Atticus Smith

Jamal is gone. To Denver. Ouch.

I really hope AJ knows what he's doing.

We can justify this in all sorts of ways, not the least of which is the fact that they Bolts went 12-4 last year in games without Jamal. But still he's still one of the top NTs in the game, when healthy.

Its tough sometimes being an NFL fan. Its true that every year brings new hopes, and with all that can happen in the league almost every team has a shot at the playoffs in the beginning of the year, and a smaller but still significant group has a real shot at hoisting the Lombardi trophy at the end. The trade off for this having to accept the reality that this is a year to year league and loyalty and family are just words without much substance.

Warren Sapp, a guy who cuts through the crap, once spoke to NFL films about this reality. He said (paraphrasing here):

"People say football is a family. It's not. If a family is walking and someone, a little kid maybe, falls behind, we go back for him. Not in football. In football we keep walking. Football is a fellowship of men. If you can't hack it you get left behind."

Its amazing how much I, and many Charger fans I know, have come to accept this reality. The proof is in how relatively easy it was to accept the LT decision. We mourned, we remembered, we looked back whistfully, but we were already looking forward to who was going to take his place. Because we had to, because that's how this works.

Consider all the players players which the Chargers have left by the side of the road in recent years.

Donnie Edwards. Lorenzo Neal. Keenan McCardell. Ben Leber.

Marlon McCree. Matt Whilhelm. Eric Parker.

Igor. Shelton. Forney. Chris Chambers. Cromartie. Kassim. Hart.

Michael Turner.

Drew Brees.

Jamal Williams.

LT.

I'm sure there are others I've forgotten. And the list will grow even longer with each year that passes.

True, a lot of these players left of their own accord for free agency. Many had injury problems, or were on the downslope of their careers or had regressed in their play or had pissed off the wrong people.

AJ Smith is the man who must make all these decisions. Most, I would argue, have been the right decisions.

There's a line in "To Kill a Mockingbird" about the fact that some people were born to do our difficult jobs for us. I sometimes think of that line when the Chargers release an impact player that we love, usually because he's become too expensive to justify his decreasing levels of productions. For the Chargers, AJ Smith is that person, making the tough decisions which we all realize have to be done but don't want to make.

(Now, I want to be very clear that I'm not trying to equate Atticus Finch, one of the great noble heroes in the American Canon, to AJ Smith, who makes millions doing a job that many of us naively think would be a dream come true. That would be a hyper-Simmonesque move of idiotic equivocation.)