SCOTT JACOBS

He’s backkkkkkkkkk!

For better, or for worse.  Mike Vick, the quarterback whose talent seemed to know no bounds, is set to be released from prison today.  But he’s not done with his sentence.  Not yet at least.  He still has two months of home confinement awaiting, where he is forced to stay in his enormous mansion with the exception of four hours on Saturdays and Sundays, and when he goes to work, where he’ll make $10 an hour.

It’s not quite the $140 million deal he signed, what now feels like a hundred years ago.  It’s not even comparable to the millions he supposedly owes the Falcons amongst other things, but hey, I”m sure it beats an orange jump suit and picking up trash.

After that Vick will be set free, releasing a fire storm potentially unlike anything we as sports fans or the media have ever seen.  Remember, before being convicted and sent to prison for horrific, unforgivable (in my opinion) dog fighting charges, Vick was one of the NFL’s young stars.  Sure he was a mediocre quarterback, but he was so talented and so electric that many people called him the human highlight reel.  One minute he’d throw a pass that was just awful, and the next minute he’d scamper for the most mesmerizing 25 yard gain you’d ever seen.  But that was Vick… back then.

Even before he was sent to prison, his pedigree as a good NFL quarterback was under major scrutiny.  Yes, Vick rushed for over 1000 yards as a quarterback in his final year as a Falcon, but also had a 52.6 completion percentage.  For his career he hasn’t been much better.  But this isn’t even about Vick the quarterback, this is about what a difference nearly two years away from football can do to you.

Sure, Vick is a hot NFL commodity right now, that some team will try to turn itnto a made for TV movie comeback story.  But what comes after that?  What happens after some NFL team takes the plunge in the hope that they can turn Vick into the ultimate X factor?  People love to broil this down to a black and white issue, but it’s not that simple.  On paper Vick looks like a dynamite fit in a wild-cat type formation, but the man hasn’t played football in a really long time.  He hasn’t taken a snap in an NFL game since 2006.  For perspective, we’re almost halfway to 2010 right now!

What kind of shape is he in?  Can he still run the same way he used to?  Is the difference between say age 25, and age 28 an enormous one?  And then there’s this: is America really going to accept Mike Vick back into our lives that easily?

A few appologies, an outcry of “give him the benfit of the doubt” from a few former players and maybe a few analysts, and that just makes what he did go away?  No!

Anyone who’s ever had a dog was mortified when news of what Vick did became public.  Anyone who’s grown attached to a dog knows that they can be just as much a family member as any other sibling.  Sounds crazy to those who don’t love dogs, but to those who do, it’s almost always inevitable.  So the premise that Vick did his time, and he deserves another chance, and that he didn’t harm ‘humans’ doesn’t fly with me.

The idea that he learned his lesson doesn’t work for me either.  You’d have to be a moron to think dog fighting is acceptable.  What he did was wrong, heinous, and most of all, devastatingly cruel.  I didn’t think his punishment was stiff enough.

So on the eve of Vick’s release from prison, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if the NFL owners got together and put in place an agreement that would shock the world: “No one signs Mike Vick.  His talent is tempting, but what he did was unforgivable.  We can send a message that we will not tolerate this.  In our league of second and third chances, this one pushed the envelope too far.  In our league of someone’s trash being another team’s treasure, what if we set a precedent that said if you do this, there is no second shot.”

What if the league owners did the unthinkable and just said “no.”

“No, he’s not worth the P.R. headache.”
“No, he’s not worth the public backlash.”
“No, we’d rather have an honest, hard working athlete who’s done things the right way, than an elite has been superstar who’s done everything wrong.”

I’m not saying that will ever happen, but it’s wishful thinking.

It’s probably the right thing to do, but NFL owners and teams are too busy overlooking some of the real screw ups. They can throw a football, they run really fast, who the hell cares about what kind of person they are.  With a chance to give the fans real role models to look up to, the NFL has a golden opportunity to announce to the world that times have changed. The NFL is not for thugs.  The NFL is not for criminals.  If you screw up like Vick did, you take the fall, and you never come back… not to the NFL that is.

You may disagree.  I may get hate mail for this opinion, but I believe that the right thing is for the NFL to move on, and for Vick to find some other way of rehabbing his broken image and his shattered life.  Vick had it all: the huge contract, the adulation of an entire city that lived off of every snap he took, and super stardom.  But he blew it.  I’m all for second chances, but not this time. Not with this guy.

My eyes want to see Vick back on the field, but my heart keeps telling me that there’s plenty of other talented, athletic players playing this game that so many of us love.  And none of them have killed dogs, at least none that we know of.

So in the next few months as steam grows towards Vick’s likely return to the league, and football teams become divided on whether the risk is worth the potential reward, I will continue to ponder the great ‘what if’: what if no one had that decision to make?  What if we all just moved on and left Vick behind?

Photo: AP