Embrace the villain

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Sportsmanship has no place in sport-ciety outside of U-10 soccer.

My dedicated readers are probably wondering, "Does this guy have any other points? This is getting old." But lucky for me, I don't have any dedicated readers. (Hi, mom!)

Villains, while not awesome in real life, are conversely awesome in the sports world. That's part of the beauty of competition: Just because you are a "good" person doesn't mean you are going to be a successful athlete. We can see this in progress as Tiger Woods tries to reinvent himself; he's trying too hard to be an upstanding person. Tiger was at his best when he was a huge philanderer because he never hesitated to rip someone's metaphorical heart out of their chest on the 18th green.

But Tiger's true mistake was building the façade that he was a good person in the first place. You have to be yourself when you are a professional competitor, and if being yourself means being an untrustworthy scumbag who only got married for the image of stability, then so be it.

Another example of morality having nothing to do with athletic success can be seen every time Tim Tebow attempts to convince us that his cartoonish throwing mechanics will ever work in the NFL. After Tebow beat the tanking Dolphins two weekends ago, the media were desperate to crown him a winner, while making his piety and physical prowess seem like the perfect combination. ("You got your faith on my athleticism." "You got your athleticism on my faith.")

But the media and Tebow got an abrupt wake-up call last weekend at the hands of the Detroit Lions defensive front-seven, which is led by spell-check breaking and "evil" (if you listen to Skip Bayless-types) Ndamukong Suh.

Suh isn't evil at all. He's actually an extremely well-spoken, thoughtful Portland kid, who graduated with a degree from the School of Engineering at Nebraska.

Suh is especially smart in that he knows how to channel one of the most effective resources available to a man of his stature: the ability to scare the piss out of his opponents. For these reasons, he is the perfect villain. But thinking that Suh is actually a bad person is about as reasonable as thinking that the Undertaker's Ministry of Darkness should be considered a part of the Axis of Evil.

Ndamukong — which translates to "House of Spears" — proves that there is no room for courtesy on the football field. And isn't that why we love the sport in the first place?

Think about it: Before everyone started noticing that football players' brains were being turned to mush, how many highlights were dedicated to linebackers "lighting up" receivers running crossing routes? Remember when Chris Berman's Sunday morning show would go over the best hits from the last week as Tom Jackson and Michael Irving would giddily scream, "You got jacked up!" over the clip? If we still ignored head trauma, wouldn't that still be a major part of the football discussion?

My point is it doesn't matter how many babies you kiss before the game. Football is a game played by people who are ready to rip your head off at any moment, and that is what makes it America's favorite sport. Football is inherently violent, which is something most Americans love. There's a reason why our country is constantly at war and only  22nd in education, but first in military power. Suh is just the athletic equivalent of Seal Team Six.

So get off the ground and stop "Tebowing." You look like a fool praising one of the worst starting quarterbacks in the league.

But I would be remiss if I didn't let you all know something:

To the fans and everybody in The Bulletin Nation, I'm sorry. I'm extremely sorry. I was hoping for an undefeated semester. That was my goal, something a columnist has never done here. I promise you one thing, a lot of good will come out of this terrible column. You will never see any writer in the entire country write as hard as I will write the rest of the semester. You will never see someone push the rest of the staff as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the semester. You will never see a staff write harder than we will the rest of the semester.

God Bless.