Ball Dropped

Apologies, as professional obligations prevented me from commenting on Shank's latest foot stomping until now.

The again, it doesn't matter much. His complaint from yesterday's column reads like your standard whining from the leftist Globe weenies - Entity X is bad because it derives money from a product we don't approve of. Which is rich, coming from a columnist getting somewhere between $80K and $100K in income every year to write two or three columns of questionable quality every week.

I'll grant his point about the long-term effects of concussions on football players, but let's ask this question - why is this issue now coming to light in the press in recent years when that specific phenomenon may have been known for decades, and these reporters and columnists probably / likely knew about it and chose to look the other way? Long term injuries from football, like former Chicago Bears defensive lineman Dan Hampton's ten (maybe twenty) knee surgeries, are fairly well documented. Should we be led to believe that the media simply didn't know about concussions until recently? Much like the steroid era in baseball, can we conclude that sports reporters and columnists were aware of the situation and chose not to report on it until other forces compelled them to do so?

If columnists like Shank want to pretend that they didn't know about these situations and now use them as cudgels against certain professional sports organizations, what weight should we give to their opinions now? I say little, if any.

Shank On Ray Rice

Instead of crapping on the Patriots yesterday, today we get a column about Ray Rice, formerly of the Baltimore Ravens.

Things moved quickly on NFL Monday.

At 4 a.m., TMZ released video showing Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice delivering a left cross to the face of his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, in an Atlantic City casino elevator back on Feb. 15. Palmer was knocked out cold.

Reaction was predictable. Social media exploded and there were calls for Rice to be banished from the NFL. There were also suggestions that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell be fired if he had seen this video before handing out his hideous two-game suspension.

At 10:08 a.m., the NFL issued a statement in which it contended that the video was not available to the league when Goodell delivered his wrist-slap to Rice.

At 2:18 p.m., the Ravens announced that Rice had been released.

I was expecting a bit more self-righteousness from this column. I'm sure it will show up again eventually...