Mourning one of the greats today...

Kenny Stabler, "The Snake", died yesterday from complications from colon cancer. The other article linked here from ESPN includes what little has been made public (completely appropriate, in our opinion: those details are none of our business), but also does a good job encapsulating the affect Stabler and those 1970's Raiders had on football fans of that era, like us here at Following Football. 

The Raiders of the '70s were the Bad Boys of football - actually, they shaped the franchise for the next forty years in that image - like the Detroit Pistons of the early '90s, the Miami Heat of a few years ago, the Miami Hurricanes of the 80s. We need those "bad guys", the counter culture going against the grain of the corporate NFL or NCAA or NBA or whomever. You want the image of 32 franchises, working independently, or you want a corporation that doles out 32 subdivisions of itself to artificially compete? You need to have someone who doesn't toe the line - whatever you think of the Belechick Patriots, we need them in the league. Or someone like them, since the Raiders aren't really relevant at the moment. 

That's another key - they've got to be good. And the Stabler Raiders were good, alright. They went to several playoffs in a row during his tenure there, including a Super Bowl victory at the end of the 1976 season over the Vikings. His teammates were and are fiercely loyal to their old field general, as the two articles linked show.

On a side note, this little tidbit was tucked away at the end of an article: 

Stabler's brain and spinal cord were donated to Boston University's Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center to support research into degenerative brain disease among athletes, according to the family.

Boston U's Encephalopathy Center has the brains of several dozen football players (all deceased, duh!) and has developed a great wealth of data on the damage football players take playing the game - we never want to tell people what to do with their lives, but we want players to know up front what they're getting into.
 

Cancer sucks.

Good things happen, even when cancer is involved. Here's a letter from Chuck Pagano, Indianapolis Colts head coach and cancer survivor, to a seventeen-year old fan he'd never met whose father had just died of cancer. Beautiful..

...and the salutes to ESPN's Stuart Scott just keep coming. If you've never seen his acceptance speech from last year's ESPYs, where he talks about how the way you live when you fight cancer determines whether you win or lose. It's a guarantee that under those criteria, Stuart Scott beat cancer - shut out win, 9 innings, no-hitter... The athletes and coaches that saluted him were nice, but it was the tributes from his colleagues that were the most heartfelt and heart-wrenching. Rich Eisen, who worked with him on Sportscenter in a revolutionary time in the business, gave what I thought was the most sincere and teary commemorations.