NFL Football, why have you deserted us?

The NFL’s annual draft in April cuts both ways. It opens the pro football season for business for a few days with a kinetic level of energy which not only involves every team, it involves every fan getting to see his or her team getting presumably better through the addition of young new players. But just as the NFL’s annual anti-season gets underway, the lights go out within a couple of days and fans realize that it’ll be a good three or four months before they even get to see their teams square off in preseason games – to say nothing of the sinking feeling that sets in after draft day euphoria wears off and fans of the league’s non-contending teams realize that the addition of a few talented players won’t likely keep their team from continuing to stink once the season does get underway.

If you’re also a fan of one or more other major team sports, then it’s not a bad time of year overall. NBA basketball and NHL hockey are in that early stretch of the playoffs in which half the teams in the league have been invited and few have thus far been eliminated, so most fans can find some rooting interest. And MLB baseball is still getting underway such that the teams with minor league budgets are still technically in contention, and even those big budget contenders who’ve gotten off to a surprisingly bad start still have plenty of time to turn it around. So it’s a good, enjoyable, non threatening stretch of the year – at least for football fans who actually find interest in other sports.

For the rest of us, it’s not just Sundays that leave a void in the meantime. Turning on the morning sports talk radio or tuning in for ESPN’s afternoon sports commentary shouting matches is no fun when all they’re talking about is other sports. And it gets even worse when they do get around to talking about football stories, but there are none but that doesn’t stop them from injecting a few anyway. The Lawrence Taylor story is unfortunate all around, but it doesn’t involve anyone who’s participated in pro football in any way in the last fifteen years. And then you get to the biggest headlines about actual current NFL players and they’re along the lines of JaMarcus Russell getting cut by the Oakland Raiders, or injured New York Jets quarterback Marc Sanchez running on a treadmill – the latter being humorously non-newsworthy in addition to the fact that both of those stories could have been written a month ago and set on a timer.

So while the 2010 NFL Draft served to remind us that football is king, in that a series of names being read from cards made for more interesting television (for football fans anyway) than any of the actual games being played that same weekend in other sports, the draft’s subsequent quick disappearance from the sports radar has also served to remind football fans that August isn’t coming up all that soon, and there won’t be all that much pro football news in the mean time.

NFL has no business punishing Miami Dolphins over Jeff Ireland

Although the newly revealed “my dad was a pimp” context in which the question apparently turns out to have been asked in makes it a lot less inappropriate than if it had come out of the blue, there’s still no defending an employer asking a potential hire whether his mother was a prostitute, no matter the context – which is why there’s no way to go about defending the fact that Miami Dolphins General Manager Jeff Ireland asked that question of wide receiver Dez Bryant earlier this year. And it’s good that the issue has surfaced, because it’s about time the NFL got around to dealing with this kind of thing. It’s not that the intentions of GMs aren’t logical when these questions are asked, of course. Once a player gets on the field, players from the opposing team are going to say every insulting and offensive thing that they can, as soon as the ref is out of earshot. That will include slurs, family insults, you name it, and a team needs to know that in that situation, the player being insulted isn’t going to snap and beat the snot out of the guy delivering the insults and get his team penalized in the process. It’s one of those dirty underbelly aspects of football that most of us as fans would just as soon pretend didn’t exist, along with the money-fueled disloyalty that teams and players show each other so routinely.

Now that the issue is out in the open, the league will likely lay down “good taste” guidelines for all teams to follow when interviewing potential draft picks (and perhaps even employ league emissaries to monitor such interviews), and that’s good thing. But the NFL has been a little too trigger happy of late when it comes to punishing its employees just to try to get on the right side of the public relations equation. The league’s suspension and resulting financial punishment of Ben Roethlisberger for merely having been accused of a crime without evidence was illegal in itself, and he could have gotten his suspension overturned (at least the “unpaid” part of it) in about five minutes if he’d filed an injunction in court; the only reason he didn’t was that he likely knows the Pittsburgh Steelers would cut or trade him if he tried (which would also have been illegal on the part of the team, yet unprovable – but that’s another conversation for another day). If Jeff Ireland is fined, the Dolphins will likely tell him to swallow it as well so that the situation can be put to rest. But if the league gets uppity again and decides to punish the organization in terms of draft picks, don’t expect the Dolphins to stand for it; despite the tactlessness of Ireland’s question, he was breaking no rule and was not deviating from what was – until this week – considered the norm for these kinds of interviews. So while it’s a good thing this came out in public and will now be fixed on a permanent basis by the league, expect Bill Parcells and company to launch a holy war if the league tries to make some kind of example out of the Dolphins that goes beyond making Jeff Ireland’s wallet a little lighter. Even that kind of “message” delivered by the league would be over the top (unless they’re going to go back and fine every other GM who has asked a potential draft pick a similar question in the past month), but the team would likely swallow it. But even the NFL should know better than to come between Parcells and his cache of future draft picks.

Myron Rolle draft not happening because he’s too smart?

Myron Rolle might be the smartest guy in the NFL – if he can get into the league. The former Florida State University standout, who took last year off in the pursuit of postgraduate education, still hasn’t been drafted as of the end of the fifth round. The only plausible explanation thus far is that he’s either considered “too smart” for the brutish game of football, or that his pursuit of a medical degree means he’s not fully committed to having a full length NFL career. The notion that a player could be too intelligent to be successful in the league is not likely the kind of public relations sentiment that the league is looking for, even as it revamped the draft to turn it into a prime time event.

Rolle is likely to land with a team even if he doesn’t drafted, as he can always sign as a free agent with a team that wants him. But the fact that he’s lasted this far into the draft without finding a team might well be one of the draft’s biggest surprises.

Update: the Tennessee Titans just selected Myron Rolls with the final pick of the sixth round.