Less than a week from today, this year's football season will come to an end. Kids will cry, men will eject themselves from their recliners for the first time since Halloween, and beer vendors will enter their own version of Prohibition.
But the most devastated person in the country will not be wearing a cheese-head or a foam finger -- that person will be the editor of People magazine.
It seems like this season the NFL has been one part ESPN and one part TMZ. After all, who wants to see 22 guys running around a grassy field when you could see them getting their actress girlfriends pregnant, fighting dogs, brawling at a strip club or being slapped with a restraining order? I certainly wouldn't want it any other way.
Although this kind of stuff happens every year, 2007 was a season for the ages. Let's look at exhibit one: a Mr. Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, Jr.You see, when Brady wasn't out lobbing touchdown passes to Randy Moss or threading slants to Wes Welker, he was helping sell magazines geared toward a completely different crowd -- a crowd that probably couldn't tell you how long a football field is, let alone anything about the game being played on it.
As if guiding a team to a perfect record wasn't nerve-wracking enough, Brady went ahead and got his girlfriend, actress Bridget Moynahan, pregnant and then left her for Gisele Bundchen, a Victoria's Secret model and, apparently, his closest match on eHarmony.
Now that Brady's child has been born and he is gallantly putting up with the huge burden of dating the sexiest woman alive, he's finally paying the price. After throwing the paparazzi some meat in the form of his off-field relationships, Brady learned the hard way that they're stuck on him for good. Most recently, that meant the entire world knew the quarterback was wearing a walking cast on his foot the week before the Super Bowl -- possibly the only time in history that sportswriters have cited gossip magazines as sources for a breaking sports story.
Then there's Brady's backfield brother, Tony Romo. As a diehard Redskins fan, I have absolutely no sympathy for the Cowboy who has been linked to country singer Carrie Underwood and (alleged) singer Jessica Simpson . When Simpson watched her boyfriend play the worst game of his career against the Philadelphia Eagles from a sky box wearing a cotton-candy-pink No. 9 jersey, it was clear that Romo's thoughts (and photographers' telephoto lenses) were elsewhere.
To top this off, Romo jetted off to Cabo with Simpson and friends during the playoff bye week when other teams were busy concentrating on (yawn) football. As might be expected, every question Romo faced before the 'Boys playoff game was about how his off-field exploits would affect his on-field play.
But it wouldn't be the 2007 NFL season if there weren't some decidedly less sexy distractions to go along with Brady and Romo tearing through the Maxim Hot 100. Show me a single person on the planet, TV owner or not, who didn't learn dogfighting is apparently still frowned upon even when you're a multimillionaire NFL quarterback. I can't count how many stories I read about Michael Vick titled "House on Moonlight Road," or something else that sounded like it was pulled off the cover of a Hardy Boys novel.
Then there's the Tennessee Titans' Adam "Pacman" Jones who, besides being an ideal candidate to babysit your little sister on a Friday night, was accused of showering strippers in Las Vegas with $81,000 in cash during the NBA All-Star Weekend, then starting a brawl that ended with three people being shot. Oh, and during the day, Jones used to work as a darn good cornerback in his third year out of West Virginia. Funny how things change.
And even though the 2007 season had all these shenanigans to distract folks from the actual football being played, apparently it's not over yet. Like students rushing to turn in papers minutes before a deadline, NFL players seem to be trying to cram as much drama into the final days of the season as they can.
Randy Moss, for example, has the right idea. Heading into the Super Bowl, the Patriots' spider-armed receiver has a restraining order against him filed by a former flame accusing Moss of battery.
So what's the lesson behind all this? Well for most of us, the world of the spoiled playboy athlete is pretty far away. But for Chris Long, currently projected by many to go first or second in the NFL draft this April, distractions are right around the corner. So keep your head up, Chris. Don't let 2008 be a repeat of 2007. And for God's sake, don't let anyone wear a tiny pink No. 91 jersey. Ever.
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