It’s no mystery why NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell asked Tony Dungy to continue to mentor Michael Vick as the quarterback makes his controversial transition back to the league.
Since retiring as Indianapolis Colts coach in January, Dungy has devoted most of his waking hours to his prison ministry, helping inmates reshape their lives through spirituality. Now he has turned his attention to paving Vick’s path back to the NFL. In fact, without Dungy vouching for him, there’s no way Vick — who spent 18 months behind bars for running a dogfighting operation — could have come back.
Time will tell if Vick is sincere about changing his ways or just saying what he needs to say to complete his comeback. But it’s hard to find fault with the involvement of Dungy, who emerged from personal tragedy — the 2005 suicide of his son James — even stronger in his faith.
After Vick’s introductory news conference Friday at Philadelphia Eagles headquarters, Dungy spoke to a small group of reporters about his three-hour meeting with the quarterback last spring at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan.
“I talked to him about where he wanted to go in the future,” Dungy said. “That’s one of the things my dad always used to say to me: ‘Don’t worry about where you are so much. What are you going to do to make it better?’ And that’s what I kept asking Mike: ‘Where are you going to go from here?’
More Top Picks Ladder Tossssss
“And the other thing I asked him was where the Lord was in all this. We talked about him growing up and having that side, that Christian background, but really getting to the NFL and feeling like he was his own guy. Somewhere in the course of all this, he realized that he had left that spiritual side. When he described that to me and the fact that he needed to get back closer to the Lord, that’s when I said: ‘I’m going to stay involved in this. I’m going to help you.'”
Dungy, 53, said he has had similar talks with “hundreds of players” over the past several years — not about dogfighting, necessarily, but about the array of problems many of them tend to encounter.
“You have those conversations with a lot of guys when you say, ‘What was going on in your mind when you were driving 140 m.p.h. at 1o’clock in the morning, racing against one of your buddies?'” he said. “And it doesn’t seem rational, but when you’ve grown up in that environment, or you’ve done it and you don’t think anything’s wrong with it … Or it’s, ‘What was going on with you when you were smoking marijuana?’ And they say: ‘Coach, I’ve been around marijuana my whole life. My parents smoked it. Everybody I know smokes it. What are you talking about?’
“Dogfighting is just one situation. I’ve dealt with guys, and they don’t see the harm in it. But eventually the light goes on and they change. That’s part of coaching, that’s part of being a parent, that’s part of helping young people grow into adulthood.”
Reserve claws: There’s an interesting position battle brewing in Arizona, and it doesn’t concern a spot in the starting lineup. Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt has opened the competition for the No.2 quarterback job behind Kurt Warner, with Matt Leinart and Brian St.Pierre vying for that role.
If the competition is a toss-up, Leinart keeps his job. It’s hard to imagine Whisenhunt bumping the No.10 pick in 2006 for a guy who has been a third-stringer his entire career, but St.Pierre will get a look.
In a 20-10 exhibition loss Thursday at Pittsburgh, Leinart was 8 of 14 for 83 yards, and St.Pierre was 6 of 10 for 53 yards.
Slimming effect: Lions quarterback Daunte Culpepper, who was carrying a lot of extra weight last season, has trimmed down considerably and looks closer to the way he did in his days with the Vikings.
Insiders say Culpepper has gone from almost 300 pounds to about 260, which should help him if he’s going to keep the starting job warm until Matthew Stafford is ready.
Knee-jerk reaction: Time to exhale for the Patriots. They have to be pleased with the way Tom Brady looked Thursday in his first game on his reconstructed left knee. He was 10 of 15 for 100 yards with two touchdowns and an interception and ran a successful sneak.
“Yeah, I was just going to hold the ball in the pocket and cuddle up with it,” he joked afterward. “No, finally on the quarterback sneak, I was saying, ‘God, I just wish someone would come and blast me,’ and you get a little of that anxiousness out of the way.
“But I’ll have to wait until next week. The offensive line did a great job. They’re the ones to be thanked.”
———-