The Morning ... According to Us

Caesar, Brutus and Plaxico.

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"Brutus and Caesar is an apt analogy."

You can read much more on NFL security issues right here.

Now that the fog surrounding the Plaxico Burress saga is starting to lift, it turns out his greatest crime might have been wearing sweatpants to a club. See, one of the biggest questions initially—why the Giants WR or anyone else involved didn't call the cops—has (pretty much) been answered: the NFL didn't want them to.

Former Giants Jason Sehorn and former coach Jim Fassel say the message from training camp on was clear: cops can't be trusted, and any off-field fiasco should be handled first by the team, to see if it can be contained. It's the same message former Wall Street Journal writer Stefan Fatsis heard in 2006, when he tried out for the Broncos placekicker, the topic of his book .

"The police can't be trusted, and the law can be a trap," Fatsis says team officials told him and other players. The NFL says there's no rule discouraging players from contacting the police but also asks teams to contact the league "promptly" should anything occur.

It isn't exactly news that the league likes to keep criminal acts from the public realm. That the public keeps forgetting about the league's involvement is more an indication of what society forgets in general: it's easier to remember the agent and not the entity behind it. After all, Brutus stabbed Ceasar in part because the budding coup in the Roman Senate more or less commanded he do it. We will never forget the "thumbs up" photo from Abu Gharib, but how many remember the government told that soldier to get information by any means necessary?

Similarly, Burress will always be remembered as the dolt who brought a loaded gun into a troublesome club and shot himself in the leg. And, yes, he was an idiot for doing that. But afterward, at least according to the league's protocol, he handled everything brilliantly.

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