When good quarterbacks go bad, do they still deserve our worship?

His head really is that shape, you know. You could call it "bulbous".

American football is bloody brilliant, and it knocks most other sports into a cocked hat. Formula One? That’s just a bunch of millionaires playing fancy Scalextric. The BBC was right to get rid of it – F1 on TV barely works as a screensaver, let alone an actual sport. Pole vault? The only reason anybody pays attention is because they all look silly when they get it wrong. But American football – ah, now there’s a game. Violent as well as tactical, it’s got something for everyone – and nowhere is this more evident than in the crown princes of the sport, the quarterbacks. In the space of just a few seconds, these athletic ubermensch have to see through the opponents’ strategic bluffs, reorganise their entire team’s positions, pirouette gracefully out of the clutches of the bellowing tackler who’s ploughing towards them like a fleshy express train, and then throw an inch-perfect pass sixty yards down the field.

In a world full of impossibly shiny helmets and immaculately-coiffured cheerleaders, these men are gods among mortals. In the eyes of the fans, they can do no wrong. But what about the eyes of the law? And what happens when those eyes overlap in big gooey optometrist’s nightmare?

Last week saw the return of Michael Vick to the NFL’s elite ranks, as he signed a cool hundred-million-dollar deal to play for the Philadelphia Eagles. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because in 2007 – while he was the darling of the Atlanta Falcons – Vick was uncovered running an illegal dog-fighting ring. Oh, and just to add a little spice to the story, they electrocuted the animals that lost. Yet now here he is, his prison stint over and done with, and all is forgotten. Even a shooting at his birthday party couldn’t throw things off course. Meanwhile, Ben “Rapey” Roethlisberger looks set to become one of the best-performing quarterbacks of recent times, despite the murky shadows cast by the many sexual assault accusations against him. How do they get away with it?

When you’re as great a player as these two undeniably are, you become a hero in the eyes of thousands. As a fan, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that someone who’s single-handedly transformed your team from a pathetic potato gun into a mighty VICTORY CANNON could also be an absolutely horrendous person, someone who in any other career would have been kicked out long ago. When you hear, yet again, that Roethlisberger has been accused of getting a woman blind drunk and locking her in a nightclub toilet with him, you definitely want him to get properly punished for it. But a less rational and much louder part of you wants to see him nail another sixty-yard score, so you try not to think about the other thing. You make excuses – like in this astonishing piece from Michael Tomasky, who claims that since “you can’t be a great athlete at that level and be living an effed up life,” Vick’s prowess on the field must in itself be evidence that he’s reformed. Unlike Tomasky, I do have the courage to swear properly and so I’m not afraid to say that his argument is a soggy, gently pulsating sack of absolute bullshit.

However, looking again to that ever reliable mirror of public sentiment – the internet commenter – you can see that plenty of people share this desperate desire to see their heroes remain untarnished. In Vick’s case, many are praising him as a reformed character, someone who started off as a good guy, went wrong, but now has turned his life around and is even greater than he was in the first place:

• how about considering the positive idea that our corrections system MAY occasionally work the way it’s supposed to instead of just complaining at someone who’s trying to change his life for the better, for whatever reasons.
• he did his time and I am sure he is very sorry for what he did
• He paid his debt to society.  Leave him alone.  To all of you who think he has done nothing you should do better research on the things he has done.  he got congress to put tougher sanctions on those who are doing this.

Maybe Vick really has changed his ways. Maybe he hasn’t. Amongst the choking haze of the PR smokescreen, it’s impossible to tell – though it looks like the tight cocoon of advisers, lifestyle coaches and other babysitters that the NFL has woven around him will leave him with no choice but to toe the line from now on. As appealing as this ‘changed man’ narrative is, some fans took the even simpler, and far uglier, step of arguing that what he did was fine all along:

• Go Vick!  I don’t give a flying phuck about those dogs with NO SOULS!!!
• People get so damn emotional over dogs. The US is getting too soft.
• Well, speaking as a Philly guy, I can tell you that we just really do not care about whether he is reformed, although we would like to tghink so. And some of us are wondering exactly why dog-fighting is a Federal crime.

(the above come from Vick’s fan forum, the Sherdog MMA forum, and the comments on Tomasky’s story above)

Yet for all the heartless fans out there who don’t care for dogs, there’s far more who have even less respect for women. The responses lying below every Roethlisberger story, festering like the rotten puddle at the bottom of the restaurant’s bins, don’t only show off just how little these fans understand sexual assault, or can sympathise with how a victim of such a crime would feel. They go out of their way to pour hot, violent hatred all over the women involved:

• I think the girl is just out for money,Ben could get about any girl he wants why would he have to rape someone.Ben I do agree you need to pay more attenion to your fans but good luck Ben and as for the girl if u are making this up just think about all Ben’s young fans like my son who idols him and how hard it is to explain this to them
• who cares. she is just a fame whore and a slut who didn’t get her way so she cried rape. like a million other girls.

And finally there’s this particularly delightful nugget, in response to the news that one of Big Ben’s alleged victims ended up leaving college because she found the attention from the press and her classmates unbearable:

• The tramp ruined her own life. She wasn’t raped. Who cares if he touched her boob? She shouldn’t have been in a club anyway, she’s under 21. I doubt Ben did anything but if she didn’t want to deal with the press, she shouldn’t have filed charges. Maybe after Ben gets his third super bowl ring, he can give that to her to make up for the alleged boob rub.

(these ones are from WXPI and TMZ)

But look, he has his own sandwich! His OWN sandwich. He must be one of the good guys!

The Roethlisberger ones in particular show just how far fans are prepared to go in order to desperately sweep aside the fact that Ben’s been accused of three sex crimes in eighteen months. Of course – those women must all just be in for the money! The problem is, some of those same fans happen to serve the judicial system: like Jerry Blash, the first officer on the scene of the Georgia toilet case and the only one to directly interview the quarterback. Blash had to resign when it emerged that while doing so he’d told the distraught girl and her friends that “the fucking bitch is drunk” and that they should go home, because “Mr Roethlisberger has a lot of money” and a police report would be a “waste of time.” Not one to miss out on a good opportunity, he also snapped a few photos of himself with Big Ben. You know – a treasured memento. Something to show the kids. Here’s Daddy, and here’s the sex attacker he helped to avoid jail!

Quarterbacks are the most precious asset a team can have. Good ones are coddled from high school onwards – repeatedly informed of their own brilliance, they can easily start to think they’re invincible. That their performance on the field gives them a free pass to do whatever they like outside it. This means that, sometimes, good quarterbacks are bad people. Sometimes, good decorators are bad people too. So are good HGV drivers, or copywriters. But they don’t get to enjoy the protection that these superstars do – they don’t have the collective unconscious of thousands of devout fans on their side, each of them attached with an intense, primal adulation. When a big name gets into trouble with the law, rather than delude themselves into thinking that it must all be some sort of conspiracy and going out of their way to discredit absolutely everyone who dares suggest otherwise, the fans need to ask themselves: what if he just sold plumbing supplies for a living? Even if he was the best plumbing supplies salesman in the whole country, would you still take his side?

And would you want to have your photo taken with him afterwards?