Of Salary Dumps and Slander: Saturday Edition

We have finally reached the purest sense of the NFL offseason, as the dark days and weeks leading up to training camp seem like an eternal crawl. To pass the time, since bloggers and traditional media types lack the means to create real news and analysis, we must rely on the time-honored traditions of hearsay and innuendo, perhaps combined with a little outrage sprinkled with a touch of irony. Like so… Paul Alexander Pulls a Mangini We recently pointed out that Bengals rookie tackle Andre Smith got his Bloomingtons confused, and consequently he showed up very late for a youth football camp in Illinois. But in our effort to apply a verbal purple nurple to the man who’ll never outlive his shirtless 40-yard-dash, we overlooked another salient point. As a media source has pointed out to us, Smith was attending the camp because Bengals offensive line coach Paul Alexander is one of the co-directors. As Randy Kindred of the Bloomington (Ill.) Pantagraph explains, ... (link)