Alexander said:
Are some people over-reacting? Yes. On both sides.
I don't see that at all, Alexander.
All I see is calm, reflective analysis concluding that Bill Parcells is a universally over-rated meglomanical dictator with so many control freak issues he can't even entertain the thought of a veteran player inquiring about his role without resorting to a profanity laced diatribe.
Trying to mask his own failures as a coach (and who knows...perhaps inadequacies as the lover of woman half his age), his basic insecurity won't allow for any challenges to his tyrannical concept of authority. His lifelong ego-centered perspective has convinced him that he has the right, and even the duty, to shout down any semblance of dissent. His sense of entitlement is based on his continual grandious delusions that he is the only head coach in NFL history to have turned around not one, but THREE abysmally performing franchises, and he has the unmitigated gall (or deep seated psychosis) to believe he can do the same thing with a fourth.
His vanity knows no bounds, nor does the breadth of his four-letter-word vocabulary. His tantrums are edging closer, day by day, to those displays of lunatic anger seen too often on city pavements by deinstitutionalized paranoid schizophrenics, gesticulating wildly about who knows what. Like pedestrians encountering the madmen on the street, his players have learned to cross to the other side.
But one occasionally stumbles into his path, like Greg Ellis.
Which brings us to that sniveling, craven whiner who craftily found a way to collect an unearned paycheck for all these years. Too shiftless and lazy to learn a new role, Ellis prefers to spread dissension in the ranks. Preferring the glory of 4-3 sack numbers, he obstinately refuses to put the team ahead of himself, worried only about all those endorsements playing as a 4-3 end have brought him. He cares only about remaining a household name.
A vestige of the owner's longtime philanthropy and lack of football acumen, this cunning, duplicitous character had virtually everyone convinced he was a company man (and a defensive end). Selfishly hogging an RDE free ride, he laid low while during Ekubust's long execution, and schemed to steal Wiley's job description. Now exploiting the gullible press to achieve his prime objective - a TRADE to a team where his name will continue to fall from every fan's lips - this conniving and mediocrely performing scoundral concocted a plot by which to sabatoge the 3-4, get a free ticket out, and leave the team in moral disarray. He seeks only to extend his crime - impersonating a defensive end - for as many seasons as he can.
Two more convincing villains could not be found in Hollywood.