Let’s blog…

Another great win, a heart-stopping win. It was a really exciting game, but it was tough for me because I was not allowed to play, unfortunately. It’s really difficult because I just felt like a glorified fan, because I was right on the sideline. I was signaling in the defenses for the secondary and trying to give tips to the players on what I saw and advise the referees as politely as possible whenever they missed calls or made what I thought were mistakes on flags. So I was really into the game, and when it got down to crunch time, it was really hard to be on the sideline watching when you’re used to playing.

Like I said last week, I’d never missed a game in my entire life. It was uncomfortable, to say the least. But it was a great win. It was really exciting. It was a great way to start this coming week.

Tuesday we all went down to the site of the Darrent Williams Teen Center, which is currently the Denver Broncos Boys and Girls Club in Montbello, and we had a little fundraiser. There were a lot of TV stations there, and the radio station 850 KOA broadcasted live from the location from 5-9:30 a.m. for the morning show, if anybody caught that. We were on a lot of the morning TV shows trying to raise money and point people in the direction of PositivePlaceDenver.org, which is a Web site where there are some items we are auctioning. If you want to make any type of donation you can go there, so if anybody wants to be a part of building the Darrent Williams Teen Center, we’re only a few thousand dollars away and we’d appreciate any help that you guys are willing to offer.

You can bid on some really cool items, like a few sideline passes for this coming game, go in the locker room before and after the game with us, and some Darrent Williams signed footballs. I know Rod Smith is going after those footballs, so you might have some competition there, but there’s a few of them, so we’ll see.

I thought it was really cool that we had a huge turnout of players. I think there was about 30 or 40 players that showed up. Obviously, the biggest-name celebrities that we have, from our quarterback Jay Cutler and Champ was there and Javon was there, just about everybody, Tom Nalen showed up, just about everybody that you would want to see or whose autograph you would want to get, you could’ve gotten it if you showed up. I’m assuming that some of you guys showed up at the Boys and Girls Club, so thank you guys and I hope you got to meet the players that you wanted.

It was a good representation of our team for so many of our players to be able to give up their time and even the players who were able to donate, like Rod who said he was going after the balls. But Javon generously donated $30,000 on the spot to the cause, which put a huge dent in whatever money we have left to raise. While giving money is great, I feel like giving time is so much more valuable, and for all the players to come down there and show up and stay as long as they did and be so humble and hang out with the kids and the community leaders in the Montbello area, it’s just really encouraging. We’re going to get this teen center up in memory of Darrent and it’s going to do a lot of good in the community, so we’re excited.

A lot of people were asking us for autographs, and we had these special teen center shirts made up, they were selling them for $30, and the ones that the players have we got those all autographed by the kids. So I got this shirt, and it reminded me of senior year in high school when you get your shirt signed by everybody and everybody puts a little message, so that’s definitely going to be a souvenir for me.

And then I had to run back down here to Dove Valley for treatment this morning which is getting better and better. I’m looking forward to playing this weekend. And then we have a poetry contest, a couple of the Boys and Girls Clubs are coming together to compete with their poetry, and I’m going to be a judge for that later on tonight, so I’m looking forward to that also.

I do remember one question that I wanted to respond to. DFFavFan asked me about the College in Colorado commercials that I do. It’s CollegeinColorado.org, which is a great Web site for kids preparing for college to help them find financing and find the best school to fit them, prepare for the ACTs and SATs. It’s a really great Web site to help guide kids in the direction of going to college and it provides a lot of the support that some kids don’t have. It has advice for kids as early as the sixth or seventh grade and has monthly tips for things that you should be doing to prepare for college, from middle school all the way up until your senior year. It’s been really helpful for me and a good resource to use when I’m helping some of the kids that I work with at the Boys and Girls Club, because I go to the site myself. I get to see my face on there, which is kind of cool, but it also has provided a lot of help for me in helping them out. I love to do those PSAs. They’re really positive and like I said before in some previous blogs, I’m oftentimes more recognized for that than being a football player, which is perfectly fine with me.

To Kayleigh47, I just wanted to say keep up the hard work. I read your response and I’m glad that you’re able to stay focused and do the best that you can and try to motivate your friends at the same time. But more importantly, make sure that you get done what you need to get done for your daughter, and I’m sure you can make the best of your situation. Congratulations and keep up the good work.

We broke another record this week, 82 responses, so thanks to everybody for the support. I’m feeling good about myself, because last week, I have to say, I was feeling a little insecure. I felt like you guys were no longer interested or I somehow became boring all of a sudden. But I came back strong with a good blog and you guys responded, so thanks a lot.

I want to thank everybody who provided YouTube clips for me. It took me longer to read all the responses this week because I was checking all the clips that you guys sent to me. I appreciate it. I guess that could become an ongoing thing. Any time you find anything funny, I’m always open to it, and I appreciate all the clips that you sent me. There were some really funny ones. I really enjoyed the laughing baby. It was so weird. The baby couldn’t stop laughing and I don’t know why that was funny, but it was pretty hilarious. That led me to some other laughing babies which were also pretty funny. I didn’t know laughing babies were as funny as they are.

Then there was one of this really smart baby, some little girl who was naming all the presidents and she was like less than a year old. It was crazy. You can find anything on YouTube I guess. So thanks a lot, and keep them coming if you find anything else that I should check out.

It’s a little late now because everything’s been taken care of as far as the New England Patriots video scandal, but I’ll weigh in on it as politically-correctly as I can while still giving my true opinion. I don’t know the exact facts of the situation, and nobody does except the Patriots organization and maybe the commissioner, but they’ve already levied their discipline, so it’s good that those type of things are happening as kind of a “cleaning up” of our league. I think our league is really proactive in comparison to some of the other professional leagues as far as getting the things that we think are harmful to our sport out and trying to keep the playing field as level as possible.

There’s been a lot of debate over whether the discipline was heavy enough or not, and I feel like it’s really not my place to say whether it was heavy enough or not, but I think it might be one of the first times that we’ve ever had a scandal like that, so I would say it’s hard for the commissioner to make a brand new ruling. But I guess he’s kind of been doing that for a few months now, so he’s become quite good at it. I hope that it works as a deterrent for future teams. That’s not something that we do around here. I think we have one of the classiest organizations, as I’ve said before, and we do everything the right way.

I find it somewhat disheartening to find out that there are teams doing those types of things. Whenever I hear about a player, as rare as it is, who has done some sort of illegal performance enhancing techniques, that’s upsetting also because I’m out there, and this team is out there, doing things the right way and the idea that someone has an unfair advantage is upsetting. People have been talking about how the Patriots may have been doing this all along and that’s how they won their Super Bowls, but I don’t know. You have to give them some credit for being a great team. If they have been doing it all along, it may have had an effect, but I don’t know how much it could have helped. It’s the players on the field who need to decide the games, not any cameras or anything like that.

Saying that, and I made the comparison to players using performance-enhancing things and players cheating and organizations cheating, that’s one thing that was different. If a player gets caught performance enhancing, it’s an automatic four-week suspension, four weeks’ pay, four weeks where you can’t even be in the building. So I kind of expected the coaches’ or organization’s punishment to be in line with the way you treat players when they have been found to be cheating. So that kind of surprised me, but like I said, it’s the commissioner’s job, it’s a hard job, and he’s doing a great job as far as I’m concerned so far.

While we’re on unsavory characters, I’ll talk about O.J. Simpson. It’s NFL-related, so it’s not that much of a stretch. Many people may not know this, but once upon a time, O.J. was a running back for the Buffalo Bills, and he was the first to rush for 2,000 yards in a season. He was a really prolific runner, a great running back. Since then, he’s become a laughingstock, to say the least. He just seems to be always in the spotlight and looking for the spotlight and doing something that we can’t respect as players in the NFL, and it’s something that I’m sure the NFL wants to get as far away from as possible.

I don’t know, I just feel like he’s one of those people that you just want to say, “Go sit down somewhere, just get out of the media, out of the spotlight.” But at the same time, you can tell that he’s the type of person who craves that type of attention, so I guess he’ll get it any way he can. I can’t imagine that whatever memorabilia that he was accused of stealing was that significant. I really just get the feeling that he’s the type of guy that just wants to be seen. He had a book, and then like a reality TV show DVD, “Juiced,” where he was doing all this weird stuff and pulling pranks on people. Having been in the trial that he was in and being found not guilty, I just feel like a light-hearted prank show shouldn’t be the next thing you do. There’s something wrong.

There’s probably a long list of people who just need to get out of the spotlight and just go sit down somewhere. Most of those people were well-respected in their day. I’d say Michael Jackson is probably on that list also. He made “Thriller,” one of the greatest albums ever, one of the greatest songs ever, “Bad,” all the way back to the Jackson 5, all those songs are great and we all love Michael Jackson for the “Moonwalk” and all the wonderful things he’s done. He’s a musical genius, but he just needs to go sit down somewhere. I guess he kind of has, he went to some foreign country somewhere. He moved away and we haven’t heard from him in awhile, which is good. O.J. should do that too.

They need like a celebrity island, where all the celebrities who are currently doing dumb things can just go away and just hang out there. We can give them some TV cameras, because that’s really all they want is some attention. We can broadcast what they’re doing back on to YouTube or something and they’ll know that people are watching them. I don’t know. I would say that I’m disappointed in O.J., but at this point, who really cares? He lost my respect a long time ago and I guess it’s not that important to him anyway.

Anyway, I did the radio show again for the second week. I’d like to think that Mike Bell and I are becoming somewhat of a hit with our offbeat comedy, making fun of each other and at the same time, analyzing things. I think the first week we had about four people in the restaurant and this week it was about 25 or 26 people in the restaurant. The first week, we had no call-ins, the next week we had three or four call-ins, so we’re building some momentum. So if anybody else wants to join us, Monday nights, 5:30 at the Sports Column, 950 AM The Fan. Thanks for all your support.

I’m looking forward to this game against Jacksonville coming up. It should be exciting, I’m looking forward to the chance to get back out on the field and be more a part of the team than I was last week. Jacksonville is an exciting game for me. That was my first career start my rookie year. I got an interception and a fumble recovery in that game, and the coaches awarded me with the defensive player of the game afterwards. It was week 4 of my rookie year, so whenever I see Jacksonville I get a little nostalgic feeling, I guess. That was a good day. Up until that point, I’d been practicing really well and people thought I could play, and I think that was the first time where everybody was like, “OK, he’s going to be pretty good.”

Jacksonville was one of the teams before the draft that was heavily talking to me and I thought it was one of the places I could go. I’ve never really told this story, but I remember a couple of days before the draft — I don’t remember the guy’s name, but if I did I probably shouldn’t say it anyway — one of the scouts or coaches or something from the Jaguars called me at like 7 in the morning on a Saturday, and told me he’d been watching my film and I looked kind of slow, and he went on to kind of rip my abilities and my college career. He said all these things like, “Well, you look like you don’t do this well, you don’t look like you tackle well,” and it was about 7 a.m. on a Saturday. I didn’t want to be bothered, but I knew I had to be nice to everybody so I could get drafted, but the guy just ripped me on the phone. I was still trying to be humble the entire time, and he’s asking me questions that I can’t answer, like, “Why didn’t you hit this guy in the Wake Forest game your junior year?” I was like, “I don’t know, coach,” trying to be respectful at the same time.

I can’t remember that guy’s name. I wish I could have, I should have sent him a letter after I got that interception in the Jacksonville game my rookie year. It was definitely in the back of my mind when we played them, but I don’t have any hard feelings anymore. I feel like I made my point. On draft day, they drafted two corners I think, and I was not one of them. It definitely hurt my feelings a little bit, but I’m over it now. I’m no longer insecure about how the Jacksonville Jaguars feel about me. I don’t know, that might be a bad story. That might get me in some trouble, but oh well, we’ll see. It’s just a blog.

As for my Blog Master, it’s not no stinkin’ Andrew Mason. I’m in direct competition with Andrew Mason. My blog is consistently better than his blog. I get more attention and I give more quality insight, so I wouldn’t dare let Andrew Mason be the one who transcribes my blog. I’m not sure my Blog Master is ready to come out into the spotlight, so you can keep guessing if you want. We’ll keep it mysterious.

As for the sign off, “All Ready.”

Tags: 850 KOA, 950 AM The Fan, Andrew Mason, Champ Bailey, College in Colorado, Darrent Williams, Javon Walker, Jay Cutler, Mike Bell, Rod Smith, Tom Nalen, YouTube

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Archives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.