Kevin Blackistone Nfl 1

Tom Cable has been, pun intended, cooling off this week. He shouldn't have been no matter this being his Raiders' bye week on the NFL schedule.

Instead, Cable should've been in New York at a particular building on Park Avenue sweating in the most magnificent office in the joint -- the NFL commissioner's suite. He should've been there explaining to NFL boss Roger Goodell exactly how his assistant Randy Hanson wound up with a broken jaw after a team meeting last August that a district attorney concluded was the result of "some type of physical contact that happened between Mr. Cable and Mr. Hanson when [Hanson] went down." And he should've been explaining how police wound up asking him about a woman who wound up being thrown out of his home last January.

BALTIMORE -- Bill Parcells is famous for assessing his team and the other guy's with a simple review of wins and losses, and an even simpler summation from that evidence: "You are what you are."

But even Parcells would've been hard-pressed to so easily judge undefeated Denver and .500 Baltimore before they met Sunday at Baltimore's M&T Bank Stadium. And he certainly couldn't have done so after their contest was complete.

To be sure, the Ravens proved what many of us suspected after they beat down the Broncos 30-7. The Broncos weren't as good as their spotless record through their first six games suggested, and the Ravens were a lot better than their lukewarm 3-3 mark alluded.

Sylvester Stallone has Hollywood all a twitter (the old school use of the word) right now over an action flick he is producing called The Expendables. Reason is, it stars a bunch of guys' guys including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Julia Roberts' brother Eric and Mickey Rourke, who back in the day I thought Bruce Willis was a cheap imitation of. The movie is about a team of mercenaries who go to some South American country to overthrow a dictator.

Silly me. I heard the title and thought it was about NFL players and wondered who was going to play Kansas City running back Larry Johnson (he was still employed by K.C. as I wrote this) or exiled NFL cornerback Adam "Pacman" Jones.

After all, other than the food service workers chronicled by investigative writer Eric Schlosser in his best-selling 2002 tome Fast Food Nation, what laborers are more expendable than highly compensated NFL players?

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Barack Obama and his family probably didn't meet the longtime neighbor of their new crib at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. William "Doubting" Thomas was in the hospital by the time the Obamas moved in Jan. 20. He died three days later from pulmonary disease. He was just 61.

But Thomas lived by day across the street from the White House -- 1601 Pennsylvania Avenue, or Lafayette Square -- under a makeshift shell of umbrellas and tarps. He decorated his digs with signs that read "Wanted: Wisdom and Honesty," "Ban All Nuclear Weapons or Have a Nice Doomsday," and "Live By the Bomb, Die By the Bomb."

Thomas (his real name was William Thomas Hallenback Jr.) was a protester. And the White House, our government -- ever respectful of our First Amendment right to free speech -- allowed Thomas to protest pretty much uninhibited from the moment he first plopped down in Lafayette Square on June 3, 1981, until he was hospitalized for the last time almost 28 years later.

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They play in the largest stadium, FedEx Field in Landover, Md., in the richest sports league in the world, the NFL. Just a few years ago, they became the first team in the United States to eclipse the $1 billion mark in value. Each of the last three seasons they've paid out more than $100 million in players' salaries, including in 2007 when they topped the league with a $123 million payroll.

But the most Washington's NFL team has to show for its riches since Daniel Snyder bought it 10 years ago is a 2-3 playoff record. That is if you don't count the unprecedented ignominy it achieved last Sunday in losing 14-6 at home to the Kansas City Chiefs, which left Washington with just a 2-4 record over the first six weeks of this NFL season despite having played a winless team each outing -- believed to be a first such stretch against abject wretchedness in NFL history.

Until about three years ago, Everson Walls (right) was best known for what he took away: passes intended for receivers. Since then, he's become more known for what he's given: a kidney. After years of watching his one-time teammate and longtime friend Ron Springs being whittled away by diabetes, and losing hope in the wait for a life-saving kidney transplant, Walls, a former Pro Bowl cornerback, donated his to Springs early in 2007.

In A Gift for Ron, a memoir scheduled for release Nov. 3 from Lyons Press, Walls described to me in detail the moving story of how he shed selfishness as a star athlete to become a selfless organ donor. In doing so, Walls became the first pro athlete to donate an organ to a teammate. With Springs, he co-founded The Ron Springs and Everson Walls Gift for Life Foundation.

Six years ago, ESPN's NFL Countdown crew sat silent as a new addition to its show, the bombastic right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh, suggested Eagles black quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated by a sports media concerned about looking politically correct. ESPN pulled the plug on Limbaugh a few days later and the Countdown crew the next weekend apologized for having abdicated its responsibility to address Limbaugh's outrageousness.

On Tuesday, it was reported that Limbaugh was part of St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts' group that wants to buy the city's NFL team, the Rams. I can't sit idly by like the Countdown crew did so regrettably.

The NFL indirectly dismissed Limbaugh before. It shouldn't accept him back unless he wants to buy a ticket. After all, this is a man who said:

It is difficult, if not impossible, to see whatever Michael Crabtree is up to as anything other than idiotic. But I am like Samuel L. Jackson's God-fearing character Jules in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. "I'm tryin'. I'm tryin' real hard." And this is the sliver of light I see:

Crabtree is trying to be to the NFL what Curt Flood was to Major League Baseball. He is daring to be a revolutionary who leads a shackled group to freedom.

They started playing night games. They gave away groceries. They held something they called "mortgage nights" to help folks who were having a tough time meeting their monthly housing obligation.

But the one thing baseball's bosses during the Great Depression refused to do was give away more of their games on radio.

They finally came to the conclusion that, depression notwithstanding, they would do nothing drastic in the way of retrenchments that would seriously affect baseball's time-honored customers or, as one owner expressed it, 'cheapen' the game," John Drebinger of the New York Times reported during baseball's winter meetings in 1932.

PHILADELPHIA -- "Michael Vick is headed to the interview room," an Eagles official announced late Thursday night in the home team's locker room at Lincoln Financial Field as we in the media scurried about querying this player and that one about the much-ballyhooed return of quarterback-turned-convict all of us had just witnessed. So we hustled to the locker room door leading to the interview room and waited for the subject of our new desire, and continued criticism, to speak.

Turned out, he was even more impressive confronted by us than he had been earlier in the evening confronted for the first time in two football seasons by rampaging defensive linemen and linebackers. That was quite a feat because Vick, the vanquished Falcons' quarterback, was just about perfect -- 4-for-4 passing with one run for one yard that should've been for none or worse -- playing a few plays in the sport he had foolishly removed himself from with criminal activity two years ago.

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