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A few bad apples ruin the image of NFL players
By Tom Curran
NBCSports.com
Are you sick of Vick? Up to here with Pac Man? Do you start looking for missing sections when your morning paper (hey, some people still read them) contain no mention of an NFL player being in a compromising situation?
Chris Draft is sick of it too. The difference between Draft and you: he’s in the league.
Draft, a nine-year NFL veteran who joined the Rams this off-season, is trying to mobilize NFL players who live on the right side of the law to call attention to their behavior.
"We’ve got a lot of good men and it’s important that we make sure people don’t just see the three, four or five people responsible for all the negative stories all the time," Draft said. "You and I both know that, out of 1,600 guys, the ones who are having problems are the ones that get the press."
No doubt. Player misbehavior is so rampant the diabolically entertaining web site Profootballtalk.com has an arrest counter on its home page documenting the days elapsed since the last arrest of an NFL player.
Draft was so bothered by this trend that he talked to Ed Reynolds, a top lieutenant of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell involved in league security.
"Ed said to me, 'Just call Roger.' I was like, 'Is that cool?' So I did and when he got back from the owners meetings in May, he called me."
The jist of the conversation, according to Draft, was this: "Every team has guys doing good work. There are plenty of guys like me who are passionate about this. It’s important to recognize guys who are doing the right things. We shouldn’t allow the negative to dominate the positive. There’s one guy doing bad for every 10 guys doing good."
Draft’s vision is to put together a character campaign. It’s in its nascent stages, but the aim is simple.
"I will simply ask, 'What is it to be a good man?'" Draft said. "We are continually measuring from the bottom up instead of from the top down. There is a fixed standard of what it means to be a good man. You can easily measure yourself against that standard by how you live your life, what you do."
http://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/1634049/detail.html
By Tom Curran
NBCSports.com
Are you sick of Vick? Up to here with Pac Man? Do you start looking for missing sections when your morning paper (hey, some people still read them) contain no mention of an NFL player being in a compromising situation?
Chris Draft is sick of it too. The difference between Draft and you: he’s in the league.
Draft, a nine-year NFL veteran who joined the Rams this off-season, is trying to mobilize NFL players who live on the right side of the law to call attention to their behavior.
"We’ve got a lot of good men and it’s important that we make sure people don’t just see the three, four or five people responsible for all the negative stories all the time," Draft said. "You and I both know that, out of 1,600 guys, the ones who are having problems are the ones that get the press."
No doubt. Player misbehavior is so rampant the diabolically entertaining web site Profootballtalk.com has an arrest counter on its home page documenting the days elapsed since the last arrest of an NFL player.
Draft was so bothered by this trend that he talked to Ed Reynolds, a top lieutenant of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell involved in league security.
"Ed said to me, 'Just call Roger.' I was like, 'Is that cool?' So I did and when he got back from the owners meetings in May, he called me."
The jist of the conversation, according to Draft, was this: "Every team has guys doing good work. There are plenty of guys like me who are passionate about this. It’s important to recognize guys who are doing the right things. We shouldn’t allow the negative to dominate the positive. There’s one guy doing bad for every 10 guys doing good."
Draft’s vision is to put together a character campaign. It’s in its nascent stages, but the aim is simple.
"I will simply ask, 'What is it to be a good man?'" Draft said. "We are continually measuring from the bottom up instead of from the top down. There is a fixed standard of what it means to be a good man. You can easily measure yourself against that standard by how you live your life, what you do."
http://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/1634049/detail.html