Sherman slips from his perch

SHELTON E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published December 11, 2002

Here on the high moral ground, the footing is kind of slippery.

It happens. You spend your day in ivory towers, lecturing to the lesser beings below about ethics because, hey, you just want to help. You anoint yourself the moral compass of the NFL, the bastion of fair play, and do people appreciate it? Nope. Eventually, someone invites you to look into the mirror.

And good morning, Mike Sherman.

Comfy, are you?

You remember Sherman, Defender of the Light? By day, Sherman is the mild-mannered coach of the Green Bay Packers. By night, he is the agent of all that is good and proper in the universe. St. Mike, they should call him.

Except, um, for this:

Sherman has a little hypocrisy on his shoes.

When last we noticed Sherman, it was because he was the guy waggling a finger in front of the face of Warren Sapp. This is not the brightest place for a finger to waggle, of course, but Sherman was miffed Sapp knocked Chad Clifton out of the game with a hit he deemed unnecessary.

So, in spite of how busy Sherman is, he was overcome with this divine sense of justice that made him pause to offer Sapp some constructive criticism. Also, to call his hit chickens---.

Now, as you may have heard, Sapp did not exactly stand and salute another army's officer, as General Sherman must have believed he would. Nor did Sapp bow his head and apologize. Those who know Sapp are, of course, shocked.

Doubtless, had Sherman been available to dress down other NFL defensive players such as Dick Butkus or Lawrence Taylor or Deacon Jones or Ray Lewis or, for that matter, Ray Nitschke, you can rest assured they would have reacted much differently. They would have apologized, thanked Sherman, maybe spilled a tear. And two days later, someone would have managed to get Sherman extricated from the goal posts.

Ah, but this is the price you pay for being a moralist. Sherman was just so eaten up with justice and fair play, he had to say something.

Except, um, for this:

Mikey, you have some explainin' to do.

This is amusing stuff. Two weeks have passed, and suddenly Sherman is on the other side of the waggling finger. Suddenly, it's his bunch that is defending an unnecessary hit. Suddenly, it's his guys who are accused of thuggery after an interception. Suddenly, it's the other guys who are sore losers.

Did you see the Packers' Antuan Edwards unload on Minnesota's Chris Walsh in the closing seconds of Green Bay's victory Sunday night? It was tough, and it was vicious. Unlike Sapp's hit, it was evidently against the rules. The NFL has said that when Walsh took a knee, the play should have been blown dead, which would have meant Edwards' hit would have been late.

Regardless of the rules, and this echoes the 4,876 pieces of e-mail I've received from Packer fans, the hit was unnecessary. All it would have taken was for Edwards to touch Walsh down.

On the next play, Minnesota threw an interception, and Sherman's battling band of Boy Scouts did the strangest things. They began to hit all sorts of people from all sorts of angles in all sorts of places on the field. According to the Vikings, Randy Moss was clipped and Matt Birk was cheap-shotted. A Green Bay defensive lineman, Cletidus Hunt, charged off the sideline to enter the fray.

"They basically tried to do to me and five other guys what Sapp did to their guy," Birk told reporters. (To be fair, the Vikings weren't exactly the league of gentlemen on the final play, either.)

With all of that going on, you might expect Sherman to be re-miffed. Surely, he would blister the faces of his own players the way he did Sapp's, right? Surely, he would not stand for this.

Except, um, for this:

He did.

After the game, Sherman offered some lame excuse that Edwards was trying to force a fumble. But with Walsh's knee down, that's impossible. When any player is down, even if he hasn't surrendered the way Walsh did, he's down at the first nanosecond of contact.

The problem here is Sherman and his shifting sense of justice. If you're going to lecture other people about ethics, if you're going to preach virtue, then you should clean up your own back yard. Or your sideline, if you prefer. You can't act like Gandhi to opponents and Genghis to your own guys.

Since the Sapp hit, I've believed three things. I thought it was brutal but legal. I thought that if a player other than Sapp had made the hit, the reaction to it would have been over in a half-hour. And I thought Sherman was completely out of line.

Here's a news flash: Most of us aren't going to take guff from someone else's boss. It isn't Jon Gruden's job to chide the Packers, or Mike Martz's job to lecture the Saints, or Sherman's job to lecture the Bucs. As long as there have been cheap shots, the NFL has a manner for the opposing coach to vent.

It is, however, Sherman's job to take care of the Packers. It appears he has some work to do. Note his meltdown against the Panthers. Note the Packers are 26th in the NFL in penalties. It sounds as if someone on the tundra could use a good waggle or two himself.

Then, there is this: In a recent article by Bob McGinn in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Green Bay's Mike Flanagan admits he cheap-shotted John Lynch during an interception return. He was frustrated, he said.

Ah, and did the coaching staff criticize him heavily?

"Not really," Flanagan said.

That's the point. If this is really about sportsmanship and fair play, if it's really about man's inhumanity to man, then Sherman needs to look at his own locker room. Otherwise, he's just some grandstander inviting the rest of the world to point at him and chuckle.

Except, um, for this:

We already did.

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