Lovie Smith Supports Vick’s Return

Those Bears fans clamoring for a new quarterback could eventually get one. But not one that many of them would actually want any more than one Bears fan doesn’t want Josh Bullocks. Coach Lovie Smith recently said that Vick deserves a clean slate when he gets out of federal custody -- and Smith didn’t close the door on adding Vick to the team. “I would look at Michael like I look at every other prospect that’s available: He goes back into the pool,” Smith told USA Today, via David Haugh of the Chicago Tribune. “That’s what everyone in society does. Mike made a mistake, and he’s paying the price for that mistake. Once you’ve paid your debt to society, you have to say, ‘OK, let’s go on from there.’” We feel like a broken record (and we’re now old enough to realize that more than half of you likely wonder what being annoyingly repetitive has to do with a new level of statistical achievement in sport), but we need to say it again. Mike Vick didn’t make a mistake. He engaged in a lifestyle for a period of years and changed that lifestyle only because he got caught. A “mistake” is adhering so literally to the commands of a navigation system that you drive your car into a lake. Vick lived a life that revolved around an abomination -- raising dogs for the purposes of pitting them against each other for sport and for money, and killing the dogs that weren’t deemed fit to die while fighting other dogs. He felt so strongly about this lifestyle that he bought a house and surrounding land at which the lifestyle unfolded. Though some readers have suggested that the conduct of men like Leonard Little (who killed a woman while driving drunk) and Donte’ Stallworth (who might have been drunk while driving a car that killed a man) is more despicable than Vick’s behavior, we disagree. Little (and possibly Stallworth) engaged in criminally reckless actions. They didn’t intend to harm anyone. Little’s crime (and possibly Stallworth’s) was to drink to excess under circumstances that did not prevent him from exercising impaired judgment by getting behind the wheel of a 2,000-pound sculpted block of rolling steel. Vick intentionally, deliberately, and soberly embarked on a hobby that violated multiple federal and state laws, and that was premised on the cold-blooded torture and killing of dogs. And then he lied about his conduct, to anyone who wanted to know the truth. He even tried to deceive about the killing of underperforming dogs after pleading guilty, and while strapped to a polygraph. If it were up to us, Vick wouldn’t play for the Bears or any other NFL team. Ever. Commissioner Goodell has said that it is a privilege to play in the National Football League. If any man has squandered that privilege, that man is Michael Vick.