No, I’m not snarkily suggesting that Tom Brady is anything but a great quarterback. The guy has three Super Bowl rings, earned while he was winning the first 10 playoff games he started. But since then the Patriots supuhstah is 6-6 in the postseason, including Sunday night’s 21-17 loss to Eli Manning and the Giants in Super Bowl XLVI.

And yet the man is coated with Teflon. Criticism simply does not stick to Brady.

The story of XLVI can be simplified to two sets of names: Eli and Mario, Tom and Wes. Though there were plays made (and missed) by lots of guys all night long, the game pretty much came down to a pair of pass plays involving those four men that occurred about 20 seconds apart in the fourth quarter. One pair connected, and the other didn’t.

There was 4:02 left and New England, leading by 17-15, faced second and 11 at the Giants 44 when Brady threw a pass in the general direction of Welker, who was wide open near the 20. And, well, I’ll let NBC play-by-play man Al Michaels describe what happened: “It’s incomplete! Just a little bit behind Welker, who tried to reach up behind him and couldn’t haul it in.”

I used the Michaels call there because it was about the only honest critique of the play that I’ve heard. In the aftermath, pretty much all we’ve been fed is that Welker dropped the ball, both literally and figuratively. It’s true that if Wes had managed to make the catch, the Patriots would have had a first down at the 20 with less than 4 minutes left and the Giants down to one timeout. New England could have moved the ball not an inch farther and still been in position to kick a field goal that would have made it a 5-point game with not much more than 2 minutes on the clock.

So, yes, it was a big play, the kind that a big-time receiver like Welker usually makes. However, he shouldn’t have had to make a twisting, leaping try. He was wide open and Brady was well protected in the pocket, with plenty of time to hit his receiver in stride rather than throwing the ball behind him. But other than that “just a little bit behind” call by Michaels, I’ve heard hardly a word of criticism directed at Brady and lots of it heaped upon Welker. (Even from Brady’s wife, supermodel-turned-NFL-analyst Giselle Bundchen, who after the game responded to some razzing from Giants fans by saying, “My husband cannot f—ing throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time!”)

We didn’t hear criticism for the quarterback, either, after Brady handed the Giants their first points of the game, intentionally grounding the ball while in his end zone on New England’s first offensive play, making it 2-0, which soon became 9-0 after New York drove 78 yards for a touchdown following the free kick. We didn’t hear a bad word about Brady early in the fourth quarter, either, when he was nursing that 17-15 lead, had first down near midfield and, after being flushed from the pocket, heaved one downfield for a blanketed Rob Gronkowski. Predictably, the 6-foot-6-inch tight end with the high ankle sprain was unable to outmaneuver 6-3 Chase Blackburn for the jump ball, and the Giants linebacker came away with the interception. Brady would have been better off throwing the ball away.

On one of the endless highlight shows on NFL Network or ESPN or somewhere, an anchor described that miscue by laying blame on the receiver who “couldn’t get open.” Just like Welker later couldn’t make the twisting catch that shouldn’t have had to be a twisting catch. Just like on the first play of the Patriots’ desperate final drive, when Brady threw one for Deion Branch, running across the middle near the 40 yard line, wide open, with 57 seconds left. The Michaels call: “And it’s dropped by Branch.” The pass was behind the receiver and was tipped by a defender. Yet it was Branch’s drop?

Brady’s fourth-quarter passes were no less impressive than his postgame rap, though. Welker manned up and fell on his sword, saying, “It hit me right in the hands. It’s a play I never drop, I always make, and in the most critical situation, I let the team down.” As for Brady, he addressed a question about Welker and the “drop” thusly: “He’s a hell of a player. I’ll keep throwing the ball to him for as long as I possibly can.” Nice of you to support a teammate under fire, Tom, but you didn’t exactly throw the ball “to him.” It would have been nice for Brady to acknowledge that his pass was off target.

This is not meant to pile on Brady, who played a good game overall, at one point setting a Super Bowl record with 16 straight completions (none of which, by the way, he caught himself). This is more a commentary on how fans and media — and even athletes themselves, and their wives — buy into the established narrative about a player and tell his story from that perspective no matter what has actually happened on the field. Brady is known as one of the greatest ever, so when passes fall to the turf it must be the receivers’ fault. Imagine if those bad throws have come from the arm of Eli. Imagine how much fun the TV pundits and nitwits would have had with the “elite” thing.

Unfortunately for them, Eli didn’t feed their storyline. He was on the money all night, especially when the game hung in the balance. When the Giants took possession two plays after the Welker “drop,” Manning and company had 88 yards of green between them and the end zone and 3:46 to get there. Seven seconds later, they were at midfield. That’s because on the first play, Eli had stepped up amid pocket pressure and heaved a ball down the left sideline that dropped perfectly into the hands of Mario Manningham, who held on and got two feet down before being piledriven out of bounds.

Even though the ball was just at the 50 at that point, you just knew the Giants were going the distance. And sure enough, with Eli completing 6 of 7 passes for 74 yards on the drive, the team from the swamps of Jersey took the lead on a 6-yard run by Ahmad Bradshaw with 57 seconds left.

Bradshaw’s run was actually a mistake, though, since Manning had told him in the huddle that if he gets near the end zone on the second-and-goal play he should fall down at the 1, which would have forced the Patriots to call their final timeout and allow the Giants to run the clock down under 30 seconds before kicking a chip-shot field goal to win it. But Bradshaw, riding the forward momentum that had propelled him through the line, was unable to stop and fell into the end zone. I think that was the better play for him to make. Take the touchdown and the lead. For one thing, there’s no guarantee you’re going to hit even a short field goal. (Right, Baltimore Ravens?) Even though the quick score gave Brady 57 seconds — not less than 30, as would have been the case if the Giants had played fore the field goal — to try to win the game, he needed to get the Patriots into the end zone, not merely close enough for a field goal try. Bradshaw did the right thing … even if he didn’t mean to.

So on this night, Eli Manning’s one mistake — calling for the lay-down — turned out OK. And Tom Brady’s mistake was heaped upon someone else. What a life it is to be a Super Bowl quarterback.

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The 23-year-old, coming off a season in which he was the Pittsburgh Steelers’ leading rusher, got in hot water with this tweet, written in response to all the “USA! USA!” celebrations that popped up after the Bin Laden news broke:

“What kind of person celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side . . .”

Now, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable perspective. Yeah, I might quibble about the “we’ve only heard one side” part, since Bin Laden never was shy about expressing his reasoning behind the terrorist attacks he masterminded. But Mendenhall’s larger point – calling into question the joyful celebration of a man’s death – seems utterly rational to me. Unfortunately, “reasonable” and “rational” just don’t fly during these jingoistic times.

Naturally, the Internet was quickly abuzz with loony accusations that Mendenhall was taking Bin Laden’s side. Much of this was spewn by the angry souls who post anonymously on bottom-feeding message boards, although some members of the media took the opportunity to misinterpret the running back as well. The Steelers issued a statement that basically stuck a five-foot pole between them and Mendenhall.

To his credit, Mendenhall did not cower and apologize. Instead, he wrote a blog item in which he attempted to clarify. After framing the whole matter as not “an issue of politics or American pride, but one of religion, morality, and human ethics,” he quoted the Bible and then wrote, “I wasn’t questioning Bin Laden’s evil acts. I believe that he will have to face God for what he has done. I was reflecting on our own hypocrisy. During 9/11 we watched in horror as parts of the world celebrated death on our soil. Earlier this week, parts of the world watched us in horror celebrating a man’s death.”

Touché.

It would be nice if the story ended there. I could just praise Mendenhall for having the courage to speak up, and that would be that. Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. Shortly after he’d posted the Bin Laden tweet, Mendenhall went on to say this about 9/11:

“We’ll never know what really happened. I just have a hard time believing a plane could take a skyscraper down demolition style.”

Yikes. I’m having one of those Jon Stewart moments, where the point you just made seems to be unraveling as you speak. I’ll leave it at this: Rashard Mendenhall has the right to believe what he believes, and to freely express what he believes. He’s taken the moral high ground in questioning the joyful celebrations of Bin Laden’s death, but as for challenging the story of the 9/11 attacks, well, now you are speaking nonsense, Rashard.

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It was a Saturday night 40 years today when, as a 13-year-old in New Jersey, I snuck my little radio into bed and tuned in to the New York City AM news station hoping to keep tabs on the night’s biggest sports story. Not just that night’s biggest, really, but one of the biggest in decades. When 26-0 Joe Frazier climbed into the Madison Square Garden boxing ring to defend his world heavyweight championship against 31-0 Muhammad Ali, the bout was rightfully billed as “The Fight of the Century.”

My mother and I were living with my grandparents at their two-bedroom house, and since I was too old to share a room with Mom, I’d moved in with my grandfather. He was a big boxing fan. It was his lifelong love of the sport, and his colorful stories of going to the Garden and Yankee Stadium to watch Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano fight, that got the juices flowing in me. I especially got a kick out of hearing him talk about former two-division world champ Mickey Walker, who hailed from the same Jersey town where my grandparents, my mom and I all were born, Elizabeth.

My grandfather didn’t care for Muhammad Ali, though. The fighter’s graceful dancing did not meld with the brawling, tough-guy style my grandfather favored. And that mouth! Even back when he was known as Cassius Clay, Ali was a guy who talked a good fight, and never mind that he could back up every single boastful word, my grandfather was no fan of the guy he called “Bigmouth.” He called Ali some much worse names than that over his refusal to serve in Vietnam, a rebellious move that got Ali banned from boxing for more than three years, his title stripped, and made it possible for two unbeaten championship-level fighters in their prime to be meeting in a New York ring. My grandfather had no interest in Ali vs. Frazier, though. I think he was convinced that Ali would win, and he didn’t want anything to do with it.

But I did. Clearly influenced by my grandfather, I didn’t like Ali, either. I did love Frazier, however, and I wasn’t about to wait until the morning to find out if he could beat Ali. So I went to bed with my little white plastic AM radio under my pillow. Because the fight was so big — and was being fought in New York City — the city’s popular all-news station had promised round-by-round updates.

The first few rounds, I remember, were all Ali, and then Frazier started coming on. The radio was providing just barebones details at the end of each round, but it was enough for me to paint pictures in my head. At some point, though, my head settled more heavily on the pillow. I fell asleep. Ali and Frazier were still fighting.

When I awoke in the morning, my radio was on the bedside table, switched off. Maybe my grandfather heard it in the middle of the night. I didn’t bother to turn it on, just ran downstairs to grab the Sunday Star-Ledger. And it was there that I learned about how the drama had unfolded during the well-named-in-this-instance championship rounds.

Here’s what happened, for all of us to relive:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8UPiArcPSw

It was 40 years ago today …

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That’s a pretty small-minded view, mocking someone who’s been brought to tears by pain, even a pain caused by something so insignificant in this great big world as a loss on a basketball court. In mid-season, no less.

But this is what the Heat brought upon themselves when they assembled the greatest team money could buy. On the surface, the tears that coach Eric Spoelstra said “a couple of guys in the locker room” shed after a close loss to the Bulls are noble, a sign that even in this money-fueled era of sports, players still care about winning. But not if you’re the Heat. The day you brought self-involved Lebron James on board to join Dwayne Wade and started planning the parade route for your NBA championship celebration, you put nobility out of your reach. You lowered yourself.

Now people celebrate your every loss. And they mock your tears. While Spoelstra’s revelation about crying in the locker room drew the most attention at the postgame news conference, it was Wade who spoke the most perceptive words, even if said sarcastically: “The Miami Heat are exactly what everyone wanted: losing games. The world is better now because the Heat are losing.”

Wade exaggerates. The Heat’s woes do not make the world a better place. The horrors in the Middle East and in other corners of the globe have not been affected at all. But within the little world of the NBA, yes, watching the Heat lay burning puts a warm feeling in the hearts of fans. It’s like watching Alex Rodriguez fail to deliver in the clutch for the Yankees once again. Do you think anyone laughs spitefully when one of the Tigers or Rockies grounds to short to end a ninth-inning threat?

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Robert G. Burton is that buffoon. He begins his angry six-page letter by referring to himself, in case AD Jeff Hathaway has forgotten, as “the largest donor in the UConn football program.” By “largest” I assume he’s talking about the vast amount of money he’s given to the university rather than the size of his ego. Although if you read the letter, sent a week after Paul Pasqualoni was hired to run the Huskies program, you might not be so sure of that distinction.

A printing industry exec who from what I’ve read appears to have made his fortune not so much by printing stuff but by putting people in the printing industry out of work — or, as he might characterize it, by cutting payroll to increase profit margin — Burton clearly is a guy who will accept no seat on the bus other than the driver’s seat. So after insisting that he “was not looking for veto power over the next hire,” he goes on to say that “I earned my voice” with millions in donations, that “I know more football coaches than the majority of Athletic Directors in America,” and that “I am fully qualified to assess coaches and their ability to match up with the university’s needs, and I have done so for football programs from Vanderbilt to New Haven.”

Gee, maybe Burton has a point. How could Hathaway hire a football coach without consulting the architect of mighty Vanderbilt, which went 2-10 each of the last two years and has had one winning season since 1982? If only you’d listened, Mr. AD, you could have brought that fine football tradition to UConn, a school where women’s basketball is queen.

We can laugh all day at Burton — and laugh you will, if you go to Deadspin.com and read not just his letter but the hilariously biting reader comments — but the problem is, he goes beyond bluster. Along with reminding Hathaway around 3 million times that he’s the football program’s largest donor, Burton lists eight actions he plans to take, most of them involving an end to his financial support for the athletic program. If he stopped there, fine. Take your ball and go home, Bob. But Burton goes so far as to say UConn will no longer receive donations from people who work for him, and to point out that he relocated three companies to Connecticut, each with more than 10,000 employees. If this condescending tone is the way Burton deals with employees, something tells me the UConn football program is going to be receiving a lot of donations from Anonymous.

The funniest line in the whole ranting letter may be Burton’s final swipe at Hathaway: “You have hurt and embarrassed the Burton family for the last time.” Yeah, that job is being handled just fine by Robert G. Burton himself.

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First and foremost, there are the Green Bay Packers, who forever and ever are seen in NFL Films walking off the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field as winners of the 1967 NFL Championship — a.k.a. the Ice Bowl — after beating the Cowboys in one the most dramatic finishes in pro football history. You remember the washed-out color footage, don’t you? The hefty linemen digging their cleats into the icy field to get a little traction with 16 seconds left, and then — oh, never mind, just watch:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVEAx0PtGrU

And there are the Pittsburgh Steelers, who beat the Cowboys in Super Bowl X back in 1976, led by Lynn Swann’s four receptions for 161 yards, then did in Dallas again three years later behind Terry Bradshaw’s 318 passing yards and four TD connections. Check it out:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P89FVtpZ4K4

And …

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3c1mvNC3Pw

Yes, Dallas did get one back by beating Pittsburgh in Super Bowl XXX, but that’s hardly going to dull the sting of having those 60-yard hi-def video screens filled with black-and-gold and green-and-gold. The horror!

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But that’s not the only connection between sports and Dr. King.

A year ago at this time I read a fascinating piece at AOL FanHouse by Terence Moore that has stayed with me. It delved into what Moore called the “hidden” side of MLK, which is an accurate description because while I’ve read a lot about King over the years, I did not know this: that he was a lifelong athlete and sports fan. The story relies heavily on the remembrances of Andrew Young, a friend and associate of King’s who went on to be mayor of Atlanta, a Congressman and US ambassador to the United Nations.

Here’s Young on the reverend as a basketball player: “Martin was small, but he always wanted to play under the basket. He was very quick, and he could shoot with either hand, and so he had a lot of quick moves. He could fake you to the left or to the right, because he could dribble with either hand. He also had a little fallaway jump shot, which for somebody his size — it was always successful, because it was such a surprise.”

On King’s favorite participatory sport: “We all liked sports, Martin and the rest of us, because you had to when you grew up in Atlanta on Auburn Avenue. He was good at sports. I mean, he could run, and he could shoot pool. Anything you learned at the YMCA, he did very well. But the one sport that was the family sport for all of us was swimming. Herman Russell [a local Atlanta entrepreneur] had a pool at his house, and after Martin got a little too well known, we’d go over to Herman’s house and swim in his pool.”

On MLK’s use of sports to further his civil right case at a 1961 demonstration in Albany, Ga.: “We realized that Jackie Robinson was from Cairo, Ga., which was in the next county over from Albany, and there were some churches burned down there. So Martin called Jackie , and he came down to visit us, and he also came with us to St. Augustine, Fla. That was very significant. See, you have to remember that the three people who sort of defined our sports life were Jesse Owens, Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, and most of the guys in the movement, well, we were all huge into sports.”

Terence Moore, the former Atlanta Journal-Constitution sports columnist, really scored with this piece. It gave us a glimpse of the everyman inside one of the great cultural figures of our time. For me, it also served as a reminder that it was on the sports field that I first glimpsed the realization of the “dream” Rev. King spoke of. The sports world has its annoyingly lingering racial issues, no question, but it’s always been the area where King’s ideals have best been put into practice — better than in the business world, the political arena, the arts, the culture in general. So I’ll be thinking about Rev. King all weekend long as the games unfold. You will, too, if you watch this:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk&feature=related

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It’s understandable that the Jets cornerback — that is, the Jets’ other cornerback, the guy who plays on the opposite side from Pro Bowl shutdown corner Darrelle Revis and typically covers the opponent’s second-best receiver — would feel that way about the Patriots’ quarterback, considering the rude way Brady treated him the last time they saw each other.

It was Dec. 6 in Foxboro, a Monday Night Football showdown between 9-2 teams that was hyped as the battle for supremacy not just in the AFC East but in all of the conference, if not the league. It turned out to be not so much a game as a slap in the face and a knee to the groin, as New England brutalized the J-E-T-S, 45-3.

In building a 24-3 halftime lead that night, Brady threw two touchdown passes. Care to guess which Jets corner was beaten on both scores? Hint: His name isn’t Revis.

What smack talk did Cromartie throw around after the game? Not a word. He declined to speak to the media. Shocking.

Revis did have a few words, though, saying, “When you play against those caliber quarterbacks, you can’t bring your C-plus game.”

C-plus. Nice nickname for Cromartie.

Nah, as second corners go, Cromartie isn’t bad. But the man talks way more than a second corner should. His motormouth head coach, Rex Ryan, might not think so, but it’s the truth.

Cromartie could take a lesson — not a schooling, like Dec. 6, but a lesson — from Brady. It’s not that Tom is above the trash talk. It’s just that he knows that talk is cheap unless you back it up. Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe Brady’s silence is caused by an inability to talk with a broad smile spread across his face. Having watched tape of that “showdown” game from last month, in which he targeted Cromartie with half of his 16 passes and had two TDs and lots of yardage to show for it, Brady can’t help but smile at the possibilities for Sunday afternoon’s AFC playoff game. He watched Deion Branch beat Cromartie for a 25-yard TD reception that made it 17-0 in the first quarter. He watched Brandon Tate get open in the end zone behind Cromartie for a 4-yard score that made it 24-3. Now he hears Cromartie talking, and Brady just smiles.

Cromartie, meanwhile, comes off like the relentlessly clueless Black Night from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4

Victimize me with a TD pass to Branch? I’ve had worse done to me! Beat me in the end zone with a pass to Tate? Just a flesh wound!

Isn’t it funny how one guy can talk and talk and not say anything, while another guy can remain silent, just play the game and make a resounding statement?

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More on NFL:

Can Mark Sanchez Survive a Four Round Bout with Tom Brady in Foxboro? (TFT)

NFL Power Rankings Playoff Edition (Round 2) (TFT)

The post Antonio Cromartie and the Jets Are NFL Champions in Talking a Good Game appeared first on The Faster Times.

Here are 11 reasons to cancel the 2011 Tostitos BCS national championship game:

1. An impatient NCAA has declared that both teams’ seniors have no eligibility left.

2. The Oregon offense, which waits for nothing, has already scored five TDs to put the game out of reach.

3. Auburn’s Cam Newton has enough money to last him until the NFL draft.

4. TCU leapfrogged both teams in this week’s BCS rankings.

5. The stadium has to be readied for baseball season.

7. At this point, even the Tostitos are past their “sell by” date.

6. The BCS has been flagged for so many delay-of-game penalties over the past month that it would take all night to clear the field of yellow hankies.

7. NFL commissioner Roger Goddell, practicing for later, has locked out all the players.

8. It’s been so long since either team has played football. So you just run toward that end zone and you get how many points?

9. After Sunday’s Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl between Nevada and Boston College, all the drama is gone.

10. We’re so close to the kickoff of the 2011 season. Why bother?

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At least until three days later, when someone lost a job over it.

According to a report on SportsbyBrooks.com that’s been picked up all over the Internet, The Worldwide Leader pulled scheduled play-by-play man Ron Franklin from Saturday’s broadcast after he had a run-in with sideline reporter Jeannine Edwards the day before. Edwards and Franklin were reportedly in a production meeting for Friday’s telecast of the all-important Chick-fil-A Bowl with a few other people, and at some point Franklin addressed Edwards in a dismissive tone, “Listen to me, sweet baby, let me tell you something …” (The original report had Franklin referring to her as “sweetcakes,” but in a USA Today story Edwards said it was “sweet baby.”) When Edwards objected to being spoken to that way, he reportedly said, “OK, then listen to me, a–hole.”

ESPN management caught wind of this — Edwards told USA Today that a colleague reported the exchange — and Franklin was yanked from the next day’s Fiesta Bowl broadcast. It apparently was too late to replace him in the Chick-fil-A booth. Or maybe management folks felt that was too big of a game — No. 23 Florida State vs. No. 19 South Carolina — to leave it in the hands of a B-team broadcaster.

On Tuesday, ESPN fired Franklin, perhaps because they’d been down this road before. Back in 2005, during a Notre Dame-Purdue game that was turning into a rout, he berated sideline reporter Holly Rowe for commending the Boilermakers for not giving up. “Holly, it’s not giving up,” he said. “It’s 49-21, sweetheart.” He got a talking-to that time, a dismissal this time.

Now, I’m sure this story is fueling all sorts of outrage. There no doubt are those outraged that Edwards or any woman would be spoken to like this in a professional setting. There surely are those outraged that Franklin would be so harshly disciplined for something that happened in the privacy of a behind-the-scenes meeting. Everyone on both sidelines gets outraged about everything in these days of the PC apocalypse.

I come down squarely on the 50-yard line here. Having worked in the ultimate boys’ locker room of media — a newspaper sports department — for more than two decades, I have seen and heard it all. I can’t count the number of times I was called “a-hole” or something much worse. Most of those times, the words were spoken in jest or in a flustered moment. People on deadline act in harsh ways. They call each other names. So I don’t really have a problem with Franklin calling Edwards an “a-hole,” per se.

I do have a problem with “sweet baby,” though. (“Sweetcakes,” too, and anything else with the flavor of “sugar.”) Women have made great strides in all of the business world, and nowhere has that been truer than in sports media. During my newspaper days, I had the pleasure of working with a couple of trail blazers, Lesley Visser and Jackie MacMullan, who pretty quickly earned the respect of male colleagues at a time when most guys still looked at female sports reporters as nothing but a pretty face and nice piece of ass standing with a microphone along the sideline, serving as eye candy more than as a legitimate reporter. Even the compliments they got at first tended to be backhanded — calling someone “a good woman reporter” is playing into a stereotype, like “a good black quarterback.” But these women worked at the craft of being a reporter and a columnist, and paved the way for other women to enter the sports media profession without having to have the word “woman” or “female” as part of their job title. And certainly without having to be called “sweet baby.”

Here’s my litmus: Was Franklin’s comment merely an expression of him being annoyed at hearing something he didn’t like in a conversation, or was it an expression of him being annoyed at a woman saying something he didn’t like? Judging from the context that’s been reported, I think the latter is the case. If Franklin had used a racial epithet to quiet a black colleague or called a gay colleague a fag to shut him up, it’d be no less offensive.

And here’s another factor, which flies in the face of me being OK with the A-word: Franklin allegedly used that term of endearment only after Edwards objected to being referred to as “sweet baby.” So he apparently was using it to express his displeasure at being called on his sexist remark. That only compounds the sexism, as I see it.

Why do things have to get so complicated, though? And who knows if there’s even more to the story? What did Edwards say or do to set off Franklin? After he called her a name, did she fire some ageist quip back at the 68-year-old grey hair?

Even though I’m writing about it now, I wish this all weren’t happening out in public. And I’m ambivalent about the firing. An ESPN big cheese should have simply taken Franklin into a room and let him know what’s acceptable, and then they should have brought in Edwards and worked things out. That’s how my son’s second-grade teacher handles things.

And it’s not like Franklin disgraced ESPN by doing something offensive on the air. It’s not like he, say, acted all giddy and celebratory while reporting on a misfortune that had befallen someone in the sports world. No, Ron Franklin didn’t do anything of the sort. That was the handiwork of morning SportsCenter anchor Hannah Storm and NFL guy Adam Schefter, in reporting Monday’s breaking news that the Cleveland Browns had fired Eric Mangini:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiGPNs80v88&feature=player_embedded

Laughter? High-fives? I look forward to seeing the raucous SportsCenter reaction if Hannah or Adam is ever fired.

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