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Originally Published: June 26, 2009

NFL teams hope for a calm break

With training camps weeks away, the league hopes players steer clear of trouble

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By Len Pasquarelli
ESPN.com
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Almost 150 years before George Halas sat on the running board of a well-appointed Hupmobile in a Canton, Ohio, automobile showroom in 1920 and launched what would become the NFL, Thomas Paine wrote these now-famous words:

These are the times that try men's souls.

With his series of "The American Crisis" pamphlets, Paine issued a revolutionary call to arms, clearly not a warning about the NFL's early-summer dog days.

But as far as league coaches and management officials are concerned, Paine's cautionary words could have been intended for them.

Many clubs have concluded organized team activities in recent days and sent their weary charges off to vacation for some rest and rehabilitation before the real grind begins. The period between the end of OTAs and the start of summer training camps is arguably the league's most perilous time. In a relatively unsupervised period for the only extended stretch of the year, some careless players adopt an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality, and succumb to temptation.

With their coaching staffs out of sight for a while, some of these players go out of their minds with all manner of indiscretions.

And so, not surprisingly, many NFL head coaches ended the final session of OTAs with the kind of "behave yourself" lecture you used to get from your parents when they went out and left you with a babysitter.

Actually, a bulked-up babysitter is precisely what some league coaches wish they could hire to keep closer tabs on their players for the next month. But for the most part, coaches are dealing with mature and dependable men who don't require supervision, because their super vision is properly focused.

Still, head coaches feel compelled to deliver the speech, and to advise their players about exercising prudence, wariness and self-control during this unsupervised time.

"It's somewhere in the [coaching] manual," Cincinnati Bengals coach Marvin Lewis, whose team has suffered some problems both on and off the field in recent years, said of the requisite lecture. "You might be saying it for the [consumption] of only a few guys on your team, but you've still got to remind them [to avoid trouble]."

Clearly, the vast majority of NFL players heed the warning and avoid problematic situations during the summer months. The league's players are typically dedicated, responsible and well-intentioned. But there is always a group of players whose conduct is questionable at best. When the weather gets hot, they put the heat on themselves and provide the critics an excuse for painting all NFL players with the same brush.

There really isn't a published, empirical study that suggests players typically go off their rockers when they're off on their own. But it is pretty much accepted as reality by coaches and league officials that the incidents of questionable behavior typically spike in the summer. Certainly, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence.

Take it to the bank: NFL head coaches spend a lot of restless nights during that period when their players are left to their own devices.

The aforementioned Thomas Paine notably used to sign his fiery pamphlets with the nom de plume "Common Sense." Coaches are hopeful that their players exercise that basic quality during their downtime.

"You can't look over their shoulders every hour of every day," said Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Jack Del Rio. "So you've got to trust that they'll behave responsibly. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case."

Over a 27-month period, a dozen Jaguars players were arrested for various illegal acts. Columnist Gene Frenette of The Florida Times-Union noted last week that only one player, linebacker Justin Durant, remains on the Jacksonville roster from the police-blotter group. Del Rio and the Jacksonville organization have made a conscious effort lately to avoid the kinds of players who might embarrass the franchise, or who already have some manner of troubling delinquency on their résumés.

Sometimes, staying out of trouble isn't enough. Just this week, there were reports that Miami Dolphins first-round cornerback Vontae Davis was allegedly arrested on June 9 in Champaign, Ill., and charged with unnecessary vehicular noise and driving without a valid license. The problem: Davis was in South Florida at the time, attending a team minicamp.

Said Davis: "It's a crazy thing. … It just came out of nowhere."

The reality that problems can emanate from just about anywhere, as the Davis case illustrates, is the kind of stuff that keeps coaches up at night. This time of year, silence is definitely golden.

During the weeks before training camps open, blockbuster stories about the NFL are all but nonexistent.

And coaches and team officials, along with commissioner Roger Goodell, hope it stays that way.

Len Pasquarelli, a recipient of the Pro Football Hall of Fame's McCann Award for distinguished reporting, is a senior writer for ESPN.com.