Larry Foote Wants Marshawn Lynch To Obey

Nail, Meet Foote

So the story on the World Wide Lemur today is that Seattle Seahawks RB Marshawn Lynch is sending the wrong message to children, what with his refusal to talk to print media, and his penchant for touchdown celebrations involving the crotch. This is all according to ex-Steelers and Cardinals LB Larry Foote (who?), who states that Lynch's charitable works don't matter, since his bigger message is to flaunt authority, and if Lynch were more like Jerome Bettis, that would be better.

A few Brief and Obvious Points and/or Questions about this...

1) If you are using an NFL player -- and yeah, you can pretty much put every single NFL player in that camp at this point -- as a role model, you're doing it wrong. I'm sure Bettis is a fine person and all, but he spent his life honing the skill of running people over to the detriment of his long-term health and mental capacities. If he snaps tomorrow and has an episode, we'd all be shocked and feel bad... but we'd also probably shrug, and within a week, there would be all kinds of allegations that were swept under the rug while he has alive. It's where the game is now.

2) Why can there be only one talking point from Lynch's life? If my child liked the Seahawks and Lynch, I'd talk about his determination to keep upright through adversity, to not just go along with rules that make no sense just because they've come from on high, and that sacrificing your comfort for your teammates means that they will have your back, even when you make mistakes. But I guess there is only one lesson to be learned when you want to teach what Foote is really selling here...

3) OBEY.

What's really going on is that Lynch has made an enemy of the people who have to fill column inches on a daily basis. Which means that everyone and anyone with any kind of a name -- and Larry Foote, honestly, just isn't enough of one and proves the point -- can now get media run just to say bad stuff about Lynch, so that it's no longer just the media guy's drumbeat.

4) Does anyone, really, think that The Young People would be magically better about dealing with authority, the workplace, school, colleges, etc., if only Marshawn Lynch was super quiet, devoid of any shown personality, and handed the ball to the ref while weeping about the unseemliness of being recognized for scoring touchdowns, when it was only due to the actions of his teammates?

Yeah, didn't think so. Kids, honestly, are kind of more complicated than that. Being sentient forms of life with free will and all.

5) Final point on this... what would happen if we never heard from Lynch in the media again? Or every player in the NFL? Imagine, for a moment, if sports writers all decided to act en masse to not interview athletes anymore.

well, um, we'd still hear from them. If we chose to. Directly. On their Twitter pages, in commercials, and on the NFL's owned and operated media outlets. In documentaries and reality shows. On call-in stations where the guys who feel obliged to reach out do just that.

There would be absolutely no impact on the ratings for the games.

Or the ticket sales.

Or the merch.

Because, well, no one ever decided to put on the game, buy a ticket, or wear a guy's jersey based on their post-game media work.

(If we did? The WNBA would be much better off. Scrubs and special teamers who stay in the league based on how easy they are to get along with would be all over the airwaves. We'd care about Olympians more than once every four years. The Walter Payton Award for sportsmanship would be discussed as much as the MVP. Eagles long snapper and amateur magician Jon Dorenbos would have his own show. Charity events would happen five to ten times more often than they do. But I digress.)

So if the people who are having the butthurt do not matter now, will not matter later, and are not offering anything to the conversation more than an ignored plea and/or badgering to be more like people who used to pretend they mattered...

Well, isn't the problem the media, rather than the athletes?