News-Record.com

I know everyone's turned their attention to UNC basketball (the freshmen look pretty darned good, by the way, as I'm watching the Heels take on the Illini) but did you happen to catch the comments of a former UNC football star, Dre Bly?

If not, you gotta check out this story in the Detroit Free Press.

If you don't have time to read it, here's the gist of it. Detroit stinks, Steve Mariucci has been fired and Dre Bly thinks it's mostly the fault of Joey Harrington.

I'm not saying Bly's off base here. After all, Harrington has never done much as an NFL QB. And Detroit has spent the past three drafts putting talent around him, to no avail. But isn't there some sort of NFL locker room code against publicly calling out your teammates for incompetence? I've got to wonder what Harrington ever did - aside from being terrible on the field - to engender such public disdain. Did Eric Hipple ever get this treatment back when he set the standard for awful Detroit QBs?

On a serious note, what do you do if you're Harrington? Do you duck your head, bide your time and wait until the season is over so you can just get out of Dodge? (That seems to be his method of dealing with this) Or do you fire back and remind Bly that, um, it' s not like Dre's been the second coming of Deion Sanders since he signed with the Lions for a lot of bucks?

I'm not normally one to advocate public sniping in the press, but if I'm Harrington's agent, I think I tell him to hit back and continue the mudslinging. At some point, Harrington's going to have to walk into another NFL locker room and gain the respect of his teammates. If they see him skulk away from this confrontation without a word, I don't know how he can do that.