The Broncos today fired Mike Shanahan, their two-time Super Bowl-winning coach, who had spent a total of 21 seasons in Denver as an assistant and head coach.  Count me among the shocked.

I got to know Shanahan and Broncos owner Pat Bowlen pretty well, and recognized that their relationship was as much a friendship as a business partnership. Bowlen once described it to me as a marriage — a marriage suffused with trust. Before the 2007 season, when he extended Shanahan’s contract through 2011, Bowlen told me: “He might as well know that I have the faith in him until he and I both agree it’s probably the end of his coaching career.”

The owner deferred to Shanahan on just about every internal football decision, on and off the field, like sacking the GM who was with the team for 16 years, Ted Sundquist, after a season that could hardly have been blamed on the front office. Some people in Denver viewed their relationship as too one way, that Shanny had Pat’s number. But Bowlen’s no pushover, and no fool. He doesn’t make decisions to respond to public pressure; he is justifiably proud of the competent operational systems that he and Shanahan imposed over the years; and he understands as well as any owner I’ve ever met in any sport that operating a professional franchise is a fickle endeavor, that success is cyclical, especially in a league like the NFL, and dependent on too many outside factors. (Look at how many injuries the Broncos suffered this season.)

I haven’t spoken to either Bowlen or Shanahan, but I’d be surprised if one of two things didn’t happen: If something didn’t flip in their relationship, if Shanahan maybe overstepped his sense of security, perhaps in refusing the day after the team’s season-ending blowout in San Diego to agree with Pat’s apparent request to make changes to the coaching staff, as my friend Jeff Legwold of the Rocky Mountain News reports. Or, maybe more likely, if Bowlen didn’t just conclude that the franchises’s long-term business (and football) prospects would be improved by a change.

But this isn’t your garden-variety firing. Shanahan is no Mangenius anymore, some young, disposable coach. Love him or hate him — and fans do both, of course — he’s an institution in Denver. Players and executives griped about Shanahan’s omnipotence, about his entrenched habits and routines, but I never once heard anyone question his abilities as an organizer and a coach.

There was a fundamental belief, even a cockiness, that the Broncos had figured out how to make an NFL organization operate efficiently and effectively, that the team wouldn’t win every year but it wouldn’t embarrass itself if it didn’t. But after three really bad seasons in a row — a run that I think began with the benching of Jake Plummer when the Broncos were 7-4 in 2006, but that’s just me — the Teflon may have worn off. I wouldn’t say Mike Shanahan was the Great and Mighty Wizard, but he certainly stopped looking quite so invincible, maybe even to Bowlen.

I had a piece on “All Things Considered” today about George Plimpton, a new oral biography about him, George, Being George, and my (spiritual) relationship to him.

George Plimpton did it all. He co-founded the literary magazine the Paris Review. He boxed and pitched and quarterbacked and dribbled with the pros. He wrestled the gun from the hand of the man who shot his friend Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles. 

He interviewed Hemingway in Madrid and Ali in Zaire. He was in Lawrence of Arabia — and the Simpsons. He threw legendary parties. He was tall, erudite and impossibly enthusiastic. In George, Being George, a friend of his puts it this way: ”George saw everything out there as one huge, old swimming hole to plunge seriously into and come up with a fish in his mouth.

More. . .

I had my first piece in the New York Times Week in Review section today, about athlete salaries and the economy:

As long as sports have been played for money, someone has complained about how much of it the players receive. “Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way,” Albert Spalding, the owner of the Chicago White Stockings of baseball’s National League, said in 1881. “If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy stares every team in the face.”

With the economy in free fall, warnings like Spalding’s should carry more weight than the usual grumbling about overpaid jocks. And yet, big numbers continue to dance across the sports pages. The Yankees offer $140 million to free-agent pitcher C.C. Sabathia. The Knicks pay disgruntled point guard Stephon Marbury $21 million to do nothing. Wide receiver Plaxico Burress of the Giants apparently cares so little about protecting his new $35 million contract that he lets a handgun go off in his sweat pants at a New York nightclub. Didn’t he know he was lucky to still have a job in these hard times?

The message for fans: recession or not, the gargantuan athlete’s salary isn’t going anywhere. As the outfielder and free agent Manny Ramirez put it after helping power the Los Angeles Dodgers to the playoffs: “Gas is up and so am I.”

Read more. . . 

Here’s the latest installment of Thursday Morning Kicker on the New York Times’s NFL blog, The Fifth Down:

An enduring truism about the N.F.L. is that the guys who kick the ball are as disposable as a Pampers and as recyclable as today’s newspaper (the printed one). This season we have the perfect example. Just follow the bouncing punter:

Aug. 30: The Redskins cut veteran Derrick Frost and keep rookie draft pick Durant Brooks.

Sept. 1: The Packers sign Frost and cut Jon Ryan.

Sept. 9: The Seahawks sign Ryan and cut Ryan Plackemeier.

Oct. 14: The Redskins sign Plackemeier and (a few days later) cut Brooks.

And so the circle of the N.F.L. punting life is complete.

Read more. . .

The New York Times’s NFL blog, The Fifth Down, excerpts the first chapter of A Few Seconds of Panic, in which I compare myself to George Plimpton and find an NFL team willing to let me in:

Lord knows I’m no Plimpton. He was the tall, Mayflower-descended son of the founder of a white-shoe law firm. I’m the short, first-generation son of a Greek ship captain. By virtue certainly of the privileges he enjoyed but more of the personality that allowed him to capitalize on them, Plimpton was a presence. “He looked for ways in which he could make himself a ridiculous figure, and not only on the football field, but in all walks of life,” [the writer Peter] Matthiessen once said. “That made him a great storyteller.”

Still, I doubt that if Plimpton materialized as a young writer today he could pull off what he did in the late 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Those were times when celebrity sportswriters like Plimpton and Dick Schaap could forge deep, personal bonds with a Muhammad Ali or a Joe Namath and enjoy unguarded conversation at the same gatherings. Athletes today are weary of the media invasion, schooled to handle it with bromides and banalities, and generally uncurious about its practices and provenances. Breaching the levee that separates Reporter and Jock is more difficult now.

Plimpton began Paper Lion with a declaration: “I decided finally to pack the football.” Those seven words quickly established the author’s Everymanhood. The message was that the workings of pro football are such a mystery that training camp very well might be BYOB, bring your own ball. “The Detroit Lions officials had not sent me the sort of list one remembered from boys’ camp—that one should bring a pillow case, a mattress cover, a flashlight, a laundry bag, etc.”

Forty-plus years later, such naïveté isn’t plausible. We are routinely escorted inside the locker stalls and medicine cabinets, the Armani-stuffed closets and Bose-loaded Hummers of today’s professional athletes. We are fed an endless cycle of sports news and blather, in print, on television, on talk radio, on the Internet. Every fan is a columnist, every columnist an expert, every expert a media star. In NFL equipment rooms, six-packs of official game balls are stacked from floor to ceiling like cordwood. I pay $74.99 for one at retail. I won’t pack it.

Read more. . .

I had a piece in the sports section of Sunday’s New York Times about how older kickers are doing especially well this season:

NFL kickers are having their best season. And the oldest among them have been the best of all.

Defying time and logic, kickers 35 and older have converted 90 percent of their field-goal attempts — 6 percentage points better than their younger counterparts. That is a statistically significant margin, considering that in the N.F.L., every kick can be the difference between one more game and forced retirement.

Some of the aging kickers have been perfect or close to it. The Giants’ John Carney — the oldest player in the N.F.L. at 44 — has made 18 of 19 field-goal attempts, and his miss was a block. Carolina’s John Kasay, who has spent 18 of his 39 years in the league, is 16 for 16. Detroit’s Jason Hanson, 38 and in his 17th season, is 10 for 10, including a league-leading five field goals of 50 yards or longer.

Read more. . .

My friend the NFL placekicker is having his greatest season ever–again. I examine why in this week’s Sports Illustrated:

In 1983 two UNLV professors explored a pressing academic subject: the NFL placekicker. The kicker, they reported in the journal Qualitative Sociology, was a classic example of German sociologist Georg Simmel’s “stranger,” an outsider central to a group. Tiny, foreign and eccentric, the kicker wasn’t “properly socialized”  to the game. He was ignored by coaches and lampooned by writers.  And yet the team depended on him. “The kicker is despised but must be tolerated,” the academics wrote. For support they quoted interdisciplinary scholar Alex Karras (Lions lineman, Monday Night Football sideman, Mongo in Blazing Saddles): “I can’t stand those little jerks.”

A quarter century later, it’s time to consign the single-bar-facemask, I-keek-a-touchdown caricature of the kicker to the ash bin of football history. The average NFL kicker today goes 6 feet, 204—one inch taller and 20 pounds heavier than when UNLV enlightened the academy. While four of the 37 kickers currently on active rosters were born abroad, one of them is Canadian, which doesn’t count, and the other three went to high school in the U.S. With an average salary of about $1.2 million, placekickers aren’t even the lowest-paid NFL players anymore.

Read more. . .

My first piece for Play, the New York Times’s quarterly (or so) sports magazine, publishes this Sunday, Nov. 2 (but you can read it online now). It’s about the venerable Rooney family’s attempt to sell the Pittsburgh Steelers:

In 1933, a boxing promoter and horse-racing handicapper from the North Side of Pittsburgh named Art Rooney paid $2,500 for a franchise in the young National Football League. The team wouldn’t play for, let alone win, an N.F.L. championship in its first 40 years.

But then came Franco Harris and the “Immaculate Reception,” Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann and four Super Bowl titles in six seasons. The Pittsburgh Steelers earned a national following and a reputation as an elite organization. The year before his death in 1988, Rooney composed a letter on team stationery to his five sons. “Time is starting to run out on me,” he wrote. “I would like to reach some kind of an understanding so that there will be no questions or complications regarding my estate.” Rooney left each son $200,000 and an equal share of his 80 percent stake in the team.

Read more. . .

That’s the incredibly clever name I’ve given to my new weekly post on The Fifth Down, the New York Times’s NFL blog. As you might have guess from the title, I’m writing about–what else?–kicking.

My introductory post assesses the incredible season  that kickers are having thus far.

Post No. 2 is about why icing the kicker is a waste  of time.

Today’s entry begins like this:

As I was scanning the N.F.L. field-goal stats the other day — yes, I do that — something popped out. Old guys are doing remarkably well this season.

John Carney, the 44-year-old Giants kicker who is in his 20th season, has made 18 of 19 attempts—the lone miss was a ridiculous block against San Francisco — and leads the league in scoring. Jason Elam, 38, in his first season in Atlanta after 15 in Denver, is 16-for-17 with a 50-yarder. Carolina’s John Kasay, who has spent 18 of his 39 years on Earth in the N.F.L.—is a perfect 16-for-16.

Read more. . .