Another superstar falls from grace - Michael Vick & Bad Newz Kennels

Michael Vick has been a star football player all his life. He was the starting quarterback all four years of high school and went to Virginia Tech on a full scholarship where he led his team to an undefeated 11-0 record and a berth in the National Championship as a freshman. In the 2001 NFL draft, the Atlanta Falcons took him #1 overall, then signed him to a six-year contract worth $62 million. He was twenty years old, on top of the world, and had his whole life ahead of him. In his first NFL season, he only started two of his team’s games - but in them, he lived up to the hype and stood out as the most dynamic and exciting quarterback in the NFL. It was around this time he also started a project which would cement his reputation as the stupidest quarterback in the NFL: a dogfighting and breeding operation called “Bad Newz Kennels” run from a house in Smithfield, Virginia owned by Vick and occupied by his cousin, Davon Boddie.

Ironically, the whole problem started with a dog. A police dog, actually, who smelled marijuana in Boddie’s car outside a nightclub in Hampton, Virginia on the night of April 20th. He was arrested and charged with possession with intent to distribute (on 4/20 of all days) and five days later, police raided the Smithfield house where they found guns, drugs, paperwork detailing the Bad Newz Kennels operation, and 66 dogs (55 of them Pit Bulls). Had he been smart, Vick would have come clean at this point. Instead, he tried to pass the buck by saying, “I’m never at the house. I left the house with my family members and my cousin. They just haven’t been doing the right thing.” It wasn’t the best message to send.

The implication being that he, Vick, had no idea what was going on at the 15-acre property and his assumption being that Boddie, his cousin, would never give him up to the police. While he may have been right, he forgot about the “Bad Newz Kennels” brain trust: Tony Taylor, Purnell Peace, and Quanis Phillips, who were all implicated as well (probably by the documents seized in the April 25th raid). Those guys had to wonder: if Michael Vick was willing to push his cousin under the bus, how loyal would he be to them? This is where his life as Michael Vick knew it began to end.

Acting on tips from informants, the feds searched the Smithfield house again on July 6th, this time looking for dog carcasses. They knew what evidence they were after and they knew what they were going to do with it because about a week and a half later, the federal grand jury indicted Vick, Taylor, Peace, and Phillips for running an operation which trained pit bulls and oversaw dog fights. Believing these guys would be loyal to him, on July 26th Vick was dumb enough to enter a plea of not guilty – still claiming he really didn’t know what went on at the house.

At the same time, prosecutors were working to “flip” Tony Taylor by using the same basic divide-and-conquer move my Assistant Principal used in Middle School: they cited him as the ringleader. Right on cue, Taylor told the feds that Vick put up the money to finance the whole operation in an attempt to save his own skin. Once they had Taylor, it must have been a piece of cake to flip Peace and Phillips, who said they personally witnessed Michael Vick killing at least 8 dogs who didn’t perform well in “testing”. And with that, it was a wrap.

The judge is expected to sentence Vick to 12-to-18 months in prison, then the NFL will most likely suspend him for at least a full season, so he won’t be eligible to take the field until the 2009-2010 season. At that point, he’ll be 29 years old, he’ll have been out of football for two years, and every team in the NFL will already have a starting quarterback who, while he may not have Vick’s physical skills, also won’t have Vick’s baggage.

He was a poor black kid from a bad neighborhood who used his God-given talent to rise above his surroundings, go to college, become the #1 overall pick in the NFL draft, endorse his own Nike shoe, electrify crowds who came to see him play, become the highest paid player in NFL history (when he signed a ten-year, $130 million contract extension w/a $37 million signing bonus in 2004), and earn himself about $20 million per year in salary and endorsements. He is now the stupidest player in the NFL, though, because he threw it all away so that he could kill dogs.