a better idea to read a column written by someone who is more sports savy than any random dickwad at a water cooler.
RoyalsFan, I have my questions:
Is there a difference in random and specific dickwad-ery?
Does proximity to a water cooler change the amount of dickwad-ness, or is water cooler just thrown in there on a misc basis?
PSSST….I KINDA DO KNOW
Don’t tell anyone but didn’t I produce FIVE sports films…all but one to theatres…two won several awards….one was the all time best selling sports doc…so yeah I kinda know a little more than most on sports…just a little….thanks.
With all due respect, Greg’s columns about sports…
Have always been comment magnets. Ditto for Star sports stories, sports blogs and sports talk radio.
That said, out of 30 to 50 comments, often they involve six or nine guys going back and forth with each other and/or Greg. Which happens here, too.
However, comments have NOTHING to do with readership.
Look us all up on Alexa and compare. It’s all relative.
Since Greg left at the end of May, KCC dipped from around one millionth place in the world to nearly a million two-hundred thousand in July/August. Since then we started taking off in September and our at our highest ratings ever, 367,000 today.
Greg too has been improving. In recent weeks he’s risen from 5.4 million to just over 5 million. That’s well over 4 million places behind KCC.
Bottomline was only a few hundred thousand places behind KCC last summer but has fallen drastically to 2.5 million.
Tony’s is at 320,000, slightly ahead of us.
There you have it. No tricks.
Alexa is the site Tony thinks is among the best at quantifying Web traffic for comparison purposes