Richard Sherman's Freak-out: Frankenstein's NFL?

By now everyone's heard about the Richard Sherman freak-out after an NFL playoff game. Soon after it happened, it became a hot topic on Twitter and people started throwing around accusations of racism at anyone who criticized the guy; others criticized him mercilessly. Sherman tried to play the incident down by L-O-ELLING about it on Twitter.

The long and short of it is that the guy acted like an ass on national television. He flipped out so severely that it left Erin Andrews blinking with the ancient fear-response. 

The problem is, almost everyone is attacking the guy for what he did: he acted like an ass. On the flip, people are defending him: "Well, remember, he is a Stanford grad and he talked real nice afterward."

Why, in this increasingly tolerant society (one that, in my opinion, might sometimes tolerate too much bad behavior) do we want to sum up this guy by the way he acted after a playoff win? 

I repeat: he acted like an ass. He should be embarrassed. But does that make him a piece of garbage?  Of course not.

A Modest Proposal for Eliminating Bad Behavior in Football Fans: The NFFL

Let's face it: fans of both American and European football can be disgusting. I'm not sure what to do about soccer -- it seems the riots continue and there will always be select beatings of unfortunate visiting fans. But I think I have an answer for American football...and it came to me after I watched a video of an Eagles fan (they lost) spitting in the face of a Saints fan (they won) at the end of a recent playoff game.

We can all agree that this is bad form. Perhaps we can all agree it is disgusting, no? But, perhaps -- as I often point out to my writing students on the verge of their "problem solution" papers -- we can eliminate the problem by simply recognizing and removing its cause.

Look: we can't very well turn apes in to diplomats, and, let's face this as well, some guys are and always will be Cro-Magnon. So those, we rule out. I think, however, if we rethink the whole nature of football, we may be able to eliminate the bad behavior of those chaps for whom we can hold out at least some hope: the hotheads who fall apart after their teams lose but who really are, at heart, okay guys -- and I believe that includes most of the guys in the stands...