“Favre-first philosophy will come back to bite Childress, Vikings - CNN Sports Illustrated” plus 1 more

Favre-first philosophy will come back to bite Childress, Vikings - CNN Sports Illustrated

Posted: 19 Aug 2010 10:50 AM PDT

Brad Childress and the Vikings have coddled Brett Favre at every opportunity.

Al Tielemans/SI

Somewhere around the third or fourth time Brad Childress was asked Wednesday about his general level of discomfort in what it took to lure Brett Favre out of his Hattiesburg, Miss., barcalounger and back to Minnesota for another season, the Vikings head coach said a pretty revealing thing.

"When the terrain varies, you go with the terrain,'' Childress opined, sounding more like an African bush country guide than a football coach.

New terrain is certainly where Childress and his team have found themselves today when it comes to their celebrated 40-year-old starting quarterback. Even by Vikings' standards that were established last summer, the pursuit of Favre this time around spoke of a whole new level of desperation by the Minnesota organization.

Childress himself making a trip to Mississippi to beseech Favre in July wasn't enough. Nor was the dangling of a few extra millions in salary and incentives earlier this month, when word of Favre's well-timed "retirement'' text messages leaked out and sent another wave of panic through the team's Winter Park complex.

This time, with the regular season again pressing in on them and no sign of No. 4, a plan was hatched to send three Vikings envoys to Favre's house, basically to stage an intervention of sorts and bring the conquering graybeard home. Friends of Favre (FOF) members Jared Allen, Steve Hutchinson and Ryan Longwell were exempted from practice and dispatched on the rescue mission to Mississippi, with no less an assignment than to salvage the Vikings' 2010 season.

In other words, whatever it took in the way of a spectacle, as Childress even gave voice to. Even if that meant having a couple of his assistants in Darrell Bevell and Brian Murphy stand up in front of the media on Tuesday and embarrassingly try to cover up the fact that Allen, Hutchinson and Longwell weren't at practice.

"That's what that took,'' said Childress on Wednesday, after first issuing an apology to Bevell, Murphy and the Minnesota media for the subterfuge. "You look and see what a situation calls for and you do it. Now, it may have never been done before, but you do what you need to do, or you feel like you need to do, in a given situation. I thought it was common sense with what needed to happen.''

To that I say, whatever. Personally, I'm not falling for the banana in the tailpipe again. Believe if you will that Favre wasn't playing football again this season unless three of his most favorite teammates appeared on his front door step and asked him to, giving it everything but the Gipper speech.

I happen to think Favre was eventually coming back to Minnesota this year, even if he had to pay his own way on a Greyhound bus via Biloxi. Everything he did or said this offseason was toward that end, but as always, he needed some prodding before taking that final leap back into the pool for yet another lap.

MICHAEL ROSENBERG: Favre comeback makes no sense and perfect sense

Favre's three teammates and their sojourn to the South were mere props in the whole made-for-television drama that has become No. 4. It's like watching our favorite show, knowing the writers have to come up with a new twist for the new season, and tuning in to see where they'll take the script. See what they did there? He's only playing for his teammates this year and his love for all that locker-room camaraderie. Otherwise he would have stayed home and been content to miss out on a 20th NFL season and a potential Super Bowl trip. But what about the ankle? Oh, never mind. That was only the storyline they used in the last episode.

It's just that now that everything's Favre-ulous with the Vikings again, I can't quite get over the feeling that there will be a price to pay for all this new terrain they're covering in Minnesota. This isn't a second guess, mind you. It's a first guess. I could be wrong. After all, every season so far with the Vikings, Childress has won two more games than he did the year before. So maybe a 14-2 magic-carpet ride is coming down the pike, he knows exactly what he's doing, and the end really does justify the means in Minnesota.

But I don't think so. Somewhere, at some point, the Vikings seem likely to pay for how they've flipped the script when it comes to traditional team-building methods, ceding almost all power and authority to the franchise quarterback, rather than the front office or coaching staff. You can't quibble with the notion that the message has been sent that Favre's bigger than the rest of the team. Not when the head coach fairly well screams it at the top of his lungs with every move he makes (see Favre, training camp 2009, 2010, thanks, but no thanks).

Call me cynical, but I'd say the stance that the rules don't apply to everyone equally in Minnesota has seeped into a few other corners of the Vikings' locker room. My educated hunch is that the Favre Rules have at least a little something to do with how much trouble Minnesota had getting offensive cogs like running back Adrian Peterson and receiver Sidney Rice to take part in as many camp practices as the Vikings would prefer.

I'm not saying Peterson (hamstring) and Rice (hip) don't have legitimate injury concerns that have factored into their work levels, but I am saying that when you foster a climate in which one of the team's stars can tell the head coach when and if he'd like to participate in the 2010 season, it's not lost on some of the team's other stars that coloring outside the lines is not only tolerated but also celebrated in Minnesota. Especially when those stars -- both Peterson and Rice in this case -- happen to be seeking rich new contract extensions.

Again, the Vikings haven't paid for taking such an unconventional approach, even by typical levels of the NFL's star system. Yet. But I think they will. I don't know when or how it will show itself, but the Favre-first mentality is fraught with potential pitfalls and locker room issues unless the Vikings win and win big, as they did last season.

But what if there's no 12-4 season and trip to the NFC title game in store this time around? If something less than Super Bowl contention unfolds for these Vikings, my guess is the end of the 2010 season in Minnesota will resemble the close of the Jets' 2008 season more than the Vikings' storybook 2009 run.

Remember how Favre wasn't exactly portrayed by some Jets as the consummate teammate or leader once New York's season and playoff hopes swirled down the drain amid four losses in the last five games of the year? Maybe a potential repeat of that bitter ending is one of the reasons Favre was legitimately dragging his feet on returning to Minnesota, sensing that last year's winning formula couldn't be rebottled.

I haven't talked to him, but I'm willing to bet that in the pit of his stomach, Vikings vice president of player personnel Rick Spielman hates the Favre-first structure that has ruled this franchise the past two years. The winning last season was great, of course, and it sure beats the unemployment that always eventually comes to underachievers in the NFL. But Spielman's a football guy who knows that putting the team first in this sport isn't just a bunch of hollow talk. He also knows that's not the Vikings way of doing business right now.

Yeah, even a taskmaster like Bill Parcells was willing to bend his rules and have a special way of treating a special player like Lawrence Taylor. That is the way it works for stars in every facet of the real world. But there can be a point where traveling that road becomes counterproductive, and I think the Vikings are too far down it now to reverse course. They've put every egg they have in the No. 4 basket, and they're just crossing their fingers and hoping they get through another spectacular season without anything cracking.

Maybe they will. Maybe Favre is that special, that unique of an X factor. Maybe Childress and the rest of the Vikings will wear a ring some day next offseason because they were willing to do what they needed to do and go to any length to get Favre back. The terrain varied, and they went with the terrain.

As sound bites go, that's pretty effective stuff. But it still leaves Childress and his Vikings on some dangerous ground.

Did Favre come back for the right reasons?: Source: SI

SI.com's Damon Hack discusses the return of Brett Favre and where the QB's expectations are as he eyes the Super Bowl once more. Run time - 2:24

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Consequences of Unequal Distribution of Wealth: The Rich Get Richer... - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 08 Aug 2010 07:46 PM PDT

Shirley Sherrod had it about right when she said, "Y'all, it's about poor versus those who have. It's really about those who have versus those who don't. And they could be black, they could be white, they could be Hispanic..."

That wasn't exactly the whole truth, for she and her husband Charles were ardent, longtime civil rights activists who understood that years of racism played a large role in perpetuating the ignorance and poverty in the South among blacks as well as whites.

(Racism is here defined as the belief among many whites, supported by the law, that non-whites were inferior. Only in America did the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott, hold that black slaves were chattel, less than human.)

Overcoming that sad heritage, Ms. Sherrod, who has spent a lifetime helping in the struggles of the poor, of all shades, put her finger on a fundamental human problem in much of the world -- especially the United States -- the unequal distribution of wealth among too many of us.

That is the subject of a new book that has become the rage among social scientists and activists in Europe, especially Britain. It's called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, written by British public health researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, who have produced an unprecedented rediscovery of the causes of so much of today's anger towards the institutions of government and finance.

The book was called to my attention by a Canadian reader, Dr. Rob Dumont, a PhD, from a prominent and wealthy family. In a reply to one of my pieces on poverty, he quoted from the book to tell me that according to its central thesis, the growing gap in many countries between the haves and the have-nots, is responsible for more than the misery of poverty.

According to the book, such health and social problems as "Obesity, Mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, homicides, imprisonment rates, lowered life expectancy, over consumption of resources, teen pregnancy and the lack of social mobility," all have in common strong links to inequality of wealth.

Interestingly, the authors, who have exhaustively documented their work, do not denounce the wealthy. Rather they point out that the most affluent citizens as well as the most wealthy countries also suffer from these ills. Their analysis mocks the American Declaration of Independence which proclaimed, "all men are created equal." The original sin of slavery gave lie to that promise and the lack of equality has taken a toll in this nation even today.

As one knowledgeable Amazon reviewer, Dr. Nicholas P. G. Davies, a Briton, wrote, "Inequality issues are often presented as being about the poor, but this book shows we are all poorer for living in more unequal societies. Inequality is as bad for the rich as it is for the poor. Society is poorer as inequality becomes greater."

AWilkinson and Pickett make this clear with dozens of graphs, which rate the nations based on the problems that come with inequality. As they say, "The impacts of inequality show up in poorer health, lower educational attainment, higher crime rates, lower spending of social capital, lower cooperation with and trust of government."

One graph, showing that "health and social problems are worse in more unequal countries," makes these points: "The U.S., Portugal and the United Kingdom rate high in the mount of income inequality. For the U.S., low taxes (by international standards), a weak trade union movement, low minimum wage and a tradition of individualism have resulted in a high level of income inequality."

Indeed, the U.S., with its obsession with the market economy, has modest social programs, Social Security and Medicare, while most of the other 20 nations listed are Social Democracies with a broad array of social insurance benefits, including universal health care. Canada is roughly in the middle of the pack, along with France, Spain and Switzerland. Japan and the Scandinavian nations have the lowest income inequality; offering cradle-to-grave social programs.

Some critics suggest that the book cherry picks its statistics and the alleged problems to prove their point. But who could argue with the graph that puts the U.S., the richest country, almost off the charts that show the relationship between a huge income gap -- perhaps the highest among civilized countries -- and such health and social problems as infant mortality, higher than most European nations, homicide and imprisonment rates, the highest in the world, obesity, child well-being (poverty among children has reached new heights) and drug and alcohol addiction?

Any thinking American can verify the sad truth in another graph that shows these health and social problems are worse in more income unequal states. With the rise of unfettered rapacious, anti-labor capitalism, which touted sweatshops and child labor, income inequality rose to criminal leves. And today, as you might expect, the southern states, namely Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and Florida "have high levels of income inequality and much poorer outcomes in the health and social areas."

These states also have the highest levels of poverty, and the lowest levels of education attainment, and in the last couple of years, income inequality has become worse throughout the United States, especially in the industrial north, as a result of the 2008-9 recession, which has increased home foreclosures, personal bankruptcies, and the numbers of Americans -- nearly 50 million -- struggling against poverty or near poverty.

Yet at the same time, the rich are becoming obscenely richer. Michelle Singletary reported in the Washington Post last month that while the average income for the top one percent of earners rose 281 percent, or $973,000 per household, in the last decade, the bottom fifth saw their incomes increase 16 percent, or $2,400 per household. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who wrote the forward for the American edition of the book, noted that today's CEOs are paid more than 350 times that of the average worker. Surely we'll see the results of such inequality in health and social problems in the next few years..

In his inaugural speech, President Obama said "The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous." But that's exactly what has happened, as bankers have made huge profits and gotten scandalous bonuses while real unemployment reached towards 15 percent.

Franklin Roosevelt fought the economic royalists of his day to help Shirley Sherrod's Georgia get electricity and survive the Great Depression with the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration. What has Obama done? One can blame the Republicans or the U.S. Senate, but where is the leadership of the President? It won't do to give Ms. Sherrod a job. Platitudes like "I feel your pain" are not true. It might help to use the powers of his federal government to put Americans to work. But as she said, "Folks with money want to stay in power and they'll do what they need to do to stay in power...It's always about money, y'all,"

You can find out more about "Spirit Level," at the excellent British web site Equality Trust.

Write to saulfriedman@comcast.net Friedman also writes for www.timegoesby.net

Follow Saul Friedman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/saulfriedman

Philosophy

Thursday, August 19, 2010