The NFL struggles through troubling off-season

The NFL needs an extreme makeover. There’s enough crime in the NFL to make a whole new… The NFL needs an extreme makeover. There’s enough crime in the NFL to make a whole new season of “The Sopranos.”

Football felons fog the image of the NFL, covering the league’s vast success with a cloak of controversy. This shadow of shame is so dark, football’s biggest fans struggle supporting the league and its players (unless the troubled player is on said fan’s favorite team, then it’s another story altogether).

For every ray of positive sunshine (see: Ahman Green’s financial backing of a single mother’s house purchase in Houston), there is a lightning bolt of unabashed bone-headedness.

For example, take Tennessee Titans defensive back Adam Jones. We’ll call him Pacman, because that’s what he likes.

He went to West Virginia, so you get where this is going. But he has made the news for his involvement in shootings, several other felonies and misdemeanors. In fact, Wikipedia has a section in his entry called “legal troubles” to list his problems.

His misbehavior boggled – and still boggles – the minds of this nation’s best and brightest. His desire to “make it rain” at a strip club in Las Vegas during the NBA All-Star Break resulted in some people getting shot. That headliner and the other handful of aforementioned legal issues prompted a season-long suspension from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

Michael Vick, guilty or not, added another awful chapter to the longest book ever (sorry, Bible, dictionary and “Harry Potter” fans). The book is “Professional Athletes Who Don’t Get Enough Satisfaction from Millions of Dollars in Salary and Endorsements, So They Gamble.” It’s a compilation piece written by, among others, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and Pete Rose. Lord knows it won’t be featured on Oprah.

But the kind of gambling – betting on dog fighting, not playing cards or even betting on sports – made it far worse. Other than your local mailman and probably Karl Malone, who doesn’t like dogs?

I know a lot of people who don’t like Vick. It’s hard to like someone who bets on dogs killing each other.

The list just keeps going.

The Cincinnati Bengals are considering renaming themselves the Ohio State Prison System Bengals.

No slouch in the crime department, Chris Henry, a former West Virginia Mountaineer, changed his jersey number from 15 to OH-298178475.

And while they haven’t announced a move to a maximum-security penitentiary yet, the Bengals are, in fact, holding training camp in the prison yard.

But Jones, Vick and the Bengals are just the tip of the iceberg. And it couldn’t happen to a better league. It’s a crying shame.

The product is fine. The product is the best-run, most competitive professional sport in America. The NFL generally features five or six Super Bowl contenders in each conference.

Think about it – when was the last time you could list 10 to 12 Major League Baseball teams with the honest-to-God potential to win the World Series year in and year out?

When was the last time you could list 10 to 12 NBA teams?

Still, it’s difficult to host a Super Bowl from Alcatraz, so Goodell and company had better find out how to fix the problem before it comes to that.

I want to know: Why does the NFL produce so many players with problems? Is it the money, the fame, the game or American culture?

I’d guess it’s a combination of all of those.

We all know the NBA carries America’s bad-boy image because of its Pay-Per-View slugfest between Ron Artest, Stephen Jackson and the city of Detroit, but the NBA isn’t throwing around countless suspensions for off-court legal issues seemingly every day.

The biggest crime in the NBA this summer came when the Memphis Grizzlies decided to pay Darko Milicic with money. No one even came close to getting hurt, at least physically.

Jokes aside, Americans already have the NBA pegged as the thug-life league, the league where wealthy criminals happen to play a sport. It’s a horrible stereotype. Ask your dad or grandpa what he thinks of the NBA.

Then ask them what they think of the NFL. The NFL is America’s league. Your relatives’ answers will reflect that.

But you have to remember that the NFL sports the biggest off-the-field record among pro sports in recent years, and there are plenty of active players to pick from: an alleged dog-fighting gambler, an alleged accessory to murder (but only outside of Baltimore), plenty of drug dealers and users and plenty of guys caught carrying illegal weapons. Just saying “Pacman Jones” and/or “Chris Henry” implies a crime has been committed.

Good thing Drew Bledsoe is out of Dallas. I was convinced one of the Cowboys linemen was going to commit murder right on the field.

All of this criminal activity begs the question: What is it about professional football players that makes them do so many dumb things? And what can the NFL do to remedy its negative image?

Whatever Goodell does, it will have to be strong and swift, or the NFL could be headed down toward the same image as the NBA.