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The offensive line, I just kept going at 'em. That's all I was doing yesterday, just bullyin' them, move 'em quick left or right and I guess they just got tired of me pushin' on them. And finally they were like, "Oh well."
-Nick Fairley, on playing Oregon in BCS championship.
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Sometimes, but you know, I did all this work. I've got to hit them.
-Nick Fairley, when asked if he was worried about late hits.
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He was like, "Let's get out of here, let's go back home. That's the kind of mindset it was looking like he had.
-Nick Fairley, on Oregon's QB Darron Thomas
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The Deep South has 22% of the nation's total population and 43% of the NFL's defensive linemen.
-Sports Illustrated
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One of the hardest times I've laughed in recent memory happened on my venture around West Africa a few years ago. This guy Eric and I were smoking a cigarette, watching the sunset from this front porch in Accra, Ghana. We're staying with this guy Eric's father knows and we're just shooting the breeze after dinner, loving being outside and looking forward to tomorrow. We get to talking about sports and Eric starts telling about his rugby playing days in high school at the Rift Valley Academy. He's a tall lanky dude, doesn't fit the rugby profile at all and a very pained looked crossed his face when he started recalling all the times he got demolished out there on the pitch. But then he started talking about how awful it was to get tangled up in the scrum was and how he once got probed in the worst way possible and the look on his face changed from one of pain to an expression of absolute devastation. That all happened years ago, yet he got so visibly distraught all of the sudden because the feeling of getting beastilized like so still conjured up some much grief and I thought it was hilarious. I remember dying laughing and telling him he should have played football and he sat there shaking his head and told me, "You're just worthless after something like that happens. Completely demoralized. You can't focus on anything else. You wanna know why folks play dirty? Because it works."
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Ndamukong Suh is one of the best linemen in the NFL. As a rookie, he topped the league for sacks made by tackles in 2010 and scooped up accolades all over the place. He was the first Lion to get elected to the All Pro team as a rookie since Barry Sanders. He's 6'4, 307 lbs, has a vertical of 35 inches, and benched 225lbs 32 times in the combine. Because he's so fast, he falls somewhere between an end or tackle, which makes for a matchup nightmare. But all that right there still doesn't account for why Suh is one of the best in the league.
Suh is one of the best players in football because he is so fucking mean.
He's a man amongst boys and he makes the simplest things look outrageously violent. Watch the video of his hit last year on Cutler and watch Cutler's body after Suh forearm swiped him into oblivion. He falls like a noodle. And we love football for that violence. How bout last year's title game? Think Oregon had seen the likes of anyone like Nick Fairley before? No sir. That game's a great example to show how its no longer good enough to just be big and fast. Those Oregon linemen were plenty big. I bet one or two were Polynesian and that's real big. They just weren't used to trying to block a guy who wants to kill. Nick Fairley and Ndamukong Suh both want to kill.
As a tackle, you are an agent of chaos. Your job is to kill the quarterback, to strike fear in his heart and rattle his world so badly that his priorities switch from the team-sized focus of leadership to the primal need of self-preservation. And you'll do anything to make that happen. When a guy tackled you and then smashes your head on the ground and whispers something absolutely foul in your ear as he digs his elbow in your ribs, you remember it. That's a rude experience and that'll stays in your mind for a while. And because such things works so well, lots of guys do it, which automatically puts the dude that follow all the rules all the time at an immediate disadvantage. So all of the sudden, everybody's breaking the rules just to merely be competitive. But the buck can't just stop there and inevitably, someone ups the ante a bit more so than everyone else competing, just to try to gain a comparative advantage and all of the sudden the sirens start flashing and the governing body overseeing everything swoops in and comes down hard on the offender, as if to say, "See, we do too play by the rules round here and you can't do that." Since the NFL's a quarterback's league, Suh's case will always be something around the lines of "How dare you rough someone up like that?"
This incident with Suh does have a few interesting parallels. When communism ended up in Russia, a whole ton of industries previously operated by the government were suddenly denationalized and put on the market. A group of well connected individuals seized this opportunity to scoop up a whole lot of long term assets for very cheap and pieced together a quite a few multi-billion dollar industries seemingly overnight. However, they did so in the fasted way possible, skirting over tons of corporate rules in the name of expediency and getting clean away with it thanks to acting in tandem with each other. This prompted quite a few fourth-grade sounding questions on ethics. If everyone's doing it, is it really a bad thing? As a result of this, the higher rungs of business in Russia are very corrupt. Everyone's guilty of the same things, so they all play by each other's rules. And if someone steps out of line to address the giant elephant in the room, they get hammered. In 2002, one of the wealthiest olgarch's in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky began publically speaking out against Putin and Moscow's shady business culture in general. He was then promptly slapped with tax evasion charges, something everyone of his financial stature in Russia is undoubtably guilty of. His corporation Yukos Oil was nationalized with the major assets pawned off for dirt cheap and he was vanquished off to exile in the far reaches of Siberia. In Russia, you better agree to not play by the rules like everyone else or you're not going to play at all. And you sure as hell don't tell folks we just told you that.
In a cartel, it is more profitable for each member to break the rules of the agreement than abide by them. The biggest incentive is to cheat because that's how to best get ahead. Think about the NCAA and Bruce Pearl's oustering from Knoxville last year. Do you think Bruce Pearl's the only coach out there guilty of a few recruiting violations? No way jose, his party ways just got the best of him and he slipped up. He didn't follow the Calipari school of thought here, where the severity of infractions positively correlate with the number of games won and first round draft picks. Winning trumps all and keeping quiet helps. Bruce has mastered the more important of the two but blantantly ignored the other and that's what got him in the end. Bruce Pearl is loud and mobsters aren't and the killing blow came when he brazenly went off and stated the obvious real loudly at his BBQ, where he poured in on for recruits and their families, laughing bout how they all really weren't allowed to be there, how it was against the rules and everything but hey no worries baby its all good here in Knoxville. Lying about it didn't help either but his fate was already sealed. The NCAA doesn't like to be done dirty like that and is always looking for a chance to prove to everyone else out there (and themselves) that they are in charge and the System is working just fine. Pearl stated the obvious and got it handed to him and the same thing just happened to Suh.
Suh's the best in the league, a perfect example of how defensive success positively correlates to raw physicality plus a twinge of madness. Violence in football is the player's outlet of self-expression and the NFL's in the wrong for being so startled when the whistle's blown and the guys are still going at it. The media just makes it worse. Is it really all that shocking y'all? Suh got what he deserved and his appeal won't get heard. But even though he'll sit out, the league still can't do a darn thing about the fact that mayhem not only pays, but it isn't just some switch you can just turn off. Some games are rigged from the start, like this accounting exam coming up. I'm convinced its out to get me.
Tune in next time, Same bat time, same bat channel.
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