Dallas Cowboys

Draft Picks Have Tremendous Criminal ‘Upside’

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In honor of last night’s first round of the NFL Draft, I decided to scrap my usual routine this week. That routine consists of combing the internets for sports stories that ever-so-slightly touch on legal matters and bringing those stories to you with a healthy dose of deranged non sequiturs. This column rarely makes sense and when it inexplicably does, it may be even more unreadable. No matter, as last night’s auction of human beings gave me an idea that, I hope, will really knock your socks off your now-naked feet.

Because football players are largely detestable human beings, I thought it would be interesting to take a stroll through the last twenty years of NFL drafts to recount the first round draft picks who have had scrapes with the law. From felonies to misdemeanors to a sidebar on the bizarre physical specimen that was Mark McGwire’s brother, herewith is the Rap Sheet Roll Call of the NFL Draft, Round One. The 31st and 32nd picks do not have a twenty year history and were, thus, omitted.

All facts cited come from the players’ Wikipedia entries, unless otherwise linked. Because I’m not going to the trouble of hyperlinking everything while the NFL Draft is on.

Let’s talk Mel Kiper’s hair and Mark Mayock’s lateral lisp…

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Sports Law, Spaw, Lorts: Dude Sounds Like A Lady Edition

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I don’t know what Gloria Allred does, exactly. I know she’s nominally an attorney because it says so on her Wikipedia page and also under her head when her head appears on my television screen. It says, “Attorney.” But, despite three years of law school, I have no idea what service she provides her clients. It’s always some weirdo at the periphery of a scandal she’s representing. A woman who bedded Tiger Woods, for instance. Or it’s a minor scandal that in years past would have been relegated to the Odd Stories column in your local newspaper. Like the time Roger McDowell got his gay slur on in front of some baseball fans. What connects these things is their apparent distance from anything resembling a legal issue.

Gloria Allred holds press conferences, as far as I can tell. And she talks sternly and forcefully, admonishing those bad actors who did her clients wrong. And after the microphones are turned off and the cameramen have all fled… well, I don’t know what it is she does. You can do anything with a law degree!

Which brings me to the latest in the Manti Te’o saga. The man behind Lennay has lawyered up, which thankfully allows me to write about Manti’s man in this here column.

Let’s talk Scandal Law. Scaw, Landal…

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Sports Law, Spaw, Lorts: Pushed Off the Team, This Coaching Career Is About to Die

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Mirroring the profession it covers, this website has whiplashed from ecstasy to agony since its inception, from bottles and models to pink slips and loan debt. Like a rap career in reverse, the site has gone from frivolity to gritty realism in the time it took the legal market to absolutely crater. And that’s okay, really. Train wrecks can be beautiful. Like a pictorial essay of Detroit. The idea behind this column was to talk about a world immune from such harrowing turns of event. To talk about a world filled with Peter Pan syndromes who won the genetic lottery and behave as if what is owed to them is much more than just the world. You know, like young Biglaw attorneys circa 2006.

But this hasn’t been the case, sadly. This space has been the province of pedophiles and et cetera and so forth, and I’ve gotten to cover none of the Entourage-like excess that I had hoped. Today? Today we have another unemployed lawyer. Another statistic. Another godforsaken down-in-the-mouth sad sack who can’t keep a job and makes me want to cry because if he can’t keep his job, what does that foretell for my own “career” if you can even call it that — because I really can’t, I mean, why did I even go to law school in the first place? Good God and baby Jesus, was that a mistake…

This guy’s a football coach with a J.D. from Harvard. Let’s talk sports….

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Sports Law, Spaw, Lorts: Johnny Football!!!

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“There’s winners and there’s nothing else. I don’t give a sh*t what those pinkos over in Russia say. You want to be a loser you go live in Russia. I’m not a loser. I’m a winner. I’m an American. Who wants to be John Wayne? Who wants to grab a root and hang on? Who wants to get a mean on? Get a mean on son.”– Coach Hisler, Johnny Be Good.

All I could think about last Saturday, while Johnny Manziel was breaking down Alabama’s vaunted defense, was Johnny Be Good. It’s one of the worst movies of all time, and it starred the assistant principal from Breakfast Club as a football coach, the nerd from Breakfast Club as some kind of great football player, and Robert Downey Jr., who wasn’t even in Breakfast Club. The soundtrack had the eponymous Chuck Berry song redone by Judas Priest, and also included a track from Ted Nugent. There are cameos by Jim McMahon and Howard Cosell, and the whole enterprise comes off as an indictment of the 1980s as one wildly implausible football scene piggybacks on another. To be strained would be a slap on the wrist for credulity in some of these scenes. I mean, this film is a trainwreck in every meaningful way.

It’s probably my favorite movie ever.

Let’s talk sports….

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