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Price fixing Without the power to heal, his motivation is peerlessPosted: Friday October 25, 2002 5:59 PM
Check out the top of the NFL receiver standings and you'll find a remarkable pair of twins. Buffalo's Eric Moulds and Peerless Price are Nos. 1 and 3 in yards (662, 639) and strikingly close in every other category of note. Moulds has 48 catches, Price 47. Each has five touchdowns. Each has three catches of 40 yards or more. And there's something of a zen quality between them. "I wouldn't have played today if it wasn't for Peerless," Moulds said after his 70-yard touchdown pass from Drew Bledsoe started the Bills on their way to the upset of Miami. Moulds suffered back spasms in practice four days before the game, and when he woke up Sunday he felt far too stiff to play. "Peerless told me I had to. I knew I did, but to hear it from him really helped me. I took a couple of pain pills and, I don't know how, but I made it through the game. I'm pretty woozy right now." Moulds is the perfect combination of speed and physical play from a receiver for today's NFL, and with Bledsoe pulling the trigger, he could have one of the great years a receiver's ever had. Both receivers could, actually.
What Brown means to meAl Lerner, who died Wednesday, should be remembered more for returning football to Cleveland than for helping spirit it away. Lerner spent a boatload of his money building the new stadium in Cleveland and he paid $530 million to bring the Browns back as an expansion team after Art Modell moved the team to Baltimore -- using Lerner's private jet to sign the deal. No perk was too good for Lerner's players, who may not have known him well but really appreciated how good he was to them. He could afford it. Lerner's net worth was $4.3 billion as the CEO of the MBNA credit card company. When he hired a security guy for his football franchise, he went right to the top -- to the head of the U.S. Secret Service, Lew Merletti. He was also the first owner in pro sports to provide valet parking for players at the home stadium. I've never heard of anyone else who provided free dry cleaning for players or a service in which players could drop off a grocery list at the office and have someone in the organization do the shopping and drop the groceries off at their homes. "We've made it very good for players to come and play here," he told me in the first year of the new franchise. "Now they just have to win. If they don't, there'll be some changes made." But there never were, really, even when they lost 27 of 32 games their first two years. Lerner was a Daddy Warbucks owner who spent what Carmen Policy told him to spend and never complained about it.
A new tuneThe Saints have gone marching in ... to first place. "What's happened," coach Jim Haslett told me this week, "is that all the decisions we made in the offseason are turning out right." Looking at the decisions, one by one: 1. Deuce McAllister replacing Ricky Williams. As great as Williams has been for Miami, McAllister has outrushed him by 10 yards after seven weeks, and he's doing it behind a patchwork offensive line. McAllister is also on pace to catch 57 passes. 2. Selecting defensive end Charles Grant with the draft choice acquired for Williams. Grant is already starting in Joe Johnson's place, and has two sacks, nine pressures and the ability keep double-teams off star Darren Howard on the other side. 3. Jettisoning La'Roi Glover, William Roaf and Johnson. Roaf had to go, because of bad knees (he walks like Walter Brennan) and the fact that personal stuff between he and Joe Horn caused some mayhem in the locker room. New Orleans was outbid by Green Bay for Johnson. Lucky for the Saints, Johnson is out for the season. Glover was too small to be the pile-pusher on the defensive line that Haslett wanted. Now he has Norman Hand (temporarily out with a hamstring strain) and Grady Jackson, 636 pounds of meat on the inside. 4. Installing rookie LeCharles Bentley at guard. Bryan Cox told Haslett that Bentley is already one of the best guards in the league. And Haslett said Bentley has been a great inside-run force for McAllister. Sports Illustrated senior writer Peter King covers the NFL beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Check out his Monday Morning Quarterback column every -- and you should see this coming -- Monday morning. Click here to send him a comment.
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