MARCH 19, 2015

One of the more entertaining Broadway plays of the past decade is Avenue Q (A Broadway play for a sports metaphor?! Yes!). There’s lots of great songs among the soundtrack; The Internet is for Porn and Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist among them.

When it comes to sports lets be honest, everyone’s a little bit hypocritical.

We slam Penn State fans - unless we’re a part of the Nittany Lion nation. We consider the Syracuse and North Carolina basketball programs deplorable stains on their universities and college basketball unless our diplomas came from UNC Chapel Hill or Syracuse.

College hasn’t monopolized the market on fans that will forgive any sin as long as it happens on “our” campus. The NFL is proving its fan bases also know how to forgive the home team while finding transgressions of players on other teams disgusting.

Domestic violence was supposed to become the one common issue all fans could agree was unforgivable, but in reality, it’s completely forgivable provided the offender helps your team. Baltimore rallied around Ray Rice (the rest of the country forgot about his elevator beatdown of his then finance  because it was much easier to turn our anger to the NFL personal piñata - Commissioner Roger Goodell). Rice isn’t out of the league because of domestic violence, he’s out because he has little to no value on the field. 

Teams are standing in line to acquire Adrian Peterson, with the stumbling block being his contract not the photos from his style of discipline toward his son. And now everyone but Cowboy fans has a problem with Greg Hardy getting a “second chance” after a North Carolina judge felt he was guilty of tossing his girlfriend into a bath tub, choking her and then tossing her onto a futon of loaded guns. In Dallas they see their team getting a sweetheart one-year deal for a Pro Bowl defensive end. Fans of the other 31 teams in the league are outraged a person they believe to be guilty of something they justifiably deplore - domestic violence - has the potential to earn $13-million this season, though they know in their “heart of hearts” they’d at the very least feign forgiveness if he could help the hometown team to a title.