Our weekly look at the most interesting sports columns on the Internet.

The post-season axe



Andrew Brandt, former VP of the Green Bay Packers, writes about the unpleasant, awkward, human side of the bowling alley’s worth of heads that roll after every NFL regular season. Team owners are richer than ever, and the quick ascendancy of some bottom-feeder franchises has made for itchy trigger fingers, he says. Brandt recalls throwing a New Year’s Eve party for Packers coaching staff and their families in 1999, then struggling to convince everyone—truthfully—that it wasn’t a pre-execution banquet when Ray Rhodes was canned unexpectedly two days later.

The firing of a coach inevitably involves a conversation no more than a minute or two long and ends with a stoic handshake and thanks for the opportunity, says Brandt. But then there’s the axe left dangling over everyone else’s head. “For days or weeks that can seem like months, assistant coaches come to the office to comb the Internet for news about other positions and talk to their coaching friends on the phone while their wives talk to realtors, movers and schools,” he writes.

Brandt also writes a companion column about the happier job of hiring coaches. It’s less juicy—except for the bit where GM Ron Wolf informs him that Mike Sherman is their man by ducking into his office while he’s talking to another coach’s agent and giving him a throat-slash gesture.

The complexity of coming out



Henry Winter talks to Kieron Brady, retired Premier League player and Sunderland Pride patron, about the fact that while a handful of retired players have come out, no current ones have. “People will think that you can be openly gay and retired or you can be secretly gay and play,” Brady says. “We have still not crossed that threshold.”

He’s currently talking to one Premier League player who’s considering disclosing his sexuality, and Brady lists off a fascinating array of cautions and considerations they’ve gone through. There will be a media storm, but it should subside quickly; online fan forums could provide a glimpse of how the rank-and-file respond; a player living in a rural area would be safer from public harassment in his daily life than one in a city; and the best time for a coming-out announcement is before a home game, when homophobic chants are less likely. Stepping out of the closet, it seems, is still a more delicate manoeuvre than anything on the field.

“Dennis is just not good at articulating his thoughts”

Dennis Rodman’s basketball outreach mission to North Korea—so odd and yet somehow inevitable-seeming, it reads like a narrowly rejected buddy comedy script—sucked up nearly as much ink as the Hall of Fame this week. Scott Cacciola suggests that although the trip is highly troubling from a diplomatic standpoint (“It would be like inviting Hitler to lunch,” one politician says), U.S. officials may well ask Rodman for a briefing on the notoriously reclusive Kim Jong-un when he returns. Former NBA player Charles D. Smith justified his own presence on the trip and Rodman’s actions by making the flamboyant 52-year-old sound like a hapless toddler. “What you have to understand about Dennis is that his heart is in the right place, his intentions are pure,” he told Cacciola. “Dennis is just not good at articulating his thoughts and what he wants to do.”

Deborah Orr, meanwhile, chalks the whole trip up to two desperate, anti-social egomaniacs propping up each other’s warped self-images with their attention-seeking “friendship.” “Kim looks even more decadent, silly, self-absorbed, sentimental, whimsical and unpredictable than he did when the world knew less about him,” she writes. “As for Rodman, he looks like someone so short of better invites that he’s glad to accept those that tend to make him look like some sort of sociopath.”

Elias Groll goes down a similar path, but he attributes Rodman’s motivations to his misfit childhood and teenage years, and his ongoing need to keep the headlines going. “Rodman and North Korea have developed a shared strategy for survival: publicity bombs. North Korea threatens to fire missiles at the United States and South Korea and detonates nuclear weapons,” he writes. “Rodman uses a similar tactic of outrage to receive his paychecks. By maintaining his media profile as a bad boy beyond repair, the reality shows keep calling.”

The joy of huffy rage

Ray Ratto gets at the heart of the outrage over the Baseball Hall of Fame vote: Everyone is getting their rocks off screeching about it. “Tidying up the process by which the Hall of Fame is filled each year is actually not nearly so difficult a task,” he writes. “The problem lies in this central truth: People would much rather bitch about it, because without bitching, we don’t feel quite so connected to the process.” And while Dan Le Batard’s decision to give his ballot to Deadspin for readers to collectively fill in attracted much of the pearl-clutching this year, Ratto points out that the results of the Deadspin poll show that the great unwashed masses of fans really wouldn’t vote that differently from the even more unwashed masses of baseball writers.

Basically, Ratto wants everyone to shut up and relax, or at least admit they’re enjoying their huffy rage—because the post-Bud Selig alternative could be a whole lot worse. “His replacement as commissioner, some tweedy marketing wizard/creep whose idea of creative thought is using tape on the end of a yardstick to pick up that quarter that rolled behind the hutch because, well, it’s a quarter—that weasel will almost surely think the best process is an Internet vote of all fans, thus turning the entire thing into the People’s Choice Awards at $1.99 per text.” Be careful what you wish for, or holler about on Twitter.