Is The NFL Really The Highest-Paid Crime Ring In America?
JANUARY 19, 1999: Pros And Cons: The Criminals Who Play In The NFL, Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger (Warner Books). Cloth, $24. IN THEIR MAD dash to criminalize the National Football League, the authors of Pros and Cons fail to make one crucial distinction: the difference between arrests and convictions. Consequently, their thesis is like January without the Super Bowl. It just doesn’t compute. “We are not talking about just a few bad apples here,” Benedict and Yaeger insist in their Authors’ Note. “Our research shows that 21 percent–one out of every five–of the players in the NFL have been charged with a serious crime.” Shocking, eh? It’s helpful here to skip the rest of the book and go straight to Appendix I, in which we’re treated to a “partial list of the players who were discovered by the authors to have a criminal history.” Here, among others, we find the Buccaneers’ Warren Sapp, who was charged with possession of marijuana. The charge was dropped. Then there’s the Seahawks’ Benni
