In my just-completed guest spot on this week’s Turf Show Radio podcast, I made reference to a site (I misremembered it as The Smoking Gun) that was keeping a running tally of NFL player arrests and other negative PR moments that are the bane of Roger Goodell’s existence. This list was appropriately called the “Turd Watch.”
The Turd Watch was maintained by ProFootballTalk.com for the 2007-08 seasons, and looked like it was going to continue until just recently, when PFT was purchased by NBC Sports. Now that they and Bob Costas are a part of the same organization, I guess they have to class things up a bit, leaving little room for discussions along the lines of Drew Magary’s guest column defending the nature of the NFL turd.
So now PFT’s Turd Watch has a new name, and won’t be quite so cheeky. But it’s still an interesting reference point, as one measure of the “Four Pillars” mantra that Coach Spagnuolo cited in his philosophy of building the Rams. One of Magary’s most salient points was that every locker room has its share of “turds,” and how the coaching staff deals with those players — both publicly and privately — may be a portent of their future success.
Thanks are due to Jeremy Yingling of Infojocks.com for forwarding me the link in the first place. Some day, one of us is going to make a pretty hilarious infographic using the Turd Watch data as a source.) Thanks also to VanRam and the Turf Show Times for having me on.
