This off-season better stay as fun as it’s been in the past two weeks. The draft has practically taken a backseat to all the fun. Massive trades, angry Sam Bradford, Johnny’s descent into a human trainwreck and now, of all things, another chapter to the deflategate saga. Lastly, the topic seen above: Josh Norman is now a Redskin. Oh Goody. When the OBJ/Norman kerfuffle happened it was a bad week for me since I was at my future in-laws house handling Christmas stuff, and I simply didn’t have the time to do a thing about it, so I’ll say my piece on that now.

OBJ acted like a giant baby jerkoff that game and I was glad to see him get suspended. It was pretty disgusting to watch the future of the franchise acting like a human missile after a play. I imagine it was incredibly cathartic to fans of other teams to see the big hype machine that is OBJ basically single-handedly set back his #brand in 60 minutes. Now instead of being the most electrifying new WR in the league, he’s a talented but hotheaded asshole who other CBs will go out of their way to provoke because it clearly works. If Beckham wants to be as great as he says, he needs to channel his competitive aggressive nature into his game, and beat people the right way. Obviously I hope that happens. I think most Giants fans were in agreement with this general sentiment when it happened. We aren’t going to turn our back on him because we know he’s better than that and we want to see him be so.

I was pretty annoyed however that Josh Norman pretty much got viewed almost blamelessly in the whole thing because he wasn’t that much better. He body-slammed OBJ early in the game and while he wasn’t as bad as Beckham overall, that doesn’t make him a saintly victim. He was just the lesser of two evils. I also don’t remember an apology coming out of him afterward, where OBJ did attempt to vocally take responsibility for his actions. In fact I think I remember him continuing to run his mouth. At least he did get fined. Safe to say I came out of that whole mess thinking less of them both. I’m not looking forward to them playing each other twice a season now, if only for the inevitable coverage and constant reminders of the incident. Part of me is interested though, because if you actually watch the game, Beckham was really only beat mentally. That counts as beat for sure because it took him out of the game, but Beckham can burn the shit out of Norman when he tries to. He just can’t let Norman into his head.

From a football standpoint, it feels like a classic Skins free agency overpay a’la Haynesworth (probably not that bad though). Part of me thinks I can’t criticize it because the Giants gave Olivier Vernon and Janoris Jenkins similar absurd money but really, does anyone think a 28 year old corner who has had one breakout year is worth that kind of money? Josh Norman is already approaching football middle age, that point in a career where a player could last another decade or drop dead the very next week. He’s had one meaningful season as a cog in an already excellent defense. The Panthers and Ron Rivera seem built to make DBs look good. On top of that they have a killer defensive line (which always makes it easier on DBs) and an all-pro linebacker helping out. Norman won’t have that level of support in Washington. I don’t think Norman will be bad in DC, I think he’ll be fine. But that is probably his ceiling now. Fine. Not great. Just decent at best. I think the Skins get two decent years out of him with a questionable year in there somewhere. Then the wheels come off. He’s certainly not worth what the Skins paid him, at least not as of this writing.