Scorched Earth

Days after the flood, as someone with allegiance to the University of Arkansas, I find myelf between a rock and a hard place. I can't sit here sober and tell you that Houston Nutt was the answer or that Arkansas isn't truly better off without him. At the same time, I can't endorse his replacement either.

Insert salty caption here.

In so many words, Arthur Blank called Bobby Petrino a quitter and a liar. What did the Falcon players have to say?

Well, it was much more caustic, believe or not. Safety Lawyer Milloy went so far as to cross out Petrino's signature on his impersonal farewell letter to the players and replace it with COWARD.

Falcons rookie defensive end Jamaal Anderson, the team's first-round draft pick from the University of Arkansas, has gotten non-stop calls from players, friends and associates with the Razorbacks football program. They all want to know what type of guy their new coach, Bobby Petrino, is.

"Disloyal," said Anderson, Petrino's first pick as an NFL coach. "If he can leave players here, what makes you think he won't leave the players he's going to coach? I'm just afraid to see what happens if he does bad at Arkansas. Is he going to leave those kids?"

...

Veteran safety Lawyer Milloy taped the "insensitive" farewell letter Petrino sent to players to his locker. Petrino's copied signature was crossed out in red ink.

"Coward!" was put in its place.

"Everything he preached over the past eight months was a lie," Milloy said. "Everything he said he stood for was a lie. He came in and messed with a lot of people's lives — he wasted a year of my life. It was a cowardly act. A selfish act.

"One thing I'm really [mad] at was while he was having a half-hearted approach to games, he was putting us all at risk. His mind wasn't in it. That explains why he threw a challenge flag a play after he was allowed to. Why we went for it on fourth-and-9 and punted on fourth-and-1. Maybe he was on the phone at Arkansas to the AD at that point.

"The cancer was diagnosed. Never would you want it to be your head coach, your general, to be that cancer, but in our case, it was."

...

From Warwick Dunn, whom no one can accuse of being classless: "He sold us a dream. He put this organization last in his life. He's selfish. He's definitely a liar. One of the things we have hanging in our meeting room is [a sign] 'Finish.' If he wanted to leave, you can at least finish three more games. It's 18 days. You can finish it and say, 'You know what, this wasn't for me.' You can respect that. But to let it go yesterday the way that he did and the disrespectful way that he did it, to me he has no heart."

There's a tendency discard players' complaints as the rambling of spoiled primadonnas, whose exorbitant salaries prohibit them from being unhappy about anything. However, if I'm a football player, committed to a violent game in which every snap puts at risk my health and my career, I'm entitled to expect my coaches to be as focused as I am.

Whatever Arthur Blank said at his press conference, this is what he meant: Ben Folds Five's "Song for the Dumped" from Whatever and Ever Amen.