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Mon. Aug 27, 2007

This Week Vick, Next Week Snakes And Gators

I suppose this site has seemed like “Vick Central” lately, and to help wrap that up, I thought I’d make a trip down to the Georgia Dome tonight, to take in the atmosphere before the first home game of the Falcons preseason, and maybe bring back a few interesting photos.

I can sum up that atmosphere in two words: hot and boring. There were supposedly going to be some “protests” by those supporting Vick, and some by those against him. For forty five minutes I walked around outside the Dome, hitting each of the four corners of that very big block, looking “off property” for any nearby activity. I saw about a dozen media trucks, with satellite dishes or microwave towers, but very little for them to cover outside the Dome.

I could very well have missed something, something very small and/or brief [note: I did, see update below], but nearly an hour at the Dome led me to the conclusion these protests were extremely well disguised as regular pre-game milling about. So much so I was unable to photograph anything that didn’t simply look like people going to the game. And not many of them, at that (on TV, the “sellout” crowd looked like about 50-60% no-shows).

To be sure, there were quite a few people in Number 7 jerseys, though I saw no one holding a sign or banner of support/condemnation. And those wearing Number 7 seemed spread across age, race, and gender; from a 10 year old African American kid paying catch with his dad, to an elderly white woman in a wheelchair. I saw it all. But frankly, I saw more people wearing Bengal Orange than Number 7.

It’s possible the apparent lack of “protest,” for or against Vick, is in part because he finally spoke publicly about this matter today, after his appearance in court. Vick started by saying he had spent his life as a football player, not a public speaker, but he spoke without notes. However haltingly, he got out most of the things he needed to say.

He did not get into the specifics of his acts, but he did specifically apologize to Goodell, Blank, and his teammates for not being honest with them from the beginning. He apologized to all the kids who looked up to him as a role model. He took responsibility, and seemed contrite. It’s a first step, and as he noted, he’s got a lot of down time ahead of him to work on the rest.

His sentencing is still ahead, and in this wacky story barely four months old, there’s no telling what surprises still await. But for now it’s time to put this one to rest, and see how the actual Falcons on the roster can salvage their season’s “false start.”

Tonight on Monday Night Football, the first team offense didn’t look half bad. Joey Harrington was 13 for 21 with 2 TD’s, the starters had several good looking drives, and they left the field with the lead after playing into the second half. When it doesn’t count, the Falcons can win on Monday night (their regular season record there is horriffic).

Plus, they won’t have much time to worry about anything Vick-related this week. Their next game is Friday night, 7:30pm. They are apparently on the NFL Ironman Schedule: first you get complete turnover of your quarterback staff (#1-jail, #2-trade, #3-injury), then you get less than 93 hours between the end of one game and the start of the next.

Next week, snakes in the lockers and gators in the showers. You’ve got to think it could happen, if you’re a Falcons fan.

UPDATE: I just saw the 11:00 news, and they had footage of some protesters. They appeared few in number, and in footage of a brief clash, one of them protested “they put us way over here, and then this.” Either this happened before I arrived, or they really had put them off to the side somewhere. No matter, the video footage showed I didn’t miss too much. Got some nice shots of a butterfly outside the Dome, though.