Details of the worst kept secret in the National Football League have finally been released: that the NFL secretly lobbied teams to draft Michael Sam. Yet, until now, no one knew the Ram’s pay-off. What did the NFL offer the Rams to entice them into drafting a pass rusher onto a team already overloaded with pass rushers?
Well, thanks to longtime NFL reporter/analyst Howard Balzer of The Sports Xchange, we now have an answer to that question:
“On Wednesday, the Rams were named the subject of this year's edition of "Hard Knocks," the HBO show that takes you inside training camp with an NFL team, but according to a tweet from veteran NFL journalist Howard Balzer, they could have been in the show two years earlier were it not for a behind-the-scenes deal with the NFL.
Balzer, citing "sources," tweeted Wednesday that the Rams avoided the 2014 edition of "Hard Knocks" because of their decision to select Michael Sam, the first openly gay player to declare for the NFL draft, in the seventh round that year.
"Sources say NFL agreed not to have Rams on Hard Knocks in 2014 if they drafted Michael Sam," Balzer tweeted.
Balzer clarified the tweet several hours later, stressing that it was a predraft arrangement between the league and team to save face and insure that the first openly gay player to declare for the NFL draft did not go undrafted.
"That's correct," he tweeted. "Rams didn't want Hard Knocks even without Sam. League concerned he wouldn't be drafted. Deal made."
Neither the NFL nor the Rams responded to emails for comment. But none of this shocked Sam. Sam, who has been out of the NFL since October 2014 and is currently under contract with the Montreal Allouettes of the CFL, retweeted Balzer to make that point.
"I'm not surprised at all," Sam tweeted.”
And, frankly, neither should anyone else. The NFL completely allowed LGBT activists to overtake it, as evidenced most recently by their threats to take the Super Bowl away from states such as Arizona and Georgia, in retaliation for those states passing Freedom of Religion laws that the NFL deems “anti-gay.”
Of course, the LGBT activist talking point that comes out of all this will be that the NFL is so homophobic that they needed to bribe one of their teams to draft Sam. In reality, based on everything Sam did, or didn’t do in his brief stint as an NFL/CFL football player, Sam proved those scouts and General Managers exactly right by showing himself as an untalented and unathletic “tweener” (player with no defined role, not a gay slur) with no spot in the NFL.
The fact of the story, which will of course be buried, is that contrary to being “so homophobic they wouldn’t draft a gay player,” the only reason why Michael Sam got drafted at all was because he was gay.
