Welcome to my football Hall of Infamy Class of 2024. Jay and I always joke about the darkness of my NFL inductees, and I understand that I don't have to induct everyone who commits heinous crimes or dies in some gruesome manner. But I really do think it's the nature of football to attract many more of those personality types, the ultra-macho, ultra-aggressive, violent men for whom madness is a way of life. This class is particularly violent domestically, and it cost one his life. Fun!
- Johnny Manziel - QB - Browns. Infamous for: Being an insufferable prick even before becoming a bust in the NFL. Jay and I don't know everything about football, but we knew this punk was going to suck as soon as the Cleveland Browns drafted him in 2014. Don't believe us? We tore him a new one in our draft aftermath, especially after he made a money-grabbing signal with his fingers upon finally getting drafted #22. I was appalled at that lack of humility, but Jay was less upset by it: "He's gonna be a bust, so let him have his fun now." The 2012 Heisman Trophy winner out of Texas A&M was beloved by the QB gurus like Jon Gruden, but clearly by falling to 22, he wasn't that highly thought of by too many league execs. The signs of a fall were all around: his playing style, his size (a little under six feet, the shortest 1st-round QB pick evah at the time), his bad attitude...and it all mixed together to result in a rookie season with no TD passes, 2 interceptions and a rushing TD, and a 2nd season where he threw for 1500 yards, seven TDs and five INTs along with six fumbles. That was his entire NFL career. Manziel had behavioral issues throughout his brief career, including flipping the bird at a preseason game his rookie year and having a domestic violence episode with his then-girlfriend that spurred the Browns to cut him after his second season. His own father called him "a druggie" and said that the best place for him was in jail. Whatever the reasons for his all-world asshole behavior, Johnny Football was destined to be bad at football and at life, and we have probably never been more accurate about anyone than him.
- Andre Rison - WR - Falcons, mostly. Infamous for: Getting on the wrong side of the wrong platinum-selling recording artist. It's a total coincidence that I now induct someone else drafted 22nd overall, this guy way back in 1989. Rison enjoyed the bottle too much also, just like Johnny Football. But Rison put together a nice NFL career, unlike Manziel. He was a five-time Pro Bowl receiver, and he got a ring as a Green Bay Packer, catching a TD pass from Brett Favre to open their Super Bowl XXXI victory over the Patriots. "Bad Moon" Rison wasn't infamous for his play on the field. He was infamous because he had a burning hot relationship with Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes of the hip hop group TLC. The couple had domestic encounters regularly, and police were familiar with them. Then on June 9, 1994 after they had a fistfight about each other's late night outings with other people, an intoxicated Left Eye threw a bunch of Rison's sneakers into a bathtub in his large Atlanta mansion and set them on fire. She had done something similar in a previous porcelain tub, but this new tub unbeknownst to her was fiberglass, and when it went up in flames it took the rest of the estate with it. Lopes had to serve time in a halfway house and pay a $10,000 fine for that. But it made Rison the face of the consequences of dating crazy, especially after he supported Lopes and held her hand during her sentencing. Rison may have gone down as just another eccentric diva receiver if not for that incident. Instead, he's the living example of why in relations you shouldn't play with fire--your ass and your shoes and your tub and your whole damn house might get burnt.
- Bill Parcells' Groceries Quote
Speaking of those 1996 Patriots, they were led by the legendary Hall of Fame coach Bill Parcells as they lost to the Pack. But Parcells was unhappy, and he would leave the Pats for the Jets. The reason, as he explained in that legendary presser, was that he wasn't being allowed to bring in the ingredients he wanted to cook. In other words, new Pats owner Robert Kraft was not letting the Big Tuna draft and sign players like he wanted. Particularly, Parcells wanted to use their 1st round pick on DE Tony Brackens, but Kraft vetoed Parcells and instead took Ohio St. WR Terry Glenn, who garnered such disrespect from Parcells that he once famously referred to Glenn as "she." I love this groceries quote because it's not fiery, it's not angry, it conveys the frustration Parcells was feeling in a way that's wrapped in a kinda cocky analogy, but it's not opaque. Anyone can understand what he was saying. That's why that quote still gets thrown around in sports today, usually when talking about a GM trying to elbow a meddlesome team owner out of his office so he can acquire the players he wants. Parcells felt that he had earned the status of coach and de facto GM, and he didn't want this new owner acting like he knew more about football. And seeing Kraft's decision making land the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in our Hall of Infamy a couple years ago, it sure looks like Parcells had, ahem, much more of a level head.
- Chris Henry - WR - Bengals. Infamous for: Terrorizing his partner into his own demise, and becoming a sad trailblazer. Henry's story may wind up being a twisted beacon of light showing why some of these people behave the way they do. It's a winding road to get there. Henry put together some decent seasons as a 3rd or 4th option for Cincinnati between 2005 and 2009. He only had 119 catches for his career, but 21 of them were TDs, which is hella efficient. Henry's issues were behavioral, and they were numerous. He was suspended at West Virginia for unsportsmanlike conduct. He was arrested multiple times in his life for assault, drunk driving, giving booze to underage girls, and gun charges. He was suspended by the NFL and cut by the Bengals, who then brought him back when their WR corps suffered injuries. But his comeback story would be cut short. Henry died on December 16, 2009 at the age of 26 when he chased the mother of his three kids, Loleini Tonga, out of the house in a domestic dispute, jumped into the bed of the pickup she got in to try to drive away from him, and fell into the street and busted his head. It was around this time that the medical community was really getting into the conversation about the trauma football causes to the brain. Many dead former players were having their brains examined for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which can't be found in the brain tissue of a living person. Henry's brain was examined after his demise and found to have CTE, making him the first active player to have a definitive diagnosis of the disease. That would certainly help explain some of his actions throughout his life. It certainly helps explain why someone would hop into the open bed a truck being driven wildly by a terrified young woman who's trying to run away from your crazy ass. Perhaps his story will make people pause before telling a player to shake off his possible concussion or just power through it, because we now know thanks to Henry that CTE can infect the brain at a very early age.
- Ray Rice - RB - Ravens. Infamous for: The punch that went public. It was the punch that so sickened me that every time the footage was replayed on TV or in my Twitter feed, I turned away. I refused to watch it, probably because I watched my mother get physically abused by my father when I was a child and I don't ever need to see a woman get battered again. It was February 15, 2014, when Rice and his then-fiancee Janay Palmer got into an argument at the Revel Casino in Atlantic City. TMZ acquired the security footage of the moment in the elevator when Rice punched Palmer once in the face and knocked her out cold. He had to drag her body out of the elevator. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell decided that Rice deserved a massive two-game suspension for this act. As pathetic as that was, I'm still flabbergasted over Palmer's decision after The Punch: She went ahead with the marriage to this monster six weeks later! She clearly decided that she'd rather stay with her star RB than lose him. However, Rice by that point had ceased being a star RB. He was a three-time Pro Bowl back and from 2009 to 2012 he had more than 1140 yards rushing and at least four yards per carry in each of those seasons. Then he fell off a cliff in 2013, turning in 660 yards on 214 carries for a putrid 3.1 YPC. Goodell tried to suspend Rice indefinitely after backlash of the original punishment came down, but Rice successfully sued to get that overturned because that's double jeopardy. Of course, no team wanted to sign Rice anyway, and so he never played again. But it will forever be my contention that Rice wasn't cut by Baltimore and unsigned because of the incident, but rather because he couldn't play anymore. Teams forgive anything if you can help them win. Ray Rice is the face of domestic violence because of that tape, one of the rare times when an abuser's raw fury is captured for the world to see. And I promise, if he was still averaging four yards a pop, the Ravens would have given him every chance to tearfully apologize for harming his "angel." If that's what he would do to his angel, I guess the devil would not have left that elevator alive.
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