MORGANTOWN — HEADLINE: Cincinnati Bengals sign Pacman.
HEADLINE YOU DIDN’T SEE: Cincinnati Bengals sign Reed Williams.
Am I missing something?
The Cincinnati Bengals are in the National Football League, right?
If I’m not mistaken, that is the league that is suffering a rather difficult image problem.
You may recall a quarterback named Ben Roethlisberger. He’s been the news lately. Even been featured in a six-page article in Sports Illustrated.
No, not for throwing passes.
For making passes, so to speak.
And then isn’t that league Lawrence Taylor used to play in? Yes, that Lawrence Taylor. The one involved in drugs, now accused of raping a 16-year-old hooker.
Not that scandal is anything new to the NFL. Remember Michael Vick? Ray Lewis? Steve McNair? They couldn’t even put on a Super Bowl halftime show without a man tearing open a woman’s dress to expose her feminity.
And now they are going to add Pacman to the mix.
Last time he was in the news where was he again? Oh, that’s right, in a strip club, making it rain money on strippers just before a gun went off.
One man is paralyzed from that incident.
He wound up being suspended from the league, served his suspension, played briefly and ineffectively in Dallas.
Now he winds up where it seems most of the NFL’s bad actors wind up. Not in jail. In Cincinnati.
Apparently the Bengals didn’t have enough problems with Chris Henry.
The NFL and its code of indecency being rewarded is a disgrace.
They let Pacman Jones back in because he promised he’d be good.
Seems like I heard that before in courtroom in Morgantown before a judge tapped him on the wrist after he tried beheading a student with a pool cue his freshman year.
Under that shadow, we now look at Reed Williams, not a character but a man of character.
He has an agent and is hoping to get a shot in the NFL, but there are injury issues that is scaring them away.
Funny, isn’t it, how injury issues bother them but moral issues don’t.
Bill Stewart, the Mountaineer coach, will tell you want kind of person he is.
“His voice,” Stewart began, “was as powerful a voice as I’ve heard around here in 11 years.”
Stewart included the leadership provided by Patrick White in that comment.
“Reed Williams was our team leader on both sides of the ball,” he continued. “That’s normally a quarterback, not a linebacker. But he was THE — and that is capital T, capital H and capital E — poster boy, the face of the program.”
Williams was a star off the field as well as on it, maintaining a 3.87 grade point average and becoming the Big East’s scholar-athlete of the year.
Not only that but he involved himself in the community, working with Boys Clubs and visiting the WVU Children’s Hospital regularly, often tying it in with his own examinations of his injured shoulders.
The situation is the NFL needs people like that among its players, for what is going on now in Pittsburgh with much of the public being turned off by Roethlisberger’s antics, wanting to see him go even if it means creating a void for their beloved Steelers, shows the world has had enough.
True, the NFL requires first and foremost that you be able to perform at a certain level. Before Williams, WVU graduated linebacker Jay Henry, who was off the field very much like Williams but on the field not quite as capable.
“Reed Williams can play in the NFL if he is healthy,” Stewart predicted. “His cover skills are phenomenal. The day of the Dick Butkus linebacker are over. Reed is perfect for what they are doing now. You have to cover backs out of the backfield and tight ends. He can do that. He is made for the NFL, not as a middle backer but on the outside.”
Perhaps, before long, someone in the NFL will wake up, will learn that signing boorish louts who bring shame to the league and their own organization is counter-productive, and start rewarding those who have both skills and a moral conscience.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
