Santana Moss: Not Dan Snyder's Only Headache

By now, even if you are a casual sports fan-as I am-you have probably heard that Canadian doctor Albert Galea named names in the area of Human Growth Hormone recipients, and one of them was the top receiver for the Washington football franchise, Santana Moss.

Note here that I refer to the team in question as the Washington football franchise. After all these years, I am still dumbfounded that all followers of the NFL, in town and out, are perfectly comfortable with a team that is named for an ethnic slur. Goodness (and my typical reader) knows, I am not a huge fan of pc, but this crosses the line. To be sure, a great many native Americans think the name stinks, but what do they matter? Apparently nothing. What's worse is that American Indians have had very little presence in the nation's capital, so there is scant reason, even for an acceptable mascot name along that line. It makes about as much sense as having a team called The Minnesota Wops.

Back when the team was winning, its success could be attributed, in no small part, to its excellent offensive line, known collectively as The Hogs. Now wouldn't that be a better mascot name for the team? It not only hearkens back to a successful era, it has plenty of relevance to the team's home town. What relevance, you may ask. Are you kidding? This whole town is fueled by political pork.

Getting back to Mr. Moss, we still do not know whether or to what extent he will be punished for his doping. The best guess seems to be a four-game suspension, and that has led to a number of rumors around this town that Washington is going to sign the somewhat problematic free agent, Terrell Owens.

Owens and his former battery-mate, Donovan McNabb lit up the scoreboard a number of times, about 150 miles north of here, but then had a major falling-out. McNabb claims that friction is now a thing of the past and that he would be delighted to resume throwing footballs at Mr. Owens.

To be sure, Terrell Owens was a very talented player and may yet, at age 36, have enough talent left to make a splash, but I wonder if he and his attitude would be worth all the big bux deluxe that Washington owner Dan Snyder would need to spend to get him in a burgundy and gold uniform. I can just see the team signing him to a ten-year contract for all the money in the world, half the money in the world guaranteed. True, Snyder is an obscenely rich fellow, but, judging from his team's poor performance last year, he would probably be better served spending those huge wads of cash elsewhere.

One big improvement Snyder probably made was swapping coach Jim Zorn for Mike Shanahan. Local commentator and former team star, John Riggins emphatically said last year that Zorn was barely competent enough to coach high school ball, let alone an NFL team.

Sadly, Dan Snyder has had almost nothing but bad luck with his big-money free agent purchases. After he first bought the team from the Jack Kent Cook estate, he invested a lot of money in supposedly the top two defensive tackles in the league. So well did they play for Washington that, later in the season, after the Dallas Cowboys had run up enough of a score, they took to running simple off-tackle rushes and making no secret about it, just to hold down the point total. Even so, they kept on scoring as their backs ran by Washington's "All-Pro" tackles with the greatest of ease.

Snyder's most recent squander was the hundred million ($41,000,000 guaranteed) he spent on a hot-shot defensive lineman named Albert Haynesworth. Not only did Haynesworth go half-stepping his way through the 2009 season, he couldn't be bothered to show up for the non-mandatory, but urgently-requested, training camps the team has held. I don't know about you, but, if someone were paying me a hundred million dollars, I think I'd put forth a little effort.

All that is not to say that it is perfectly OK to pay an athlete $100,000,000-more than the entire payroll for the NFL for several years and probably a few decades as well. Yes, there was a time when miserly franchise owners (of whom the original Washington owner, George Preston Marshall, was one of the very worst) paid their athletes miserably in all sports, but particularly pro football, which could only stage six home games a year. Since then, though, we have more than righted the wrong and gone haywire the other way.

This would mean very little if God actually dropped huge fistfuls of thousand-dollar bills into the owners' laps, but, as you might be able to guess if you stopped to think about it, He does not. Instead, the fan pays for these outrageous salaries in the form of obscene ticket prices (averaging $75 a game, but as high as over three times that amount) and that the rest of us pay with the extra we end up spending on products that advertise lavishly during the games.

We get nail-spitting mad when a CEO makes that kind of money, but we're all-too-ready to give attitudinally-challenged athletes a free pass. Of course, it's not just the pro athletes who make way more money than they deserve. The same goes for the top entertainers. Even acknowledging that they too are required to work hard and are constantly faced with the threat of unemployment, the patron who is kind enough to support them ought to be able to do so without getting shaken down.

If I were offered the job as commissioner of a sports league, I would only take the job if given absolute control. Then I would promulgate only two rules: first, all existing contracts would be null and void. Second, all teams in the league must scale their ticket prices down from $25, which would be allowable for only the very best seats in the house. It's about time somebody gave the fan a little consideration, even if said fan has been a total chump for throwing away so much hard-earned money on frivolity.

But that is not about to happen, is it? For the more realistic near-term, I would advise the hard-luck plutocrat who runs the football show in Washington: peddle Mr. Haynesworth to someone else, even if you only get a handful of magic beans, and use the unpaid portion of his obscene contract to find and sign a few guys who actually wouldn't mind playing a little football.

Sources

usatoday.com/sports

nfl.com

Wikipedia

WRC TV