Gay NFL player overlooked by teams

"If Sam doesn't land a spot with an NFL club he could try and sign with the Canadian Football League. His CFL rights are owned by the Montreal Alouettes who currently have former NFL star Chad Johnson on their team."

He won't end up having a football career. No team in either league would want the media circus and issues that go with having someone like him on their team. It would create to big of a distraction.

-J.

I disagree. I think most teams would love the exposure they'd get for the first week or so. And most, north of the border atleast, would realistically expect that almost all commentary after that first week would have to do with his on field performance.

Do you think a gay player would be more of a distraction that the various criminal or domestic violence type distractions created by so many current NFL players?

Honestly, yes. When other players cause disruptions based on violence, drugs, etc. they are dealt with by the team and/or league and are more often than not suspended. I will admit that the NFL Network will further break down said incidents till no one wants to hear about them, but for the most part, it goes away.

That having been said, every aspect about Sam being on the team will be dissected in great detail. He won't get treated like 'just another player' whether we all think he will or not. The issue will keep popping up because we know that there will be some players unhappy about the whole situation as well.

Also, any team that brings him on will have to tread very carefully indeed. If the day arises that he would need to be disciplined, anything levied against him will automatically come under scrutiny from all sides, with someone yelling 'discrimination' or 'hate crime' or 'homophobic' eventually.

It's all a powder keg that no team would want to have ignited.

Even Chad Johnson couldn't generate that stuff.

-J.

On the other hand, after St. Louis drafted him, sales of their jersey with Sam's name on it broke the record for draftee signing.

Much ado about nothing. If you believe the statistics that 10% of the population is gay then every team in the league has 4-5 gay players already playing that haven't come out yet.

I think that he just isn't good enough for the NFL. Maybe the CFL would be more appropriate for someone of his talent level.

But he's gay! You have to let him play whether he's good enough or not! Oprah will launch a human rights complaint against the team if they don't!

Obviously not. That fact that he isn't playing is kind of the whole point of the story.

Entirely possible. Perhaps there will soon be a time where being gay isn't something that players have to feel the need to hide and then we will not see headlines like this. It seems ridiculous to me that the focus on this player being cut is on his personal life rather than the contribution he could make on the field.

Or,

Maybe Sam isn't as good a football player as he thinks he is, sexuality aside?

How many other players got cut this week and there wasn't any of the hand wringing and recriminations? FFS the media should get over it, a football player got cut that's it, nothing more.

The Rams wouldn't have wasted a draft pick on Sam if they didn't think that he might have paid out for them. They're a business and they do these things if they think it'll help them win games. Sam was in the last round of cuts so he did show them that he had something of value for the team, even if after his training camp they decided that he was just a bit too far away from being a pro league player.

Credit to the Rams players too who treated Sam like one of the guys and stood up for him when some dipshit from ESPN tried to stir up trouble over the shower room. There's certainly a lot of dumb-ass athletes everywhere but the reporters that cover sports these days seem to all be a uniform bunch of complete cretins.

He became damaged goods the minute he was drafted not because of anything he did but because of how the media hyped his sexual preference rather than his athletic ability.