You Can't Fire The Owner

For a sports fan, nothing is more agonizing than wanting to fire not the coach, not the GM, not the quarterback or cleanup hitter or point guard … but the owner.

Nothing makes you feel more powerless, more impotent, more feeble in your rage.

Consider Sunday’s Lions-Redskins game in Detroit. In the wake of the worst loss in most ‘Skins fans’ lifetime, there’s the usual venting about firing novice head coach Jim Zorn and former first-round quarterback Jason Campbell and the defensive coordinator and the overpaid defensive tackle and all the usual suspects. But the common theme aims blame straight at the top, at owner Dan Snyder, who has done a masterful job of alienating one of pro sports’ most rabid supporters within just a decade.

Detroit fans know their pain, times four, because under William Clay Ford their dreams have been crushed for more than 40 years. They’ve tried everything, from staying home to staging protest marches to registering every possible domain-name combination of “fire,’’ “Matt’’ and “Millen.’’ But the true target of their ire, Ford, remains solidly in place, and was spotted celebrating the end of a losing streak that had spanned three seasons as if the Lions had won its first-ever Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, back in D.C., ‘Skins fan took an immediate beating from gloating fans of the Ravens, going to 3-0 just up the road in Baltimore at the same time the ‘Skins were being humiliated. Lost in the mocking was the fact that Baltimore fans had to have known exactly what their suffering neighbors were feeling. Even if they were too young to remember Bob Irsay (as if anyone in town would ever let them forget), they were living amidst the nightmare of the Peter Angelos regime with the Orioles.

Not only are ‘Skins and Orioles fan bases practically separated at birth – the demolition of decades of success for a storied franchise – they are largely the exact same people. Thank another despised owner, Bob Short, for abandoned D.C. baseball fans adopting the Orioles for three decades.

The list is endless, even if circumstances are so dissimilar. The Yankees and Clippers are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of success, tradition and cache, but their owners (George Steinbrenner, Donald Sterling) tend to send their respective fans into vein-throbbing tirades. The Bidwill family has managed to become the bane of the existence of Cardinals football fans in three cities over the decades: Chicago, St. Louis and Phoenix.

Any fans who have been through this, even if it was long ago, likely still feel the sting. The A’s (Charlie Finley). The Reds (Marge Schott). The Bengals (Mike Brown). The Oakland-L.A.-Oakland Raiders (Al Davis). The corporations make the feeling even worse (the Cubs and Tribune, the Knicks and Cablevision), and the coincidental collaborations worse still (the group that ran the New Jersey Nets for a while, dubbed “The Secaucus Seven’’).

What they all had in common was the feeling of helplessness they inspired in their fan bases. The only thing more pointless to yell than “Fire the owner!’’ is “Sell the team!’’

They’re untouchable. They’re made men (and women). They answer to no one. On the rarest of occasions, they answer to their commissioners – who, of course, are employees of those same owners. If they ever sell the team, they sell it when they’re good and ready, and they’re never good and ready when their paying customers are clamoring for it.

Eventually, the cry goes up, “Stop giving him your money! Hit him where it hurts!’’ Detroit fans, however, stopped giving Ford their money years ago; Sunday’s game was the lowest-attended Lions game in 20 years, and it was blacked out locally. Yet Ford still runs things, because owning an NFL team works well for him. The same goes for Angelos with the gem that is Camden Yards, to no effect on his ultimate power. Raiders games are televised slightly less than Carrot Top film festivals. As for Sterling, life is never sweeter than when he hosts the Lakers in the building they share, because it’s a guaranteed purple-and-gold sellout.

Don’t expect Snyder to be eating government cheese any time soon, either, because the groundswell of anger doesn’t guarantee that Redskins games will stop selling out before the end of the next decade, much less this season.

With Snyder and his (mostly) brethren, his team can lose. His fans can lose. His image can lose. But he’ll still win.

(FOX Network screen shot from washingtonpost.com)

Here's the Bill, Belichick

The football gods really have long memories. Either that, or they took extra-long notes on the 2007 NFL season.

How else to explain what happened to the New England Patriots on Sunday at the Meadowlands? Better yet, how it happened?

Think about this: in Week 2 of 2009, the New York Jets talked junk about the Patriots and threw it all into the streets about what they wanted to do to them, and how they weren’t about to bow down to them, and all the things that should have had them eating about 10 flavors of crow by game’s end. And not only did the Jets back it up, they actually did make the Patriots look bad, even keeping them out of the end zone.

Not a huge deal, you might say, since this clearly is less of what we’re used to seeing of the Patriots, less of what we expected of them, and more of the injured Tom Brady than the rehabbed Tom Brady. But those who believe in karma have no doubts about what went on Sunday.

Payback.

For all of 2007. And apparently, the balance has yet to be paid.

You remember, of course, the Perfect Season, the one that would have been one of the most admirable seasons ever, turned in by one of the game’s most beloved teams, had the Patriots not killed the mood and turned their admirers into bitter antagonists, first with Spygate, then with Rub-It-In-Gate.

Week after aggravating week, the Patriots, without admitting it but without even a hint of subtlety, endeavored to run up the score as high as possible, leaving in starters, throwing deep late, risking injury (particularly of the vengeful sort) to their stars. It was a middle finger flashed to the rest of the sport the likes of which had never been seen at the NFL level. And though, again, it never came out publicly, it was generally accepted that Bill Belichick was orchestrating it all to stick it to the league for investigating him for illicit taping of opponents, which plenty to this day are convinced the NFL never pursued as hard as it could have.

Despite a surprising number of defenders who loved seeing the Patriots never take their foot off the gas, the entire ploy made them look ugly and cheap.

The bottom line: the Patriots were really asking for it.

They got it in the Super Bowl, in a multitude of ways. They lost to the Giants, of course, ruining the quest for perfection. They lost to another Manning brother. The record-shattering offense never got going, and then when they finally had to come from behind and did, gave that lead right back up. They allowed a miracle play by a complete unknown who will now be as much of an immortal as any of their own players. Finally, the winning points were scored by a player who, within two years, would be sentenced to prison.

Even in the face of that, though, Belichick dared the gods, by leaving the field before the final gun, proving that you can’t flip a switch on that kind of mindset.

Then, at the start of the next season, Brady got it. His season-ending knee injury really made lots of people wonder about the limits of karma. That cost the Patriots the playoffs.

Then they lost, through various means, huge chunks of the defense that had been a bedrock of their dominance, back before they became infatuated with scoring points: Rodney Harrison, Mike Vrabel, Tedy Bruschi, Richard Seymour.

That was a temptation of fate. They dodged the consequences in the season opener, when they were all but gift-wrapped a win they barely deserved, to Buffalo.

And then … last Sunday.

The gods clearly intervened on this. The Jets came in advertising their arrogance. Lots of people dismissed their chances and their tactics, still believing that the Patriots’ humble, blue-collar nature would offset them easily.

Those Patriots, though, went away two years ago. The obnoxious, gloating, shameless point-padders took their place. And the universe proved that it was not done collecting the bill for it all yet.

These Patriots got out-talked, out-egoed, and then outplayed by, of all teams, the New York Jets.

The franchise that literally and figuratively trash-talked the entire sport for one full season, got another taste of its own medicine.

But it’s into its second year now. You have to wonder how many more doses the Patriots have coming to them.

(Photo: Associated Press)

The Customer Is Always ...

While the American public wrung their hands and wailed to the heavens about the breakdown of civility and politeness among elected officials and celebrities, they forgot once again that they have no room to talk.

In fact, just in the past three weeks, sports fans proved that they can match the very stars they blast for their anti-social behavior, outburst for outburst. It didn’t seem that way for a while, but a pair of Buffalo Bills fans closed the gap earlier this week.

These two couldn’t even wait for the rage at Serena Williams to cool down. Two days into the nationwide flogging of the 11-time Grand Slam winner for unleashing her tirade against a line judge at the U.S. Open, the “fans’’ staged an early-morning vandalism run on the home of the Bills’ Leodis McKelvin, whose late-game fumble had opened the door for New England’s comeback victory over Buffalo in Foxboro a few hours earlier.

McKelvin’s lawn was spray-painted with the score of the game and a graphic obscenity – a different one from the one that turned Williams into a pariah and put her in the crosshairs of everybody within reach of a microphone or keyboard, but a pretty vile one anyway.

Don’t ever bother wondering whether these two delinquents have since absorbed the same level of abuse Williams did. It’s been mentioned in passing in the two days since it became known, when it gets mentioned at all. There are a lot of NFL injury updates and pennant “races’’ to follow now. Not to mention replays of the fumble itself.

Can’t imagine that the paying customers want to hear much about their own lawless indiscretions, anyway. That’s not good business. Just like it wasn’t good business to pursue the mayhem in the stands in Boise two weeks ago following the punch LeGarrette Blount threw at the end of his Oregon team’s loss – not when a lot more hay could be made of running endless loops of the punch itself, and dissecting the various violations of the rules of decent society that represented. So what if, minutes later, fans were caught on camera screaming curses, physically striking Blount and waving a chair in his direction?

In terms of threats to society, a metal stadium chair is child’s play compared to a tennis ball. Depending on who is threatening whom with which.

The good news is that local police are handling the thugs responsible for taking their anger out on the home, property and family of an NFL player. Much like police in Michigan took the time and effort to bring to justice the boneheads who started and escalated the Palace Brawl in Auburn Hills five years ago, the one that tarred (deservedly) the reputations of Ron Artest and his cohorts for life. The Pistons didn’t completely uphold their own responsibility for trying to shift blame from themselves in the aftermath, but they did yank a number of season tickets and ban the ticketholders.

There is actual proof that in the real world, everybody is held accountable for their actions.

It all makes you wonder, though, in what world do a lot of people exist – the people who sit silently as their fellow fans assume some crazed, delusional sense of entitlement, conclude that the law applies to someone besides them and act as if the sports universe revolves around them and is subject to their own fears, jealousies and inadequacies.

The same people who suddenly find their voices when an athlete or celebrity acts out, who believe they can act as judge and jury on those stars – when they don’t have a moral leg to stand on.

The people who live in glass houses – or who drive to others’ houses in glass cars, armed with spray cans and filthy minds.

(Photos: wkbw.com)

Let It Go

You saw and heard what Serena Williams did at the U.S. Open last week, and you’re shocked and angry. Fair enough. But it’s not just that.

You think she’s a disgrace to her sport. You think she’s tarnished her reputation and her legacy. You think that she really did “threaten’’ the line judge, came at her with the intention of taking her life in front of a packed stadium and a national television audience. You think that if she’s said and done that “on the street,’’ she’d surely be arrested and thrown in jail.

You demand an apology, then another one, then another one, then berate her for offering it too late, or for the first being too weak. You think her fine should have been a whole lot bigger, like her entire winnings from the Open. You think she should be suspended, too.

Congratulations. You’re now officially guilty of exactly what you’re accusing Serena Williams of doing.

As chronicled by the Washington Post’s Michael Wilbon, Williams was scolded at courtside in mid-tirade by none other than her father, Richard, who saw her completely overreacting to a bad call. “Let it go, Serena! Let it go!’’ he shouted.

If only we all could heed his words. She did something terribly wrong. She took too long to acknowledge it. She cleared her head, apologized, paid her fine and absorbed the public embarrassment the act deserved.

Let it go.

But why, in this day and age, should any of us not only weigh in, but take it to the exact same ridiculous extremes that she did? That’s what passes for sports talk now, not to mention pretty much every other kind of talk, every other type of communication, ever since so many more paths have opened up. Everybody has a voice, and everybody’s gonna damn well use it now.

If the target, the situation and the timing is right, any action is open to be punished with a life sentence, which is exactly what an alarmingly large portion of not only the teeming masses, but the supposedly more-responsible professional commentators, is proposing for Serena Williams. They want to hang this around her neck forever, and move it to the top of any list of her career accomplishments. One outrageous outburst that was fairly quickly dealt with by the sport, and the world is striving desperately to have it define her whole life.

Is that an exaggeration? Not when people parse the words she spoke and wonder aloud whether the line judge she berated should have pressed charges.

Some merely want her $10,500 fine multiplied about a hundred fold. Or maybe just take away her prize money. Or remove her from play.

No mention of exactly how any of that would serve the sport or the player. Irrelevant. As long as it satisfies the public blood lust.

It’s ironic that Serena Williams has done a better job in her career avoiding extreme overreaction than the public has. It was a rare blow-up for her, which is one reason it stood out so much – not just among other tennis players, male or female, or other athletes in general, as we’ve learned from the increase in “miking up’’ everybody involved in the action at any event. (Not that even that is a new thing, unless you’ve never heard the classic bleep-filled NFL Films selections from decades back.)

No, we’re the overreactors.

It’s curious, for instance, to see whether the same people condemning Williams for going way overboard against the line judge, who take the “threat’’ aspect of it way too literally, are the same ones who said or wrote that Michael Vick should be given the same treatment he gave his dogs. Since he tortured and killed those dogs, we’re looking at probably thousands of counts of publicly threatening the life of an American citizen. Each defendant, of course, likely would immediately start screaming, “It’s just a figure of speech! You wanna arrest me for that?’’

Sure. Because if you said that “on the street’’ …

It’s almost a sure thing that this same crowd pushed for Oregon’s LeGarrette Blount of Oregon to be suspended for the season after punching the opposing player who had shoved and taunted him after a game. Some also wanted him kicked out of school. And yes, many wanted him in jail, too. To the average rage-fueled fan (or, again, writer or commentator), prison is too quick an answer.

Well, it’s not so quick when it’s a bench-clearing base-brawl, hockey melee, or Cy Young award-winner flinging a bat barrel at a baserunner during the World Series. Or, for that matter, calling a tennis official “the pits of the world,’’ or blurting out a profanity after a long mid-match argument less than 48 hours after Williams’s meltdown. But those cases are different, right?

She has been punished. Let it go.

Meanwhile, on Monday night, the Oakland Raiders played on national TV, coached by one Tom Cable. Early in training camp, Cable reportedly punched out an assistant coach. Police are, in fact, still investigating, and might still file charges.

In the six weeks since, Cable has not received a fraction of the outward public outrage for possibly assaulting a fellow coach and seriously injuring him, that Serena Williams has since Saturday night for cursing and shaking her racket at a line judge.

And on the three-and-a-half-hour broadcast, Cable’s act was never mentioned once.

Looks like in some cases, it is possible to let it go.

(Photos: federal-prison.org; The Guardian)

The Greatest Generation

With no disrespect intended to the two tremendous coaches being enshrined in Springfield, Mass., today – Jerry Sloan of the NBA’s Utah Jazz and C. Vivian Stringer of three Final Four teams – the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame class of 2009 will be identified by the three Dream Teamers inducted: Michael Jordan, David Robinson and John Stockton.

And even while Jordan is eclipsing the other two more-than-worthy inductees, the everlasting impact of all three can never be overshadowed. They were key figures on that groundbreaking, never-to-be-duplicated 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team. And they, in turn, are icons of the greatest era in the history of the sport.

They are part of the NBA’s Greatest Generation.

That has turned out to be a curse as much as a blessing for the game, on nearly every level, unfortunately. Every generation of player – every player, in fact – has been diminished, put down, denigrated in comparison not just to the players from this class, and to the players from that Olympic team, but to every player from that era. Depending on whether you shave a year off on either end or squeeze a player in on either side, the era basically is defined as 1979 – the year Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the NBA together – through 1998 – Michael Jordan’s last season as a Chicago Bull and the year before the NBA’s disastrous labor stoppage.

Just about two full decades of a mind-blowing stream of players in their prime, playing the game not only the way it should always be played, but the way the founders (including Dr. Naismith himself) could only see it being played in their dreams. That group stretched the limits of the imagination, of the physical, the mental and the psychological, yet kept the game itself grounded in its fundamentals and its essence.

Skeptical? Misty-eyed with nostalgia about the Celtics dynasty, of the days of Russell and Chamberlain and Cousy and Robertson and West and Baylor and the other players who were the building blocks of the pro game – not to mention the legends of the college game who set the stage for the greatness of the pros?

Don’t be. The Greatest Generation couldn’t have existed without having climbed on their shoulders. But they clearly took what the previous generations have created and created something even more radiant.

Think of that nearly 20-year run. Think, for starters, about the Dream Team. Magic. Bird. Jordan. The Admiral. Stockton. Karl Malone. Patrick Ewing. Charles Barkley. Chris Mullin, Clyde Drexler. Scottie Pippen. (And Christian Laettner, who should give his gold medal back, or to Isiah Thomas.)

Of those 11 players, 10 (all but Mullin) were named in 1996 to the NBA’s list of its 50 Greatest Players. This year’s three-man induction brings the number in Springfield to eight, and Malone and Pippen are on deck. Mullin, again, may have to wait, although that should hardly diminish his career accomplishments.

That’s just the Dream Team. They mixed it up in their careers, in their primes, with these future enshrinees … (take a deep breath …) Thomas, Joe Dumars, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Moses Malone, Dominique Wilkins, Hakeem Olajuwon, James Worthy, Alex English and Adrian Dantley. Their finest days were slightly past, but also sharing the court were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving and George Gervin when they still had plenty left.

That’s just the Hall of Famers. These guys were merely excellent: Byron Scott. Mo Cheeks. Michael Cooper. Mark Aguirre. Tim Hardaway. Mitch Richmond. Buck Williams. Dennis Johnson. Derek Harper. Andrew Toney. Kevin Johnson. Bernard King. Dennis Rodman. Reggie Miller. Mark Price. Gary Payton. There’s probably a list of players left off who deserve apologies.

Plus, these players were coming in at the end of that blessed stretch, and in some cases had established themselves already: Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson, Alonzo Mourning, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen. Again, surely some worthwhile names are left off.

There simply has been no comparable stretch in NBA history; that wave of players had a hand in some of the most memorable moments ever, and in every championship team, and their names litter the record books. No Olympic team since has been able to match it – including 2008, and that’s right, I said it – which has been a problem for the U.S. team, particularly in 2004 when it got “only’’ a bronze. The NBA players and teams since have suffered in comparison, worst of all the players stuck with the label, from wherever such labels come, of being “the next Michael.’’ Currently strangling on it: LeBron James.

It isn’t their fault. The bar was set too high.

In the next several years, these players will all have moved into their rightful places in immortality in Springfield. Future stars and fans will absorb their accomplishments and wonder if any wave of players will ever match The Greatest Generation.

May we all live long enough to see that.

(Photos: nba.com)

Boise Will Be Boys

The new college football rankings will be out sometime Tuesday, but no doubt Boise State will have moved up the polls from its preseason No. 14 spot. Good, because if nothing else was proven in its opener against Oregon on Thursday night (besides what a sharp right jab LeGarrette Blount possesses), these Broncos proved that they’re nobody’s tiny, mid-major, Cinderella outsider anymore.

No, their program can be as bloated, over-entitled, overbearing and devoid of all perspective as any member of the exclusive BCS club it’s trying to crack. Oh, yes, they’re big-time over at Boise State now.

They showed it before the national TV cameras that night, starting from the moment – just before Blount threw the infamous punch – that they threw down the first no-class card.

Just go down the list. Player (defensive end Byron Hout) singles out opponent who is walking away, shoves him, taunts him and flips the switch – check. Stadium operators replay retaliatory punch over and over again, inflaming an otherwise celebratory sellout crowd – check. Stadium security and police surround Blount and give him the “mad brute’’ treatment, as if he’s the threat to the 34,000-plus on hand instead of the other way around – check. Unruly crowd surges forward, spewing profanity and striking Blount, enraging him further – check. The obligatory chair is raised by the obligatory lout in the stands – check.

The coach (Chris Peterson) sounds notes of stern discipline toward his own player, but decides on the meekest, punishment possible – check. Player never gives his side, tells what he said to start it all, or utters a word in public about it – check. No further probing into crowd’s antics emerges – check. Program reaps benefits of landmark victory, but remains unaccountable for its part in a postgame melee that normally would tarnish that victory – check. Rising public outcry against program blissfully tuned out as team moves forward – check.

If that’s not a blueprint for a BCS program, then nothing is.

You really don’t get authentically irresponsible, bullying behavior like that from the lower divisions, that’s for sure. That’s what Boise State was that night, for sure: the bullies, the jerks, the playground punks, the folks who chewed up and spat out a pseudo-rival, then flexed and pounded their chests and dared someone to make them stop.

The last few years, to hear it told, you turned to the Boise States of the world for the antidote to that. Not any more.

And they are led by a coach who went Tom Osborne-Bobby Bowden on us: the bonehead who carelessly flouted the rules and standards of his team, his school, the sport and common sense, gets the “internal’’ punishment from Peterson. Meaning that he doesn’t even get the traditional wrist-slap of being benched for the first quarter, or first possession. He gets a firm talking-to. Ooooh, that’ll show him. Blount loses his entire senior season, and Hout gets to the training table late one day. Sounds about right.

Blount has been spraying apologies all around, and started doing so in the locker room after the punch, not sounding at all like the out-of-control lunatic he was portrayed to be in the immediate aftermath. Oregon’s first-year coach, Chris Kelly, has heard criticism of not only his coaching in that game, but in his teaching of self-control and sportsmanship beforehand. They both have paid prices in some way.

At the other program, though, no prices appear to be paid nor lessons learned. Nope, Boise State’s exercise in boorishness will actually be rewarded at some point, if they run the table and sway enough voters to their cause of kicking the BCS door open to them.

But why wait until then. On opening night, the program proved that it can bring a stank attitude, make preening fools of themselves, incite a mob and let the perpetrators walk, just like the big boys do.

Welcome to the club, Boise State.

(Photo: Associated Press)

A Collect Call from 'Skins Fans to Roger Goodell

We’ll be hearing from Roger Goodell again very soon, I’m sure.

If he’s serious about the league’s public image being at stake, if the concept of a code of conduct he has enforced the last few years has any meaning, if “protecting the shield’’ is more than the cliché it has become lately, then the commissioner of the NFL will be calling Redskins owner Dan Snyder into his office and demanding that he explain himself – and then slapping him with a fine, or suspension, or both, that will be heard and felt from his FedEx Field luxury box to wherever in the world any casual fan has tugged on a cap with an NFL team logo.

Because if Goodell thinks his sheriffing job stops at the wallets and livelihoods of the players, he’d better think again. For every way in which the actions of the Michael Vicks, Plaxico Burresses and Pacman Joneses reflect poorly on the NFL, multiply it by a thousand – and that’s what Snyder and his partners in crime in the Redskins’ front office are doing to their own fans, right down to their own decades-long season-ticket holders.

The stories that ran over two days in the Washington Post this week, about the depths to which the Redskins will stoop to extract and extort money from anyone with pockets, had better be flat-out wrong. Better yet, Snyder’s group of gangsters had better step up soon and respond, some way, any way. If neither happens, then the Redskins stand accused, and pretty much convicted, of being the biggest bunch of lowlifes ever to disgrace professional sports, and would be marching steadily into territory now occupied by the subprime mortgage lenders, health-care looters and Ponzi-scheme perpetrators. All eager to use anybody and everybody as their personal ATM, beholden only to themselves and accountable to nobody.

Seriously, Vick has to grovel and beg for his career in front of Goodell, but Snyder gets another slap on the back at the next owners’ meeting?

Go ahead, say it. Killing dogs is worse than scamming your own customers, even worse than suing them for pleading for relief from your obscenely-exorbitant ticket packages when the worldwide economy hits home for them. It’s a strong argument, and you don’t have to belong to PETA to buy it.

You can make that case – as long as you’re not one of the Redskins ticket-holders driven into bankruptcy and near destitution by one of the team’s breach-of-contract suits, while the team repossessed their tickets and re-sells them, often with the same brokers used by the team to re-sell other tickets at scalpers’ prices to opposing team’s fans while their own fans wonder why they can never get their hands on the seats they want.

If you were the fan (there was more than one) in the Post story who the team counsel called a liar … or the fan who was ridiculed because he was a mortgage broker who dared ask for a break on his tickets … or the fan who holds evidence that the team altered his ticket application to tie him into a long-term deal … or any of the fans who sat home on the Monday before Election Day last year and watched Steelers fans take over FedEx Field … even if all you did was read that the team’s various spokesmen (because Snyder couldn’t be bothered to comment on any of it) shrugged off all the accusations and complaints and sorrowful tales because they represented such a small fraction of the ticket-buying public … are you really more angry at Plaxico Burress?

Do Chris Henry’s bouts with the law enrage you more than the debt collectors who ring your phone off the hook because you lost a $66,000 judgment over tickets for the team you rooted for since before the previous stadium was named after RFK?

There’s criminal conduct, and Vick and Co. are surely guilty and are certainly serving their punishment, whether they’ve actually finished their jail terms or not. Then there are criminal-level breaches of trust against the people on whom your business relies, who literally make you rich and pay your bills and swallow your pitches about how they’re not just buying a superior product, but the integrity and credibility that hold it together.

Unless and until the Redskins offer proof to the contrary, they’re worse than the lenders who suckered eager homebuyers into houses they couldn’t afford. Even at their lowest, they never followed up on evicting the owners by suing them for their mortgage balances. When you fall behind payments for your car, or furniture, or wedding ring or plasma TV, do you get hauled into court after you get your stuff repossessed?

Hardly, if ever. Many teams the Post reached, in the NFL and other sports, claimed they don’t pull that on their struggling ticketholders, either. This is neither the NFL’s rule, nor policy, nor general practice. If you’re broke and can't pay any more, these team’s reasoning goes, it takes your tickets away. It doesn’t try to then drain you dry until you can’t buy so much as a movie ticket afterward.

The Redskins are different.

But even the Redskins wouldn’t try that if the commissioner of the sport truly was interested in safeguarding the good of the game for all the participants, not just the 32 billionaire entities who pay his salary.

So if Goodell doesn’t temporarily put aside his crusade against players who accidentally shoot themselves and step in on this, on behalf of Washington’s fans, and the fans of the entire NFL, then he isn’t worth the paper his contract is printed on.

He might as well join his partner atop the hierarchy of his league, the nouveau-riche owner of one of the most storied, legendary and profitable franchises in the sport’s history – and spit on the customers below.

(Photos: Goodell, Boston Herald; Snyder, slate.com)

As the Donovan Turns

Upon further review, the Donovan McNabb-Michael Vick marriage isn’t headed for an early annulment after all. Not even a counseling session. That’s not to say you can afford to let your attention drift away from it, though.

For a couple of days, it seemed as if the biggest obstacle to Vick’s return would not be Roger Goodell, or PETA, or the vast reaches of the BWG (Bitter White Guy) Radio Network – but the very quarterback who supposedly had lobbied to bring Vick into the Philadelphia Eagles’ fold. McNabb clearly was not overjoyed with exactly how Vick was used in his comeback game against Jacksonville last week. However, he insisted Tuesday as he tried to “re-calibrate’’ his post-game comments, there was no rift between him and Vick and no objection to having him there.

Yes, McNabb said Tuesday, he did think the Eagles were “forcing’’ Vick in early in a preseason game he’d rather have spent getting the first-team offense in a rhythm. On the other hand, he added, he did know that this situation was a little out of the ordinary: normally, he “isn’t going to be coming in every second down.’’ As for the Wildcat – at least the version where McNabb is somewhere besides under center – “A lot of good things can happen in this.’’

This time, no mention of “gimmicks,’’ nothing further on the “throat-slash,’’ no elaboration on what the Eagles should and shouldn’t have done. Nothing to indicate that McNabb was any less secure than usual about his standing as the Eagles’ starting quarterback.

All it did, then, was add another chapter to the ongoing drama that has been McNabb’s career, which on odd days has you wondering why Eagles fans never cut him any slack whatsoever, and on even days wishing McNabb would stop doing things to stir those feelings up.

This mini-conflict was completely avoidable; McNabb only had to keep his sideline gestures a little more discreet, and taken a bigger-picture view of the Vick experiment afterward. At no time in his career has McNabb been less effective than when he has to explain something he’d said or done earlier, yet he puts himself in those situations time and time again.

This might not have risen to the level of explaining the final-drive heaving in the Super Bowl, or his bafflement with the overtime rules last season, or anything related to Terrell Owens. But it was typical McNabb, confusing rather than defusing. For a guy whose playing record and general handling of himself is a hair away from impeccable and unassailable, he ends up in these short-term-dustups way too often.

In reality, McNabb is probably no more threatened by Vick’s presence than any other future Hall of Fame quarterback on a usually-undeserved hot seat would be.

But if that little flicker of insecurity didn’t turn into a five-alarm blaze every once in a while, it just wouldn’t be McNabb, would it? Without it, Vick’s last preseason game Thursday against the Jets wouldn’t have that added voyeuristic element – all the eyes veering to McNabb on the sidelines every time Vick does anything spectacular.

Purely for the entertainment potential, Vick couldn’t have landed in a better place. He hasn’t been around three weeks, but from that aspect he’s already paid off.

(Photo: Associated Press)