It would be naive to think that a team, our team specifically, is above the shenanigans that you'd think you'd find on a "bad" team.
I have to admit that I was (and still am, to a degree) very angered that the Texans management dealt with this issue the way they did...then, they try to pay for Black's surgery while also claiming it was not in any way evidence of the teams' liability. Intellectually speaking, the Texans did a wrong thing and then they went and compounded the wrong thing via several missteps: Paying for a surgery they said they weren't going to pay for, claiming it was not evidence of liability, Rick Smith yelling at Stevenson and questioning his integrity, Kubiak shrugging off attempts by Brown and Breuner to confront him on the issue. The list goes on, probably a lot more than we'd like to know.
Which leads me to this: There's no telling how much complete GARBAGE is happening in the organization that we don't know about. People say you wouldn't eat hot dog weenies if you saw how they were made. And that goes for the inner-workings of huge, multi-million dollar companies.
While I lost some respect for Kubiak and Rick Smith, I have to be a big boy and realize that there is a lot of TRASH like this going on within the Texans every day, as well as with the Dolphins, the Jets, the Lakers, the Phillies, and any other sports organization at any other level for that matter.
We'd like to think that our team is the team of the "good guys." That our top guys take care of our players like Dick Winters took care of his Band of Brothers in WWII and beyond. But that's not the case. It's a meat grinder out there. Period.
So, for me, I had to spend the day rolling those things around in my head. I won't watch the team the same, knowing that the "good guys" are more likely to be "average, problematic guys". I wish I had never seen this crap, but now I am dealing with it. I'll find a way to compartmentalize it away into that section of my brain where I stash things that are justified and rationalized.
The things that bothers me the most is this: We won't even LOOK at a guy like Cedric Benson because, gosh darn it, we're a team of character and we don't need that junk on our team. But we'll engage in a prohibited drill (Article 36, section 4) that outlaws LIVE BLOCKING and gets three guys hurt. There's a reason this drill was run when the public wasn't there, and there's a reason the trainer's report was doctored up, and there's a reason the Texans finally paid up for Black's surgery. In the process, guys who stand up for themselves are being demonized for doing the right thing. But we have standards. We won't take on a classless player, even if he would fill a much-needed spot. We're the good guys.
It's entirely possible that a guy like Cedric Benson would NOT help us, that he'd be a bust or a locker room cancer, etc. I "get" that. What I am referring to is Uncle Bob's relentless pursuit of marketing this team as a first-class organization that "takes care" of those who are employed there. In fact, it hurts worse because our team does so much to put off that image of goodness and wholesomeness, compared to other teams. In essence: The kid who got straight A's in school, and kinda' smirked at the problematic kids the whole time, just got caught spray-painting graffiti in the bathroom two days before graduation.
A little bit of the bloom has come off THAT rose, whether we like it or not.
This story, on OTL, and on the ESPN website and ticker across the TV screen all week long, is very very bad P.R. for the Texans, especially the way Bob has tried to market this team to the world.
However...you offer a player a lot of money to come here, and his agent is going to convince the player that this sort of thing happened on all 32 teams, and that the Texans are far from the worst team in the league to play for. And that, is that. Swept up, mopped up, polished up, folded up, tucked neatly away in an area of the brain reserved for the compartmentalization of things to be justified and rationalized.
