Pay the man!

“Pay the man!” That’s what Deion Sanders said in reference to Joshua Cribbs performance in the first half of the Cleveland/Pittsburgh games last night.
“He’s only making $600,000 a year. Pay the man!”
For some reason that statement didn’t sit well with me as I brushed my teeth and watched the halftime report on NFL Network. I’m sure Cribbs is one darn good athlete, heck he's been on my fantasy team several times. He can run and throw and catch and puts up decent stats. I don’t want to take anything away from the young man. Sure there is the question of his contract with the Browns.
But Neon Deion Sanders on the other hand? I actually found him to be an entertaining analyst for the NFL. Sure his insight isn’t the greatest (He claimed my Dolphins would be fighting for the first round pick this year, yet they are actually fighting to get into the playoffs), but he is entertaining. That is up until that comment last night. Is this really what he thinks the fans want to hear? That some player making six figures deserves more?
Maybe Deion should step out of his mansion in Texas and take a look at the world around him. Maybe he should step into the local unemployment office and look at the people who would be happy to make $600,000 over the next 20 years. Maybe Deion, and his like, need to step away from their compounds and enter the gates of the Dallas/Fort Worth National Cemetery and stand by while a mother and her children lay to rest a husband/father who sacrificed his life for $34,000 and a belief in freedom.
Now I know that we have to be cool and have our little catch phrases and maybe this year’s phase is “Pay the man!” And I might have dismissed this as Neon Deion trying to flash once more, but at the end of the report Marshall Faulk jumped in and used the phase asking Deion “Who hasn’t paid the man?” I think Faulk is a pretty darn good analyst and I usually enjoy his perspective on the game. But to join in and ask the question as a form of entertaining the American public was ludicrous.
Maybe this is just a sign that the NFL truly doesn’t understand the fans who make football the sport it is in America.
Or maybe it is America spitting in its own eye. Sports players continue to make hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars while the men and women of our armed forces make considerably less.
This, of course, is nothing new. The argument of movie stars and athletes riches versus the salaries that cops, nurses, teachers, and firefighters make has been made before. And it has bothered me before as well, but I guess I just never heard an athlete come out and say that an organization needs to “pay the man” because he’s only making over half a million dollars a year.
I guess what I’d like to see is if anyone is getting paid around here it is the American public in the form of respect. Pay some respect Deion and retire that ridiculous phrase and don’t rub in the fact that somebody who isn’t fighting to make minimum wage to put food on the table for his/her children makes $600,000 and should get more because he can entertain. Don’t ask America to pity Cribbs for making 12 times the median income.
Pay some respect!