Did you and your kids miss the magic moment in the Super Bowl when Seattle’s Doug Baldwin celebrated a touchdown by miming the act of crapping out a football? You may have, because the broadcast’s director, undoubtedly primed for Seattle’s various crotch-grabbing antics—this is the biggest family TV event of the year, don’t you know—was on the alert for something ugly and snapped his cameras away.
But Baldwin still did it, and everyone in the stadium saw it. There was a penalty, and now Baldwin has been fined $11,000, the equivalent of a jay-walking ticket, the smallest fine for on-field misbehavior there is in the NFL. I tried to imagine, as a baseball fan, what would have happened in the World Series if, say, Pablo Sandoval had pretended to poop on home plate after scoring a key run. My guess is that he would have been thrown out of the game, suspended, fined, and instantly reduced his value as a free agent by 30% or more. Last season, Jonathan Papelbon, a moron, grabbed his crotch the way Seahawk Marshawn Lynch has been doing all season as he left a regular season game, was ejected, and suffered a wave of columns condemning him. How many columns have you read about Baldwin? See, the culture of football, and the standards of its fans, are so abysmal that a player embarrassing the league, the game, his team and the broadcast, not to mention parents watching the game with their children by pretending to poop out a football isn’t even a big deal now. After all, he didn’t cold-cock his girl-friend, beat a four-year old, murder someone, try to use doctored balls or deceive people into liquifying their brains: what’s the big deal?
The NFL now practices the “boken-window theory” in reverse: it exists on Rationalization #22, “There are worse things.” In most sports, a player engaging in a gross display like Baldwin would be the lowlight of the year. In the NFL, it’s just a footnote. Here was Baldwin, who isn’t even the biggest jerk on his own team, reacting to his penalty:
“I mean I was just out there having fun, enjoying the game of football. The explanation, I don’t know. There’s no explanation. You play this game for so long, you go out there, you have fun. And I can get criticized all [I] want to — that’s fine. Everybody has their option. But in the moment I was just having fun and my teammates know that.”
That’s right, the most popular sport in the U.S. is played by young men whose idea of fun is to squat down on national television and mime a bowel movement. The NFL barely cares, because the fans barely care: It was great game, wasn’t it? What’s there to complain about?
Law professor Jonathan Turley, a football lover who has written that he no longer attends games because there are so many loud, drunken boors to cope with (imagine that!), writes,
“I realize that there are people who think that {Baldwin’s] sophomoric conduct is really really funny. The question is whether the NFL will join a race to the bottom with the Seahawks or whether it will force owner Paul Allen, (head coach) Carroll and others to reintroduce an element of professionalism on their team. It is a bad sign when a network under obscenity rules has to cut away rather than let people see the conduct of your players at the Superbowl”
Dream away, professor! There is no question, and won’t be, until fans take some responsibility for the vile culture of the sport they allow to represent “America.” The NFL had a year of scandal that would drive most businesses into receivership, and was rewarded by its biggest Super Bowl audience ever. Pick the wrong heroes, and they will corrupt you. It works on cultures, too.
Ethics Alarms 
What? The guy didn’t even try to spin what he did as “laying an egg?!”
Wait, wait, wait… he squatted over a ball already on the ground??
Anyone knowing what they are doing would hold the football and let it slowly slide out of their hands between their legs making it look like they are actually relieving themselves with a mutli-couric sized dump.
I just now got “multi-couric.” I think. I have no more words.
Bazinga.
Oh, I can’t STAND it! I simply MUST be sure I was getting it! I took you to infer that a certain woman in mass media is “a little P.O.S.” Amirite?
Nope 🙂
It’s a Southpark joke…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Crap
I don’t know if their reference is to call her a POS or merely to say she, like most of the journalist profession, is full of it.
Tex, thanks for that link. I actually might be one-up on you for once, for a change, here, in having a clue as to why the unit “couric” was used. Nah – you probably already know this: Katie Couric did a documentary that involved letting the public see a colonoscopy – and she was the patient. I can’t remember if it was on one of those shows like 20/20 or 60 Minutes. I do recall she let viewers follow her night-before “prep” as well as the actual procedure. I think I remember her making a comment as she watched the screen in the examination room in real time: “It’s a pretty little colon.” The whole idea of the show was, I think, to promote acceptance of mass need for screening. I believe her husband died of colon cancer – not sure.
Nope. Didn’t know that. I bet that’s the reason. Thanks!
No no no….. Hiiiiiiidey Hoooooooo.
He loves me
and I love you
therefore, vicariously he loves you!!!!!!!
Am I the only one who thinks the player’s act is insignificant compared to the fact that the N.F.L. allowed a team proven to be a cheat to continue on its merry way to a Superbowl? Who cares about a stupid act by a player when the league showed that its owners and central management have no integrity!
Ugh. Did you not get the reference to “reverse broken windows”? That means, to spell it out, that the NFL is doing so many worse things than allowing boors to pollute the game on the field that nobody notices. Your attitude is why. Yes, of course, killing your players by paying them to de-brain themselves is worse, but if we would object to a football-pooping player in an otherwise perfect league, we shouldn’t object to it any less in a corrupt one.
I didn’t really miss it. I was reacting to the law professor’s “whether the NFL will join a race to the bottom with the Seahawks” comment. In my opinion, the league is already at the bottom and the players are making progress towards joining them.
(You could try a little harder not to alienate your readers by making them think that you think they are stupid. You make money by having a high number of page-views rather than by scoring points in a game of insults.)
All silliness aside, and Jack will tell you himself, he has no problem calling a spade a spade and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
1. You wrote, and I quote: “Am I the only one who thinks the player’s act is insignificant compared to the fact that the N.F.L. allowed a team proven to be a cheat to continue on its merry way to a Superbowl?” Since my post made it very clear that I obviously think that; and since I am on record in the Comment policies and elsewhere that I really, really detest the “why do you write about X when Y is so much more important”? criticism (I write nearly 1000 posts in a year: this is a lazy variety of comment), I was annoyed by it. I expect my posts to be read before they are criticized, and I will not give unfair criticism a happy pass. Sorry. I wrote about Deflategate a lot, even excessively. I have hardly neglected it, or given it a pass.
2. And your comment was sparked by TURLEY’S quote? You wrote the comment to me. It’s valid to him: why the hell is he complaining about this while putting money in the pockets of a league that does so much worse? Since I explained here that nobody should watch the Super Bowl, and implicitly made the point that I missed this stupid stunt as a result of following my own advice, saying “Am I the only one…?” to me is offensive. To ME. Write an obnoxious comment that misrepresent what I have written and I will call you on it every time. This is a forum. I lead it.
3. I make NO MONEY AT ALL off of page views. Do you see any adds here?
4. The underlying attitude that we should ignore small unethical acts to focus on larger issues—I have gotten this from people who say I should write only about war, famine, and man’s inhumanity to man–in counter to the mission of the site and the philosophy it embraces. i will slap it down here every time, and yes, I do think it’s stupid, and dangerous too.
Q.E.D.
Was it wrong of me to crack a smile in anticipation after reading sansifer’s “You could try a little harder not to alienate your readers by making them think that you think they are stupid. You make money by having a high number of page-views rather than by scoring points in a game of insults.”
Mr. Marshall, I did not intend to insult you. I am angry at the league for allowing the farce that was a Superbowl with a proven cheating team as a participant. I intended to take a shot at them and hit you. I apologize.
Thanks. I also apologize for bristling. You inherited my annoyance at four years worth of commenters who have harangued me with variation of #22, and I recognize that you weren’t even making that point. I’m also depressed about ugly implications of the mindless way America abandoned its values to cheer two despicable teams in a corrupt enterprise. You just hit a nerve.
Ex-lax, enema, pass, pass pass!
Let’s hope together that this incident will be noted in history as a smudge on the high-water mark of that “tide” you and I both would rather not see as high as it already is today…just thought of another angle: Could Baldwin be prosecuted, or sued, for out-of-bounds depiction of “excretory activities?”
The “tide” will be put into storage for now as a poke or joke that has sort of run its course, just like you stop reminding someone of a funny but embarrassing incident after a few times.
So on top of deceiving players and the public about the dangers of the game, maiming/killing players for others’ enjoyment, the NFL is now further reduced to basically obscene behavior on the field. Yes, I would agree that concussion/CST is worse than pretending to evacuate a football from one’s bowels, but it’s not the relative nature of the act. It’s simply one more example of the mindless, narcissistic, moronic (and with the concussion issue), unethical nature of the game, those who run it, and now (clearly) those who play it.
Well said. After seeing this story, for a while all I could do was try to imagine what coaches of old like Lombardi and Landry, and players of old even including Broadway Joe, would have said and done if a teammate acted like Doug Baldwin. I doubt those men saw such crass cock-strutting even in their wildest locker rooms, in their days, let alone would have thought highly or even tolerantly of anyone doing such a thing, anywhere. “Here: Kick, pass and run with a great, big piece of my sh_t!” That isn’t just “unsportsmanlike.” That expresses contempt for anyone with any notion of sportsmanship and for anyone who appreciates the sport.
Hahaha! Thanks for the seltzer all over my keyboard.
Sorry – it was probably karmic payback. I apologize for not crediting you in previous incidents when your comment cost me a dry keyboard. You have succeeded at that; I just don’t have a count of how many times.
There may be an excuse for Baldwin’s infantile behavior: what does his last CT scan look like?
Of course, this makes two feces related posts in a week.
I wonder if Freud would have anything to say about this…
Caughtcha Tex! YOU brought up the “#2” about #2s. [nanny-nanny face]
Hey, what’s brown and sounds like a bell?
DUNG!!!!
1) I really wish you hadn’t made me quote Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Ugh.
2) I’m sure that Jack is delighted that the substantive discussion following his post is book-ended by scatological humor… no doubt turning away any new commenters who may have useful things to say…
Well, we are coming up on Lent, and I will be giving up snarky posting for 40 days.
WOAH, pump the brakes…. you are self-condemning too much…
that WAS NOT snark…