Jason Whitlock Puts The Hammer Down
 

http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/w...-cassel-100812



You gotta be f---ing kidding me.

In a society that increasingly supports caged human cockfighting — aka MMA — has a proud history with boxing, cheers lustily whenever fights break out inside a hockey rink and builds Roman Empire-stylized coliseums for football games, a 320-pound, sweet-talking lineman has somehow convinced a segment of America that Chiefs fans are the sick and disgusting bad guys.

You gotta be f---ing kidding me.

You damn straight a small percentage of Chiefs fans cheered loudly when two overgrown Ravens knocked Matt Cassel smooth the hell out. Did we not cheer when Mike Tyson curb-stomped Michael Spinks? Google the knockout work that made Anderson Silva the MMA’s most beloved star and tell me if you hear respectful silence or wild, joyful hysteria?

We love violence and Eric Winston’s hypocritical ass is wealthy because he’s relatively adept at inflicting it. The only thing all that unusual about the smattering of cheers that greeted Cassel’s glazed-eyed trip to the turf is that his hometown fans gave life to the noise. And for that, you can blame Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli, his boss, Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, and the escalating cost of being a sports fan in the era of shopping mall-amusement park stadiums.


Sickening? A smattering of cheers for an injured $66 million quarterback with a rating of 66.2 and a league-leading 14 turnovers?

No. No. What’s sickening is how easily Winston, Kansas City’s right tackle, deflected the national media from the real story. One of the most passionate fan bases in sports — Kansas City Chiefs fans — has been abused so thoroughly the last eight to 10 years that it is turning unruly. What happened Sunday inside Arrowhead Stadium is a result of the Hunt family’s neglect of their fan base. This has been brewing since 1998, since Marty Schottenheimer courageously and justifiably realized he should move on after 10 years in Kansas City. From 1989 to 1998, Schottenheimer and his front-office partner Carl Peterson transformed Arrowhead Stadium from an empty parking lot into one of the coolest, most electric places on earth eight fall Sundays a year. Football Sundays in Kansas City became mini-holidays. The whole town wore red starting on Fridays. Tailgating at Arrowhead Stadium before games was Kansas City’s No. 1 social activity.

I’ve watched NFL games at every venue. Nothing compared to Arrowhead Stadium during the Schottenheimer era. Nothing. The Chiefs never advanced to the Super Bowl, but Kansas City was the NFL’s ground zero. The players, coaches and executives were treated like royalty.

The players, coaches, executives and ownership got spoiled. They didn’t have to win it all to be treated as if they had. The Chiefs haven’t won a playoff game since 1993. That’s right. The Chiefs haven’t won a playoff game in two decades. But the stadium was filled, the parking lot packed and Chiefs jerseys hung in seemingly every Kansas City closet so Lamar Hunt, Kansas City’s Dallas-based owner, allowed Carl Peterson to hang around 10 years after Schottenheimer left, a good five years after it was painfully obvious Peterson’s previous success was a result of Schottenheimer’s brilliance. Most Chiefs fans concluded Hunt would’ve never allowed Peterson to linger for a decade if Hunt lived in Kansas City and felt the pain of each disappointing season as personally as Kansas City residents. Kansas Citians attached their identity to their professional football team. Joe Montana, Marcus Allen and Derrick Thomas made the typical, insecure Kansas Citian feel big time.


LET'S GET NUTS!
NFL fans are a special breed, and they their bring their own brand of craziness on game day.
The stench of Peterson’s last 10 years and Lamar Hunt’s loyalty to Peterson are fueling Chiefs fans lack of patience with their successors, Scott Pioli and Clark Hunt. The situation is further exacerbated by KC’s newly renovated stadium and the elevated cost associated with it. Chiefs fans are paying $27 to park, $200 for a club-level seat, $10 for beer and are watching teams with no reasonable shot at postseason success.

For the most part in today’s NFL, no quarterback equals no shot.

Lamar Hunt and Carl Peterson could never pick a quarterback. In 20 years, they never drafted one in the first round. They preferred to sign someone else’s veteran. Given a choice in the 1990s between benching an aloof, inconsistent and expensive Elvis Grbac and going with locker-room/fan favorite Rich Gannon, Hunt and Peterson let Gannon escape to Oakland, where he won a league MVP award, made four Pro Bowls and one Super Bowl appearance. Grbac eventually bounced to Baltimore and quit football. No one, besides Trent Dilfer, remembers Elvis Grbac.

Scott Pioli’s first major personnel decision in Kansas City was giving Matt Cassel a franchise-quarterback contract despite his highly suspicious resume. Cassel never played at USC. He played one season at New England. Cassel is Pioli’s original sin, the mistake that has haunted his four years in Kansas City. Pioli, the Bill Belichick disciple, saw in Cassel the second coming of Tom Brady. Pioli arrogantly and foolishly thought he’d discovered Brady in a bottle twice. Ha.

This year Cassel has been the worst starting quarterback in football. He’s a turnover machine. He clearly lacks confidence. His arm strength is atrocious. His ball floats up before it moves ahead. He needs to be benched. Pioli won’t allow it.


PAIN TRAIN
Injuries are a part of football, but these players have been hit particularly hard.
Before Sunday’s game, a group of working-class Chiefs fans pooled their money to fly a banner over Arrowhead Stadium demanding that Hunt fire Pioli and bench Cassel. These people love their football team. Clark Hunt lives in Dallas. The fans are spending their money to get the attention of their absentee owner. They’re afraid that Pioli-Hunt is going to be a replica of Peterson-Hunt. Their fears are justified. Pioli is a poor man’s Peterson. Pioli is an embarrassingly insecure version of Peterson, a man with a bloated ego. Pioli masks his insecurity with a false bravado, a dictator’s management approach and a constant desire to manipulate the media into believing he was the brains behind the Patriots dynasty.

Chiefs fans aren’t having it. They want a real quarterback. They want the Cassel charade to end. Pioli’s stubbornness forced a handful of Chiefs fans to spontaneously thank the Ravens for momentarily ending their Matt Cassel nightmare. I think America will survive.

It’s easy for the national media to sit on their couches, inside their television studios or on their free, comfy press-box seats and preach polite decency to the working-class folks paying to watch their hijacked football team.

I won’t do it. I was inside Arrowhead Stadium on Sunday as a Chiefs fan. I’m not the type to boo or cheer. But I want Pioli fired. Eric Winston, too.

:hail: :hail: :hail:

This man has been, and always will be, my ****ing hero.

popcorn

****ing loved it. My exact freaking point through all if this, its football. Cassel is paid well to indure whatever.

You can bet your ass I got excited when I figured out cassel was the guy down. I was stoked.

At somebody ****ing gets it:

Spit on article whit. Sorry to ever question you
Posted via Mobile Device

Holy shit I love Whitlock right now.

Jason using his power and media reach to defend us.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbj6tfBrh31r30bnz.gif

I came.

****ing. CONGRESS that was spot on.

nice article, shame the NFL will have FOX take it down in 3-2-1...

I only wish the section about Cassel would've linked to the Declaration of Independence, MO

i would the whole thing

:eek:

Now I wish he wouldn't have peed on Lupica's rug, otherwise he might be allowed to go on ESPN and defend us.

Thanks, Whit - Scott Pioli can eat a whole sack of dicks.

thank god someone got the class issue too...

spot on...

The whole premise is flawed....Knockout is the goal of MMA (or tapout etc) whereas concussion / injury in the NFL is not something to root for...

Even when the OTHER team gets injured no one cheers...

Whitlock is just an assclown justifying his own disgusting behavior.

Yes, excellent... thank you very, very much Jason... i take back any light barb i ever slung your way.

Thank you for telling America the REAL story, i am honestly grateful.

Go **** yourself with a bag of rusty nails

**** yeah!

:clap:

Loved the article. **** Hunt. **** Pioli. **** the rest of the foot shuffling porters they call a staff.

I love Whitlock. He's the man.

Submission is the goal of MMA.

MMA is built around using violence to get an opponent to submit to your will. It's far closer to football than you want to admit.

But I understand that having the massive hatred for your boyfriend force fed to you for 24 hours has been difficult for you, so I suppose we can give you a pass.

In a general sense, I agree - we shouldn't start cheering for injuries in football games - that's not the point. But I do agree with jwhit that we shouldn't be DISGUSTED when people do cheer in those situations - there are plenty of examples in entertainment where injuries are just fine, and violence is clearly a part of football.

huh? every play ends with a tackle or a sack. Injury is part of the game. When a linebacker comes in hot and hits the QB so hard his feet fly in the air the reaction the crowd gets insanely loud and over joyful. In fact people jump up and down like a reerun humping a doorknob because the play was so physical.

Damn. Great stuff.

As I said, I wouldn't even root injury to another player on another team...

But I already the kind of people that would cheer someone's injury aren't worth shit.....

You can try and pretend this is about me supporting Cassel, but you wont find any evidence of that since the middle of 2011. You're just a douche.

I need a tissue. This article was ****ing amazing.

Thanks JWhit!

Holy shit! That was awesome jwhit.

I for one whole heartedly say thanks. You caught a lot of crap on here when u were still at the star, I can say I'm thankful to have you as a member of this board, and I apologize for any negative things I said about during that time. In chiefs fans darkest hour, the voices of reason come from unlikely places. Thanks Jason, mellinger too.


Without your voice, the lie that we are bad fan will continue. I doubt even with your article they will stop it, but its a start, and I again say thanks

Huh? SO every tackle or sack leads to injury?WRONG

Umm Tackle/sacks happen every game without injury..People root for big hits, but NO ONE roots for injuries except a small percent of basement dwelling pieces of shit.

Or don't put fans in a position where obvious stupidity is only addressed by an injury. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what Matt Cassel is and is not capable of at this point. Chiefs Management is like dealing with the soup Nazi from Seinfeld at this point.

There's plenty of blame to go around.

Thank you Jason, for throwing a punch for us in this battle.

We are armed only with our wallets, and heretofore, those haven't been enough.

Ah, so you're just deluded.

If you honestly don't see the similarities between fans cheering a right cross that drops someone to the canvas and a crushing hit that rocks a RB to his core, there's little I can do for you.

They're games built upon choreographed, coordinated violence - the end.

Great article by Whitlock. Keep the heat on Chunt and Pioli.

Mellinger talking today about how the blame should fall more on Pioli than Cassel : "I mean, I could ask my dog to cook my dinner, but I shouldn't be pissed at him when he doesn't do a good job."

Wow, great read

Perfectly stated.

We've been hijacked by Patriot Way terrorists.

AND JASON WHITLOCK IS PASSENGER 57.

http://www.siteoffline.com/images/passenger_57.jpg

if people are rooting for big hits then its the same thing as rooting for an injury. Players even go for big hits to take people out of the game. They admit it.

And yet you are still too ****ign stupid to see that neither of these things are INJURIES.

I don't have time to explain the difference to someone as reeruned as yourself so here:

http://thechive.files.wordpress.com/...pg?w=500&h=430

Duhhh

Thank you JW give em hell

Pioli is done http://imageshack.us/a/img11/6302/mjchokehand.png

No it is not...Thats idiotic...Even in MMA, serious injuries are very rare...

In football they are much more common and NO ONE roots for injuries...People like to see a good fight, big hit...but NO ONE except reeruns roots for actual INJURIES

JFC Whitlock. Someone get that photo of him knocking out Pioli from the chiefs photoshop thread.

We're any of you at the Broncos game in '03? The Dante Hall punt return game.

At the visitors sideline near the west end zone in that game, Shannon Sharpe was shaken up and I think the trainers came over to attend to him. If I remember correctly the PA announcer said "injured bronco is Shannon sharpe" and a cheer arose.

I don't think anyone hoped that he was seriously injured, but we damn sure hoped he was injured. We hated him. So the reason for the cheer was not "We hope you die", it was "Hooray, a player who has torn us up a million times got walloped."

That didn't become a national story. I doubt if this would have either ten years ago. It's football.

This is a tortured fan base that has been more devoted than most forever, and we deserve to at least be respected. Playing Cassel insults our intelligence.

If I am judging what happened yesterday, even the few people who did cheer when Cassel went down weren't necessarily cheering that he was injured, but rather that his injury would bring in Quinn. In other words, they were cheering the result and not the thing that precipitated the result.

Is that not accurate?

Kent Babb put down his pen and Whitlock picked it up.

START PRINTING YOUR RESUME, FAT MAN. IT'S ALL OVER.

For the record I don't think many people WERE actually cheering for the injury....Most were cheering for Quinn to come in...(I cheered for Quinn coming in!)

What I am saying is the TINY percent of people who actually cheered the injury are window licking shit stains.

As a previous poster said:
Give Em Hell Jason.
Cassel gets paid a good amount of money to wear the Chiefs uni and play QB,it's part of the job.
if he cant take the heat, he needs to get the **** out.

That's one awesome fucking article and God Bless JW!!!

He put a valid national voice on all the Chiefs fans frustrations after 40+ years....

You seem to have lost your central thesis, sweetheart.

What does this have to do with your idea that the premise is flawed? People don't root for injuries in the MMA either - they root for hard shots that end the match. They root for some display of athletic prowess whereby the guy they are rooting for is able to pin and disarm his opponent.

Sometimes someone gets injured - it happens. And just like people weren't cheering for Cassel's injury as much as they were its effect on the team, MMA fans don't root for some poor bastard having his arm broken in the ring as much as they root for their guy to grab him buy the wrist and torque it back until he decides to quit (ask Jon Jones all about it).

So I ask again - what's your point? The MMA and NFL comparisons are extremely apt.

Way to go Jason! I have blasted Whitlock for many reasons but at least he is honest. We all wanted Matt out of there with a slight injury. No one wants him to be really hurt for life but whatever gets him off the field is OK with me.

My point is just that, PEOPLE don't root for injuries in EITHER sport (you agree).

Only shit stains and worthless garbage do.

DAMN! You hit that one out of the park J Whit.
Thank You

Fans were cheering the benching of Matt Cassel, not the injury itself. I hope Cassel is ok, but he should have been benched during the Buffalo game. He's had far too many chances to play well and he's been the most inconsistent QB in the game. He plays like a rookie when he's an 8th yr veteran.

Winston can cry all he wants. He doesn't know the history in this town, he gets paid millions of dollars to play a ****ing game. He can go blow ass for all I care.

So your typical MMA fan?

That was something of a manifesto for our "Save Our Chiefs" movement. Seriously, JWhit. Thank you for writing that. It was amazing, and resonated with all of my feelings about this debacle.

Just had my wife read this and she agrees.

We shouldn't act like it isn't personal between Whitlock and Pioli. Pioli snubbed him at dinner, and its been personal ever since. That doesn't detract from the facts of Whitlocks argument here, which are sound. but come on - its personal. Whitlock correctly called that Pioli wouldn't work out, winning a guess that is one in two, but its not like he is a prophet. He started a personal campaign against someone who didn't afford him the respect he feels he deserves.

His article is flawless, but come on. We don't need to deify the leaders of this movement.

For those who don't understand, no one was cheering Cassel getting injured because they wanted to see him hurt. It was most likely because a Cassel injury meant he was finally removed from the game. Nothing else seemed to work in getting him benched, only an injury would force the team's hand.

Whitlock should have alluded to the bizarre play calling. That's the real scandal. Come on Jason, it's obvious that Pioli isn't letting his coaching staff choose the QB.

No, but isn't it time that someone else that's been paying attention and might have some partisan interest in the Chiefs start taking this personally? Most of us do.

When I was listening to Mike&Mike this morning I almost sent them an email with the same example of boxing/mma. I should have just to see if they brought it up on the show and tried to deflect it as a different sport entirely.

Wow. First article Whitlock I have ever read which I could agree with pretty much anything. But, Mr. Whitlock you can't leave your brother Romeo out of the blame. If he had any guts he would have gone to Pioli two weeks ago and said enough is enough. You can fire me if you want but I'm benching Matt Cassel. He must share the blame as well.

But, other than this fairly significant ommission you finally got one right Mr. Whitlock. Well done.

P, the Colonel wants you in front of him, standing tall...

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4VHKpGJX29s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Q who really cares? How many other voices in the media do you see rallying to our defense?

However Jason knew in the beginning, he knew it wasn't going to work out, really doesn't matter. We all want our chiefs to succeed. That's our end.

Whitlock didn't "finally" get one right.

He's been getting them right since 2009.

He had all these frauds nailed from the beginning.

Give him credit.

I wonder what kind of inside info he had?

He's been getting them right since he was with the Star. The true fans hated him but he was right most of the time. People hate the truth. Not anymore though, people are fed up.

I love you Jason Whitlock.

Holy shit that is the best thing Whit has ever written, too bad he isn't still in KC.

I hope Mellinger and company got to read it.

Damn this is like bizzaro world, Whtlock is popular, CP is united.............

I said GOD DAMN!!!

http://i.minus.com/ibsgF87RMZ0ykv.gif

A perfect article. Thanks.

Pioli we are coming for you.

He's usually a turd, but goddamn... Whitlock you rocked it man! Cheers, and I apologize for allthe hate. We need your continued support moving forward! There's a plate of ribs in it for you, on me. Just keep churning this shit out!

The luncheon with Pioli and Haley.

And he knew people in the biz who knew things about Pioli.

I was really hoping you'd lay into these frauds. The Facebook page for the Chiefs had a post today tyat said "Chiefs fans are the greatest". I was enraged. Those PATronizing, disingenuous, passive aggressive ****s. Great job. I love you Jason Whitlock.