So I just got done today watching the Steelers versus the Raiders. The Steelers got the raw end of two calls in particular which I want to discuss. One was a hit by James Harrison where he leveled the Raiders’ QB a split second after he released the ball. It wasn’t a late hit but he went through him and to the ground. Out came the most idiotic flag for unnecessary roughness I have seen in a while. The ref called it because he claimed Harrison landed on the quarterback with all his weight. If it wasn’t a late hit what is wrong here?

Harrison’s hit was not only legal due to the timing but honestly, how else is he supposed to tackle a quarterback? Is he supposed to tap him gently and hope and pray that the QB goes down? People say that the league is targeting the Steelers after it got egg on its face over the Big Ben flap where no charges were filed and the league essentially banned a player for not breaking the law. Meanwhile Brett Favre was never suspended for his off the field antics with a female reporter. Instead they have decided to pick on James Harrison it seems? I guess it is just easier than dealing with other issues with other players that the league doesn’t want to deal with.

Earlier in the game however there was another bogus call. Ryan Clark tackled a receiver, landing a helmet square in the opposing player’s back. There was a flag and he was tagged for 15 yard for a “helmet to helmet” hit that never happened. Flash back a few weeks. Hines Ward was reaching for a ball in the end zone and the opposing player’s helmet clearly hit the back of his helmet. No call, and no fine that I am aware of for that one.

It seem to me the league has a big problem with helmet to helmet hits. That big problem is consistency in calling them. And often when they are called it seems that they are being called when a defensive player already in the act of tackling winds up making contact with the helmet of another player who is falling down and whose helmet crosses his helmet’s path.

In the NHL, high sticking is called when a player brings his stick up and clips an opposing player in the face. However, if the player is falling down and contacts a stick there is no penalty. To me it seems like the answer to helmet to helmet hit in the NFL could be well dealt with in the same way.

If you want to clarify the rule for everyone and start making offensive players taking at least some responsibility for their own safety then you can simply define the penalty of helmet to helmet hit as when a player raises his helmet to above the level of another player’s helmet where the player being contacted is upright. In this case you have a penalty. However, if the defensive player is in the process of tackling and the offensive player by his own volition lowers his helmet below what would be normal shoulder level, for any reason, then he takes the risk of getting hit helmet to helmet. In this instance there is no penalty.

“Volition” is to make a conscious choice to do something. We hear complaints about defenseless receivers, for example, and they get hit helmet to helmet often times when falling after attempting to make an acrobatic catch and are unable to fully control themselves. The league wants to protect these players. But they are putting themselves in that helpless position. Instead of telling the defensive players that they must be the one’s responsible for the safety of all players who choose to put themselves into a vulnerable position, perhaps we need to tell all players that they are responsible for their own actions? Hey, you want to stretch out for a grab, you take your chances. That’s football.

Let’s take the skirts off the offensive players and realize that football is a full contact sport. Punish the blatant intents to injure such as where a blitzing backer launches his helmet into the helmet of a standing quarterback. But let’s at least make all players accountable for their own decisions and that means applying equal scrutiny to the actions of offensive players that might result in helmet to helmet hits.

I doubt this will happen though. Seems to me we have a man in charge of the league that doesn’t have two functioning neurons in his brain. And when that is the case, all you can expect is lunacy.

It will be interesting to see how Roger Goodell reacts to the trouble league golden boy Brett Favre has got himself into.  Goodell set the bar very high when earlier this year he suspended Steelers’ quarter back Ben Roethlisberger for committing no crime except that of being accused of acting inappropriately in a bar with a young, and quite frisky in her own right, young lady.

Farve, in case you have not heard has been apparently caught sexting Jenn Sterger, a former sideline reporter for the New York Jets, pictures of the most naughty sort.  Apparently, so the story goes, two years Sterger rejected Favre’s advanced and the attempts to woo her continued.  Basically, Favre was stalking the reporterette.

Hey, even if the allegations aren’t true Big Ben was suspended six game, since reduced to four, all on allegations too.  So that is the minimum that Favre should get.  But based on what is coming out and Brett’s uncanny silence on the issue it seems there is a little more here than just smoke.  If so and the charges are true Goodell would be forced to levy a harsher punishment on Farve than he did Ben or look like a hypocritical fool.

If true Brett Favre deserves to be suspended for the season.  Then he can retire once and for all in shame only to come back again next year I suppose.

Roger Goodell, the idiot running the NFL, has put himself in a real bind. By suspending Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger officially for six games to start the 2010 season he is setting a dangerous precedent. Roethlisberger, as much as the Ben haters want to believe otherwise, has not even been charged in a case involving claims by a drunk college student, who was herself trolling for sex, and her friends that she was sexually assaulted by the superstar. Thus by suspending Big Ben for essentially doing nothing wrong the standard is now that doing nothing wrong costs a player six games without pay. Since most NFL players are in the same boat (i.e. not breaking any laws) this must mean that Goodell is getting set to be fair and levy the same punishment on the vast majority of players in the league right? Don’t hold your breath.

Hey, who needs the courts right? We’ve got Goodell; a self envisioned Judge Dredd! Close up the court houses boys and girls, because there is a new sheriff in town with his own brand of justice. Idiotic as it may be, it is apparently here to stay.

Goodell cites something or other about the suspension being based on a morality clause and code of conduct the NFL has. But I say again is it moral to punish a man who is not guilty? In Goodell’s new justice system it is.

“But the police report says …”

I hear from a lot of the Ben haters, who are a vast but vocal and idiotic minority here in Pittsburgh, citing things that they are cherry picking from the police report says about what happened on the night in question as justification for calling Ben a rapist and their continuing hatred of the Steelers Quarterback. Well gee, guess there is no need ever for a trial based on this logic huh? Heck why go to court when we have a police report and we can convict solely on that evidence huh?

You are all a bunch of dumb asses! In case you haven’t figured it out, all you dumb asses that just hate Ben because it makes your pathetic lives whole to do so, police reports are not convictions. A police report is just a collection of statements from witnesses and observations by the officer(s) on the scene after the fact. They do not prove what actually did or did not happen and often contain contradictory statements from different parties that see the same events. This, you dumb asses, is why we have trials; to sort this stuff out when the evidence is strong enough to warrant one.

And just for the record often times things written in police reports are found out to simply be not true once investigations begin. People lie and believe it or not are very often mistaken in what they see all the time. I can call the police right now and file a police report against my neighbor claiming all sorts of sordid things. Doesn’t make of them true however. And although the loud mouthed, trailer trash, entitlement mentality loser may well deserve to spend a few nights in the slammer for acting like a bitch on a regular basis without a brain in her head it doesn’t make any of the claims I would make about her just to get that accomplished right.

The facts are clear. Even the attorney in charge of the reviewing the case said that there was not enough information to charge Big Ben. If there isn’t enough evidence for a trial then there sure as heck isn’t enough evidence for a conviction. The accuser, while she hasn’t recanted her story, is obviously not that interested in going to court either. I suspect the weakness of her case and the fact that what she said about what happened didn’t actually happen is a large factor in that. And please spare me the tripe about how women who are raped don’t often like to press charges. I have known three women that have been raped and all three of them had been so pissed that they took the case to trial to make sure the scum that did the deed went to jail. And each of them did. Of course maybe I just know women who are more principled than this goof down in Georgia, but I doubt it.

I admit I wasn’t there. But neither are you. I am also not proclaiming Ben innocent or a Choir Boy either. But I don’t have to. The law already has! And so far Big Ben is not accused of anything except by people that hate him for some frivolous reason such as he wouldn’t sign their kid’s jersey when they bothered him at a restaurant or some other such nonsense when they acted rudely thinking that because of his status that he owed them something. If there had been something here the authorities in Podunkville, Georgia would have looooooved the media attention and circus and dollars that would have come along with a trial.

As I said before, Ben is obviously more of a man than Roger Goodell is. Because rather than fighting the suspension, a fight the Quarterback would win and make Goodell his bitch for years to come, he is going to grin and bear the suspension by a tiny man with a giant ego knowing that his suspension will be cut to four games once he completes some touchy-feely counseling sessions. And Goodell can go to his cocktail parties and regale people with puffery and stories about how he is cleaning up the NFL by acting as judge, jury and executioner while talking about higher standards for players yet lowering himself to the level of tin horned dictator.

Had I been Ben I would have told Goodell to kiss my hairy white ass. If I were in Ben’s shoes, with more money than I could every have dreamed of, I would have told Goodell that if he punished me for something that I did not do (or at least had never been charged with much less convicted) with even a stern talking to much less a suspension that I would retire effective immediately. Ben doesn’t need this bull shit. And the league is quickly turning into a steaming pile of feces with this sham.

Six games for not doing anything? Heck, I can’t wait to see what the next thug calling the NFL who actually gets convicted of an actually crime gets! Because by this measure even taking a drag on a joint (i.e. Santonio Holmes) would warrant a 10 year suspension by my best calculations. What did he get for his third offense? Four games? That is two games less than Ben and Santonio actually pretty much admitted to what he was doing. And I don’t even agree with Holmes getting suspended either.

As for Michael Vick? Well, he is just lucky he got caught a few years ago because as of today in Goodell’s NFL his punishment for dog fighting would have been the death by lethal injection.

It’s so insane that when you have players that actually kill people at this rate they will have to be executed, revived, executed, revived and again and then executed a third time just to have the punishment fit the crime in Goodell’s eyes.

Senators goaltenders got beat on last night in Ottawa as the Penguins racked up seven goals, four against Elliott and three more against Leclaire.  Elliott was yanked after the score ran up to 4-0 and the sad part for him is that it could have been much worse had he not played as well as he did in the first period while keeping Ottawa in the game.  But even he could not hold back the Penguins attack as once again His Sidness racked up 4 points (2 G, 2 A, +3).  Cris Kunitz and Sarge added 3 points each and Evgeni Malkin added a goal in what could have been a rout had the Penguins not taken their foot off the gas and allowed four Ottawa goals.

They were almost pitty goals and it reminds me of the scene from the Princess Bride where the Fezzik (played by Andre the Giant) is fighting the Man in Black.  Outmatched and frustrated but not totally defeated the Man in Black/Westley/the Dread Pirate Roberts complains, “Look, are you just fiddling around with me or what?”  To which Fezzik responds, “I just want you to feel you’re doing well.”

Fezzik eventually loses because he fiddles around too much but last night the Penguins had an aswer for everything the Sens threw at them getting goals from E. Malkin (PPG, 11:50 – 1st) , S. Crosby (03:47 – 2nd) , M. Cooke (03:59 – 2nd) , S. Crosby (06:12 – 2nd) , M. Talbot (SHG, 12:38 – 2nd) , C. Kunitz (18:11 – 2nd) and J. Staal (PPG, 12:27 – 3rd)

Pittsburgh however needs to learn how to get a little more of a killer instinct as they got sloppy and allowed the Senators two five on three advantages which resulted in goals.

But in the end the final score still read Pittsburgh 7 and Ottawa just 4 with the Pens holding a 3-1 series lead.  Can’t argue too much with that.

Tomorrow I’ll have comments on the crucifixion and six game suspension of Big Ben as the NFL seems determined to make itself into a laughing stock of stupidity and idiots here in Pittsburgh, who are in a minority but really believe they are a majority with all their hearts, are still saying that the punishment is not enough.

I have a serious accusation to make regarding Steelers owner Dan Rooney and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. It has come to my attention that these two have taken advantage of a college girl in a bar bathroom. This charge, unfortunately, cannot be corroborated as the girl in question has declined to press charges and asked that the investigation be dropped. Further there is simply no physical evidence to support the accusation.

However, in light of the fact that both Goodell and Rooney are lynching Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger for basically the same accusations and a situation that has played out exactly the same way I think that we should be fair and treat both of them the same way they are trying to treat Big Ben. Talk from the Steelers front office and the commissioners office is that they will join together to punish Roethlisberger probably with a suspension of some length ranging from two to four games. And all this because Big Ben was out trolling bars for poontang? All this when by all accounts the girl in question was inviting sexual encounters by wearing a “DTF” name tag (meaning “down to f*@k”). All this when by all accounts the girl and Big Ben had exchanged sexual talk prior to both willingly heading off to do what single men and women often do? All this when there is no evidence of any kind that any crime too place?

Of course when I say “by all accounts” I mean all accounts except those that you read on page one of the news papers covering the story and are that are apparently more interested in giving only part of the story.

Thus I am calling for punishment for Goodell and Rooney based on the charges I have made. They cannot be proven but hey, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. These two will hide behind some morality standards that the NFL claims to hold to in punish Big Ben. Well I say that it is immoral to punish a man who has committed no crime. Thus I will invoke the same standard.

I propose the following. Goodell, as the NFL ringleader in charge of this sham, shall have to resign his commissionership for allowing this travesty to occur. He will be demoted to ball boy for the Oakland Raiders for one whole season. At the completion of that season Mr. Goodell will be banned from ever holding any office in the NFL higher than Field Maintenance lackey.

For Dan Rooney I propose that, being the disgracethat he is for going along with this travesty, he should have to sell his majority stake in the Steelers effective immediately. He can remain a minority owner but shall be barred from ever having a majority stake in the team. The second term of his punishment is that he will be sentenced to spend one full season as Willie Colon’s jockstrap. Following that one year he shall be be required to spend three full seasons as a tackling dummy on the practice field and get the snot beat out of his pansy ass every day. If he survives that ordeal he will be required to and take up permanent residence in Ireland where he is now U.S. Ambassador to.

And as a bonus there is punishment that I believe should be levied on all the Ben haters within the sound of my voice who think that Big Ben should be punished because they simply believe that he should aqnd who have always hated him, created lies about him and been just general douche bags. All so-called “Steelers fans” who want Big Ben run out of town on a rail must turn in their ‘Burgher credentials. Further they must all stand in a circle, each wearing an, “I’m with this stupid FUCK next to me!” t-shirt. Because that is exactly what each of these retards are. Then they will all be packed on a train and shipped to Seattle where they can all become Seahawk fans because they deserve to suffer in such an inhumane manner.

If I were Big Ben I’d be fighting this lynching tooth and nail.  But reports are that the Steelers QB will not and that he is going to accept his punishment just to make peace with assholes that don’t respect him otherwise they would never be pursuing such acts against him.  Which you know I think shows that Big Ben has infinitely more class than the bozos in either the front offices of the Steelers or the NFL. Still, that said if I were Big Ben I would be leveling the full force of the player’s union against the league and beat them into submission because they are simply wrong.  Then I would flip the bird to any brain dead idiot that boos me out of ignorance at Steelers games.

I wanted to talk today about the Pens heading down to Carolina to try and continue their hot start for the month of March, something that seems to be a bit of a tradition in the Burgh as of late.  But no, instead I feel compelled to address another issue; the issue of Steeler’s Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and the reaction of some people here in Pittsburgh to another accusation of sexual misconduct.

A year ago a fruit loop in Tahoe accused Big Ben of rape.  That case holds about as much water as a sieve.  The woman openly bragged about having Ben’s baby and was, by all legitimate accounts not all that stable mentally.  Now we have another case between Ben and a woman where all sorts of accusations are flying.  And along with those accusations come the inevitable calls from the Ben haters for the head of the Steelers star QB and for him to be run out of town on a rail.

I honestly don’t get it.  The man is accused of a serious crime.  He is not convicted of one.  Sure the accusations are serious but if Big Ben is not guilty of them should he be punished and the target of scorn?  Scorn, I might add, that I think comes from people who never really liked Big Ben and have for years been putting him down since (and even before) that terrible Super Bowl he had against the Seahawks where the team won in spite of him.

I hear the rumors about Ben every day.  Someone’s sister’s best friend didn’t get an autograph when they approached Ben while he was trying to enjoy a dinner in a local restaurant and he is the worst thing since Hitler.  Then there are the ones where people claim he runs out on the check and worse.  These third party sources and callers to sports talk shows around town always seem to have the story but never much to back it up.  The restaurantand the actual people involved are never mentioned and we are given sweeping generalizations.  And to those who bitch about Big Ben not giving you an autograph when you disturb him when he is trying to enjoy a meal?  I personally think you should thank your luck stars that he didn’t put you through the wall for being just that rude.  Yes he is a star quarterback.  But he is not your personal slave who must just at your command.

Yeah, I really do think these same people who are jerks like that or just the type that don’t like Ben and make up all sorts of stories about him are the same ones in overdrive now.  What is worse, I hear that the Steelers organization is a little miffed at Ben too.  But if he isn’t convicted of a crime or doesn’t admit to something why?  Do the brass really hate him all that much?  Is Coach Tomlin that much of a Dixon guy that he would help fuel such animosity?

Hey, if all it takes is an accusation to get someone run out of town here in the Burgh then maybe I should start some really unsavory rumors about the Bob Nutting!  If all it takes is a rumor, true or not, that say Mr. Nutting likes to eat puppies after boiling them alive then maybe we could get someone who gives a damn about baseball into an ownership stake in the Pirates and shed our losing ways at PNC Park.  But no, Pittsburghers seem more than willing to endure a pathetic franchise taking up residence on the North Shore and even an admitted wife beater in one James Harrison than wait until all the facts are in on Ben Roethlisberger.

I mean for Christ’s sakes!  The man won us one Super Bowl and in the case of the game against Seattle played well enough not to lose another.  He lit the league on fire this year and kept Pittsburgh alive in games when the defense, the defense so many can never say a bad thing about, couldn’t have stopped the offense of a junior varisty squad from any local high school.  And what does he get for that?  He gets a bunch of haters who can’t wait to get him out of town and will use anything to justify their burner hate for him.

Ben gets charged and convicted I say you’re right all you naysayers.  He should be gone.  But until that time I want him treated the same way I would want to be treated – innocent until proven guilty.

Stop hating just to hate.  Hey, it’s not Big Ben’s fault he can get a girl ten times hotter than you just by flashing his smile and it is certainly not his fault that you couldn’t even hold his jock strap.