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It’s Father’s Day.  The early-midsummer Sunday that serves as the perfunctory bookend to Mother’s Day.

While it’s an occasion for the dads out there to take a load off and watch some golf (try a Red Bull if the goal is to stay awake) or the NBA Finals (since it’s Game Five, try a Five Hour Energy to make it to the five-minute mark of the fourth quarter), it’s also an opportunity to renew our commitments to our families.  Any man with the properly functioning body parts can father a child, but being a father requires much more than that.

And it’s not just to our own children.  Nephews, brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors, and players on the teams we coach.  They look to us for protection, guidance, and inspiration.

We should strive to be worthy of it every day, without thought.  On Father’s Day, we should take a minute or two to consciously embrace for another year the duties that go along with providing for the safety, the shelter, and the future or anyone who relies on us.

We also should honor those who have done the job well, selflessly and at times with significant sacrifice.  My father died nearly 15 years ago, and I still spend a lot of time thinking about the lessons I learned even when he wasn’t trying to teach them, along with the things he enjoyed.  He watched Sanford & Son religiously.  And Hogan’s Heroes.  He loved Chris Berman and Mike Lupica, cackling at pretty much anything they said, even the stuff that wasn’t intended to be funny.

It’s important to make sure the fathers in our lives know we appreciate what they do, even though the truly good ones don’t need to hear it.  The man in the picture is my wife’s father and my son’s grandfather, still going strong at 76 despite more surgeries than Rob Gronkowski, a Type-A personality that would make Mike Ditka say, “That guy needs to relax,” and an appetite that would impress the average offensive lineman.

He treats me like one of his own, brags more than my own father would, and watches nearly every episode of Pro Football Talk on NBCSN.  And he really likes it when I give Kuselias a hard time.

So Happy Father’s Day to Joe Oliverio and to all of the fathers in our lives.  And for all of us who are fathers, let’s do earn that label, today and every day.

AP

As the Titans add receivers, the speculation grows that soon-to-be-30-year-old Nate Washington isn’t long for a job.

And yet he still has one.

To Washington’s credit, he doesn’t care.  Which could be one of the reasons why he has been able to keep going.

“I am not worried about it, and never was worried about it, to tell you the truth,” Washington recently said, via Jim Wyatt of the Tennessean.  “At the end of the day, I am here, and I am here to do a job.  I have no problem with who they brought in or didn’t bring in.  It doesn’t matter to me.’’

Still, Washington knows that, as he ages, he needs to find other ways to force the team to keep him around.

“If all these other guys are going to get younger, faster and bigger, then I have to get older, wiser, bigger and stronger,” Washington said.  “It is about me giving my all.  If I do that, I know I can look myself in the mirror.  At this point, I have nothing to prove.  I just need to make sure the guys believe in me and know I am going to work and do everything I can to help us win.”

His effort this year includes gaining five pounds of muscle.  He now feels stronger and faster than ever, and he understands the game in ways young players don’t.

Washington has been a solid, but not spectacular, performer during his eight-year career.  He has one 1,000-yard season, in 2011.  Last year, he caught 46 passes for 746 yards and four touchdowns.

That was still good enough to lead the team in receiving yards.

This year, he’s dealing with a depth chart that includes two first-round picks (Kenny Britt and Kendall Wright) and a second-rounder (Justin Hunter). He’s also dealing with guys like Britt calling him old.

While Washington seems to be taking the high road, we suggest that he consider taking a page out of the Cris Carter playbook, who had this to say when a young Bears defender called Carter “old man” in 1998:  You should get on your knees and pray that you can play this game as long as me.

While there aren’t many things of which I’m sure, I’m sure Britt won’t play pro football as long as Washington.

AP

Safety Tanard Jackson was signed by the Redskins in April of 2012, but never played a game with the team because he was suspeded for a year after violating the NFL’s substance-abuse policy.

Jackson will be eligible for reinstatement just before the start of the regular season and the Redskins will get a roster exemption of a few weeks to decide whether or not to put Jackson on the roster. That decision will obviously have much to do with how Jackson looks once he’s allowed to resume practicing with the team and with what the team’s other safeties do in training camp and the preseason, but defensive coordinator Jim Haslett certainly sounds like he’s eager to get the chance to make that decision.

“Obviously if we got Tanard back, you know that’s another bonus because he’s a heck of a football player. I don’t know where that stands with the NFL, but we’d welcome [him] back with open arms,” Haslett said, via Rich Tandler of CSNWashington.com.

The best case for the Redskins would be for Jackson to truly be a bonus to the secondary. That would mean Brandon Meriweather is healthy and rookies Phillip Thomas and Bacarri Rambo are ready to take on regular season roles, among other questions to be answered at training camp. That would make it incumbent on Jackson to force his way onto the roster, a much better scenario than the Redskins needing to count on a player a strike away from a lifetime ban for a significant place on their defense.

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The Seahawks have retired No. 12, in honor of the team’s fans — the 12th man.

And the 12th man nearly put itself onto the Seattle Mt. Rushmore.

The fans narrowly missed inclusion in both the Pro Football Talk on NBCSN and the PFT Planet version’s of the team’s Mt. Rushmore.

For both, the 12th man came in at No. 5 (which is better than 12th).  We also agreed on the four who merited the slots:  Steve Largent, Cortez Kennedy, Walter Jones, and Shaun Alexander.

The discussion, justification, and voting results appear in the clip from Friday’s show.

Reuters

Johnny Manziel, the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback at Texas A&M, still has three more seasons of NCAA eligibility, which means he might not make it to the NFL until 2016. But he’s tweeting like a man who plans to enter the draft next year, the first year when he’ll be NFL-eligible.

Early Sunday morning, Manziel wrote on Twitter, “I can’t wait to leave College Station.” Manziel quickly deleted that tweet and replaced it with one that said he loves Texas A&M, but he also urged people to “walk a day in my shoes,” the latest in a series of public statements in which Manziel suggested that he finds college life rough.

If Manziel isn’t happy in college, he’s probably already planning his jump to the NFL. And when he does jump, he’ll be a fascinating prospect: Manziel isn’t the prototypical NFL pocket passer, but NFL teams are increasingly discovering ways to make the most of the talents of quarterbacks who aren’t prototypical NFL pocket passers. There will be questions about Manziel’s height and about how well his college accomplishments can translate to the next level. Those questions will resemble the questions about Russell Wilson heading into the 2012 draft, and there are surely plenty of NFL general managers now kicking themselves for passing on Wilson before the Seahawks grabbed him in the third round.

Opinions about Manziel entering the draft may be all over the map, but a year from now, we can probably expect Manziel to have left College Station, and be getting ready for an NFL training camp.

AP

Left tackle Ryan Clady’s absence from Broncos workouts this spring has drawn a lot of attention, but he’s not the only starting offensive lineman who has been missing from the field.

Center J.D. Walton and guard Chris Kuper have been recovering from surgery and also missed the offseason workouts, leaving the Broncos with several questions among the guys charged with keeping quarterback Peyton Manning on his feet. Kuper hasn’t been cleared to return from ankle surgery and the team isn’t clear on Clady’s status after shoulder surgery as he’s been out of touch while trying to parley his franchise tag into a long-term deal, but Fox said the expectations is that all three linemen will be ready to go at or near the start of camp.

“I think that’s kind of been the target date all along with Kuper, J.D. and Ryan,” Fox said, via Jeff Legwold of the Denver Post. “We’re anticipating at some point, if not at the beginning of camp, early in camp, we will get them back full speed.”

Kuper may be ticketed for a reserve role after serious ankle injuries in the last two years and the arrival of Louis Vasquez in free agency, but the other two guys are essential parts of the offensive line and there will be some concern about the state of things up front until they prove they’re back to full speed at camp.

AP

Hines Ward is used to training, and he’s used to competing.

What he can’t get used to is the inevitability of losing.

The former Steelers wideout has struggled with that concept, as he prepares for the Ironman Triathlon.

“The realization is having never done it before, I can’t go in thinking I’m going to go out and win the Ironman,” Ward said, via Karen Price of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “That’s the battle I have, . . . I have to know what my body’s capable of doing and I have to run my pace. I can’t run a pace that’s someone else’s or I won’t make it at the end.”

By the time the race in Kona, Hawaii begins in October, he will have been in serious training for nearly a year.

Even for an elite athlete, the challenge of swimming 2.4 miles in the Pacific Ocean, biking 112 miles and then running 26.2 miles is a different kind of challenge than playing football or “Dancing with the Stars.”

Ward has been training with eight-time Ironman champion Paula Newby-Fraser, who had to teach him how to ride a road bike with clip-in pedals, and teaching him the correct strokes in a pool to give him a chance.

“I think he thought it might be a bit of a challenge, but he had no idea how hard it was going to be, . . .” Newby-Fraser said. “He gets incredibly frustrated. He melts down with frustration just because he wants to be good at it and wants to perform. He’s having to balance the reality of where he is with where he wants to be. When things don’t go exactly right he gets so mad.”

Ward has gradually built up from shorter races, and he did a half-Ironman last week. He trains three hours a day, six days a week, logging on average 150 miles combined per week. As a result, he’s dropped 30 pounds since he started training, down to 195.

“I love challenges, and this will by far be my toughest challenge,” Ward said. “It’s just me versus myself on the course. You have to continue to push through the pain and hopefully after 140 miles I can cross the finish line and what great satisfaction it will be to hear, ‘Hines Ward, you’re an Ironman.’ When that day comes, if I can cross that finish line, that will probably be one of my greatest accomplishments throughout my life.”

For a guy who has accomplished so much already, that’s saying something.

AP

Last week, Vikings coach Leslie Frazier left open the possibility that wide receiver Greg Childs would get medical clearance to resume football activities sometime early in camp.

That would be about a year after he tore the patellar tendons in both knees during a Vikings practice while trying to make a catch on a play when he wasn’t ever touched. There were doubts about whether Childs would ever play again — there’s no record of anyone coming back from that injury to play in another NFL game — especially since Childs had suffered the same injury to one of his knees at Arkansas.

By all accounts, though, Childs has worked incredibly hard during rehab and remains committed to becoming the first player to play in a game after such a devastating injury. Trainer Eric Sugarman said Childs never blinked when he heard the long odds against a comeback and Childs hopes he winds up as an inspiration to future players recovering from career-altering injuries.

“I’m the kind of guy who is going to make this believable. People are going to be like, ‘OK, we believe now,’” Childs said, via Mark Craig of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “One day, when this happens to other guys, they’ll have a guideline to go by. They’ll be able to say, ‘OK, just because I tore both of mine, look at that guy Greg Childs. He worked his butt off and did what they said couldn’t be done.’”

The team is putting no timeline on Childs’ recovery and they’ve consistently pledged patience with his comeback effort. They’re under no obligation to do that, but the kind of work that Childs has been putting in is certainly deserving of as much rope as the Vikings can give him in his effort to blaze a new trail back from such a devastating injury.

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The Falcons and free agent defensive lineman Richard Seymour have been talking about Seymour coming aboard for the 2013 season, but the two sides remain unable to reach an agreement on a contract.

Seymour told Jason La Canfora of CBSSports.com that he remains open to signing with Atlanta, where he makes his offseason home, but that the team hasn’t made him an offer that he’s willing to accept. Whether or not that remains the case, Seymour said that he’s grateful to the Falcons for their interest and their discussions about a contract.

“I thank them for their efforts,” Seymour said.

Signing Seymour seems like it would fit into the Falcons’ overall approach to this offseason, one that has seen them sign other veterans and convince tight end Tony Gonzalez to return as part of an effort that wide receiver Roddy White has described as “Super Bowl or nothing.” That hasn’t caused them to open up the purse strings as wide as Seymour would like, which could change as the team gets closer to training camp or even after training camp gets underway.

There hasn’t been much other interest in Seymour around the league, so a continued gap with the Falcons could mean the end of the line for the 33-year-old former Raider and Patriot.

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Folks in Baltimore and Indy aren’t alone.  There’s another franchise with a Mt. Rushmore that will create plenty of consternation in a pair of cities and states.

The Titans, once the Oilers, previously were in Houston.  Now (for those of you just emerging for a coma or returning from a desert island after your FedEx plane went down and you befriended a volleyball) they’re in Tennessee.  But they get one Mt. Rushmore.

And you get 12 names to narrow down to four winners.

The final four will be unveiled on Tuesday’s edition of Pro Football Talk on NBCSN, when coincidentally former Titans great Frank Wycheck will join us in studio for the first of a two-day guest analyst stint.

Unless he ends up on a desert island and befriends a volleyball between now and then.

AP

We’ve become numb to endless news from offseason workouts regarding how good a player looks.  In fact, it’s only really news when someone looks like crap in no-contact drills — since it doesn’t bode well for his performance when it’s time to put on the pads.

But one player is receiving very high praise for his work during the offseason.  The fact that he did a great job in a one-day role on Pro Football Talk on NBCSN makes us even more likely to point that out here.

So we will.

As described by Aaron Wilson of the Baltimore Sun, defensive lineman Chris Canty was “dominant” during the Ravens’ recent minicamp.  Perhaps more importantly, he’s also healthy.

“The knee is not a problem at all,” Canty said regarding an injury that caused him to miss seven games in 2012.  “The knee is fine. I feel great.”

The veteran, who has played for the Cowboys and Giants, says he’s in better shape.

“Physically, I slimmed down a little bit,” Canty said. “I wanted to focus on conditioning this offseason.  I’m excited about it.”

New defensive assistant Steve Spagnuolo, whose time with the Giants didn’t coincide with Canty’s, raves about the player’s size.

“He’s bigger than I thought,” Spagnuolo said.  “You can’t coach that height.  He puts his hands up, man.  There’s not a coach in the world that can take a six-foot guy and do that.  He’s been very impressive to me.”

Canty will play defensive tackle and defensive end for the Ravens, but not nose tackle.  If that knee stays healthy, he’ll contribute to a team that many still believe, based on a lingering (and flawed) mid-March narrative, will struggle in 2013.

AP

The subject is too frivolous to turn into World War III, but the war of words is escalating between Patriots owner Robert Kraft and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kraft said last week that in 2005, he visited Russia and left without his Super Bowl ring, as Putin admiringly said, “I can kill someone with this” and walked off with it. At the time, Kraft released a statement saying he had given it as a gift to show the friendship between the American people and the Russian people, but Kraft now says he was pressured by the White House to make that statement to avoid an international incident.

Asked about Kraft’s comments, Putin’s spokesman told CNN that he was personally with Putin at the time that the ring changed hands and that the story is totally false.

“What Mr. Kraft is saying now is weird,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “I was standing 20 centimeters away from him and Mr. Putin and saw and heard how Mr. Kraft gave this ring as a gift.”

The Russians say the ring is on display with other state gifts at the Kremlin.

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Chance Warmack wanted it.  And Chance Warmack is getting it.

For starters, he called his shot prior to the draft, ditching the standard incoming rookie “I want to play for whoever picks me” crap and declaring clearly and unequivocally his interest in the Titans, given the presence of two Hall of Fame offensive linemen on the coaching staff.

“I’ve never been coached by an actual offensive lineman before,” Warmack said in mid-April.  “It would be like a dream come true for me.”

As explained by David Climer of the Tennessean, Warmack is getting hands-on instruction from both position coach Bruce Matthews and head coach Mike Munchak.  The boss, per Climer, was “deeply involved” in O-line drills during offseason workouts — particularly with Warmack.

“Having the head coach spend that much time with me and with our group means a lot,” Warmack said.  “It shows how much he cares about the offensive line.  He knows how important we are.”

Munchak also knows how important this season is.  He has been with the organization as a player and a coach for more than three decades, and the end could be coming if the Titans struggle again in 2013.

AP

Last month, safety Ryan Clark said that he didn’t want 2013 to be his final season with the Steelers.

There’s been no action since then to guarantee Clark will remain in Pittsburgh, however. Clark told Ed Bouchette of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that there have been no talks about a new deal. Clark said that he hoped that talks would get going as the calendar moves closer to the start of training camp, but that he wouldn’t approach the season any differently should the Steelers remain silent.

“I still play, I still love this game, I want to be here and I want this team to do well,” Clark said.

Clark turns 34 in October, an age that usually doesn’t bring multi-year deals to the table even when you’ve been a longtime fixture on the defense. Clark’s play has remained strong enough to think he could continue playing well beyond 2013, but finite cap space and an organizational commitment to getting younger mean that he may need to do that playing somewhere else if the Steelers decide to see what rookie safety Shamarko Thomas can do before making any calls on Clark’s future in Pittsburgh.

AP

LB Bryan Scott helped the Bills put on a football clinic at Ralph Wilson Stadium on Saturday.

Dolphins DL Jared Odrick hosted his first charity golf event this weekend.

QB Ryan Mallett’s future holds some intrigue for the Patriots.

A look at how Jets rookie QB Geno Smith’s been spending his days this offseason.

Ravens coach John Harbaugh shares his reflections on Father’s Day.

Bengals DL Margus Hunt has a lot to learn about the game of football.

Davone Bess is the likeliest choice to start at receiver for the Browns during Josh Gordon’s suspension.

Steelers RB Le’Veon Bell says that he’s ready to be up to the task of pass blocking for Ben Roethlisberger.

Right tackle is an area of concern for Texans coach Gary Kubiak.

Breaking down the Colts roster on the way into training camp.

Former Jaguars OL Richard Collier, injured in a 2008 shooting, has taken up wheelchair basketball.

The Titans have some tough road trips ahead of them next season.

Broncos LB Von Miller took part in a “Football University” event for 200 young football players in the Denver area.

Football and the Chiefs came to Kansas City 50 years ago.

Said Raiders T Menelik Watson of the differences between Oakland and his hometown of Manchester, England, “It’s sunnier, I tell you that! Oakland is pretty rough and it’s got its reputation. In that sense it’s similar to Longsight. You just be careful where you go, be careful what you do, always know your surroundings and where you are and you’ll be fine!”

Former Chargers RB LaDainian Tomlinson hosted a 5K run to benefit his Touching Lives foundation.

Will the Cowboys run the ball more often in 2013?

With WR Victor Cruz signing his tender, it’s time to recap the Giants offseason.

Zach Berman of the Philadelphia Inquirer calls T Jason Peters‘ arrest a test for Eagles coach Chip Kelly.

Redskins WR Josh Morgan wants to give back to his hometown of Washington, D.C.

It doesn’t look like a return to the Bears is in the cards for DL Israel Idonije.

A vote against an extension for Lions QB Matthew Stafford before the season.

Former Packers WR Donald Driver had a street named after him in Green Bay.

Vikings C John Sullivan isn’t sure if he’ll be ready to go at the start of camp.

Falcons players and coaches got a taste of tailgating at a grilling event on Saturday.

Said Panthers G.M. Dave Gettleman of LB Chase Blackburn and WR Domenik Hixon, “They know what it takes. They’ve been through the wars, and they’ve shown the consistency in their careers that most guys don’t have.”

Saints QB Luke McCown will become a father for the sixth time.

Urgency is a buzzword for the Buccaneers and QB Josh Freeman.

There’s an “Accountability Sheet” recounting mental errors made by Cardinals players in a team meeting room.

Said Rams offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer of his young offense, “If they weren’t working so hard, if they were struggling a little bit mentally — which I’m sure they’ll have their days — I’d probably be a little bit nervous. But they’re doing really well.”

TE Vance McDonald looked good at 49ers practices this spring.

The Seahawks like what they’ve seen from their rookie defensive linemen.