The Degrees of Dysfunction
A little context for those of you who may not have a solid grasp on NFL player grievances against their own team even as they head for the playoffs. More than a few players, usually star #1 receivers become particularly unhappy with their quarterbacks for not targeting them enough, their coaches for not telling the quarterback to target them more, their owner for not telling the coach to tell the quarterback to throw to them more, the fans for booing them when they catch wind of the displeasure (some of it clearly evident by body language on the field and sidelines) or all of the above.
A.J. Brown is the Philadelphia Eagles’ star wide receiver, one of the most physically dominant and statistically productive players in football — and, at the moment, the central character in a public slow-burn saga of visible frustration, cryptic social media posts, and sideline sulking that has made sportswriters and fans alike wonder whether they are watching a playoff push or a Netflix family drama. He is most definitely an ‘all of the above’ and then some.
Mike Tanier — widely considered the sharpest football writer in America — recently dissected Brown with his usual mix of surgical insight and ruthless wit because “the Eagles are mired in yet another chapter of the endless A.J. Brown Vaguebooking Sadgasm telenovela, a soul-consuming bleakscape of metastasized self-pity.”
Here’s how he describes the current Eagles-AJ Brown situation:
“Let’s say you are a highly-valued, hard-to-replace employee at an incredibly successful company in a competitive industry, but you are unhappy at work. You are well compensated, and the company is doing well. This is a personal and professional-satisfaction situation: you are mad at coworkers/bosses, feel disrespected or taken for granted, and/or seek a chance to pursue more of your individual goals.
Under the circumstances, there are three paths forward:
Boomer: Grin and bear it like a pro’s pro.
Troublemaker: Loudly and publicly demand change, making ultimatums if necessary.
Lord/Lady Emoknickers: Mope around acting vaguely miserable for months, muttering melancholy little riddles to anyone trying to figure out what is wrong and bellyaching online.
The Boomer path is best for the company, but not the individual. If you are wired to keep your mouth shut and get the job done, it does have its advantages: it rarely makes the situation worse, for example. But it’s not for everyone. Personal happiness is important, after all. The Boomer path is also not always the righteous one: if there’s a problem at work that’s impacting your happiness and performance, your colleagues and superiors may need to hear about it, because you might not be alone.
The Troublemaker path, for NFL wide receivers, is the well-worn Diva path. You might get labeled as a crybaby or malcontent. You might also force change: a trade, a raise, or an assurance of a better role. You could force ownership to intervene in the situation. Or expose a deeper company problem. Heck, airing the grievances can be an end in its own right. A boss looking you in the eye and saying There’s nothing we can do to make this better for you, but the team needs you, so please stick with us can be downright therapeutic.
The Lord/Lady Emoknickers path is . . . immature attention-seeking behavior masquerading as courageous stoicism. It accomplishes nothing while dragging down or alienating the people who have to deal with you on a daily basis. It’s also self-fulfilling: the Troublemaker brings the issue to a head, the Boomer sacrifices the personal for the professional, but Lord Emoknickers slowly makes others distrust or dislike him, which only makes him sadder.
It doesn’t take a therapist to recognize these behaviors. Every family and business lawyer certainly does.
Most legal issues don’t start with a single explosive moment. They begin after months or years of silent endurance, theatrical outrage, or emotional slow-burn misery that everyone – spouses, business partners, shareholders, employees, feel but no one addresses directly.
The longer it goes on, the more complicated and expensive the cleanup becomes because the longer it festers, the more damage it does [witness the Eagles meltdown against the Cowboys and Bears] and the harder it is to move on.
Look, the Philadelphia Eagles need to solve the A.J. Brown problem, but their hands are tied. They missed the trade deadline. They are stuck with this dynamic for the rest of the season and into the playoffs. Could they still repeat as champions? Sure. Stranger things have happened. Will they still have an A.J. Brown problem after the champagne flows? No question, he is who he is. Will they have to deal with it before next season? They better.
You, however, don’t have a trade deadline. You don’t have to survive another season of emotional turbulence hoping it somehow resolves itself. You don’t have to keep running the same plays and pretending the team tension isn’t poisoning everything. You can act now.
Quick Update to: “You’re Fired! Probably”
When last we left the LSU – Brian Kelly fiasco (just as it was about to be replaced by the Lane Kiffin – LSU – Ole Miss fiasco) – LSU had announced that Kelly had not been “formally terminated” at all, that the AD who fired him probably did not have had authority to do so, that grounds for a for-cause termination might exist, that the whole thing needed to be re-litigated from scratch, and, oh, yeah, by the way if it’s for cause forget the $54 million contract buyout.
That particular merry-go-round ended in the middle of LSU’s quest to replace Kelly with Ole Miss’s Lane Kiffin despite the fact Kiffin’s team was chasing an NCAA playoff berth.
Mark Twain Didn’t Sleep Here
An 1858 mansion in Manchester, CT sold last month for a record price. The sale of the Cheney Mansion made the news as both a hopeful indication that the former mill town was coming back and for the ‘little extras’ that made the price possible: owned by a silk-mill magnate, restored to its Gilded Age charm, koi pond, rolling grand lawns, and the clincher – “frequented by Mark Twain in the early 1900s.”
Mark Twain, of course, lived in Hartford for years. His home (above), modeled on a Mississippi River boat, is now a National Historic Landmark. Aspiring writers can pay to sit in his library and write for a few hours a day. Twain, of course, wrote Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, The Prince & the Pauper, and so much more in that library.
A few things to know about Twain: he was a social media maven long before electricity came to Hartford. He documented everything about his life in letters, diaries, stories, notebooks. Between 1869 and his death with the reappearance of Haley’s Comet in 1910, we basically know where he was and who he was with every moment of every day.
If Instagram or TikTok had existed in 1870, Twain may never have written a word.
We know, then, that despite the realtor’s claims – online and in the sales brochure – that Mark Twain never ‘frequented’ the Cheney Mansion between 1901-10. He left Hartford in 1891 and never went back. That story – along with the realtor’s other claims of a close relationship between Cheney and Twain and a ‘friendly’ competition to build a better home – was local lore that the realtor embraced.
So . . . if you’re the buyer who bought into the Twain narrative, the natural question is: do you have any recourse? Did you pay a ‘Huckleberry Finn’ surcharge based on a false claim? Can you get it back?
Good questions. Here’s the short answer: Jon Voight’s 1989 Chrysler LeBaron convertible.
That’s right, like so many things, it comes down to a Seinfeld episode. George Costanza is thrilled that he just bought Jon Voight’s old Chrysler LeBaron. The seller swears it’s true. George believes it because, well, because he’s George. He drives around town humming the theme from Midnight Cowboy.
Jerry bursts George’s bubble when he pulls out the owner’s manual and notes that the name is John Voight, not Jon. A mistake that George could easily have discovered if he knew how to spell.
If the Cheney Mansion sale had happened back when George was buying the LeBaron, the only way to verify the Twain connection would have been to travel between UC-Berkeley, Columbia University, Elmira College, and a half-dozen more archives, poring over Twain’s notebooks and correspondence. The buyer would have been forced to accept the realtor’s claims. If the buyer had somehow figured it out, they might have had a claim.
Today, though? Well, if you toured the house, read the sales lit, talked to the gushing realtor and went home to Google AI search the claim . . . you’d have been reassured that Twain did indeed hang out with the Cheney’s on a regular basis- AI scrapes the internet, where the realtor’s website became the ‘authority.’
A few extra keystrokes, however, would immediately pop up all the problems with the claim, dismantling it at the speed of light. It would even pull up the one and only letter Twain ever exchanged with Cheney, in 1878, about “a criminal whose crimes are modified, softened, almost neutralized, by his native chuckle-headedness”.
There’s no legal claim here, technology gave the buyer the same instant ability to discover the ‘error’ that knowing how Jon Voight spelled his name could have given George.
De-escalating?
In November 1974, the Cleveland Browns received a letter from an attorney who had been complaining about ‘his fellow fans’ throwing paper airplanes during games, it ended with this: “I will hold the club responsible for any injury sustained by any person in my party attending one of your sporting events.”
The letter above is the the Browns’ General Counsel’s answer – as concise a response to the threat of a frivolous lawsuit as has ever been written.
Don’t Miss an Issue
Haven’t subscribed yet? Agree with Homer? Then don’t miss another issue, subscribe now. And . . . if you know someone who may enjoy this, please feel free to forward this issue to them.
