You shouldn’t be punished for crimes you had to commit.

Pacman Jones is a thug. He’s also a victim of circumstance. A month after his latest brush with infamy, the wayward cornerback looks all but finished in the NFL—which is grossly unfair under any classical standard of justice.

Freedom means choosing the person you’ll be tomorrow.

Fate, on the other hand, means being chosen by the person you are today.

This isn’t a plea for clemency. Jones is a police report waiting to happen, and any team that signs him deserves exactly what’s coming to it. But let’s not forget how we got where we are. In a world where the past shapes the present, it’s hard to hate a hood for living the life to which he was born.

You can’t steer a rudderless ship.

You can’t straighten a rudderless soul.

For all his enlightened despotism, even Roger Goodell is subject to the dictates of developmental psychology.

Sports fans are suckers for simple character types. Winners and Losers, Heroes and Villains—the stories we tell ourselves are populated by coherent creatures, beings responsible for their own behavior. The catch, alas, is that modern science killed the morality tale. Pacman’s brain has endured a quarter-century of abuse and neglect. To fault it for having a few ill-wired neurons would be an act of unconscionable turpitude.

It’s bad to be wrong.

It’s worse to be righteous.

Pacman is nobody’s saint, but at least he knows better than to confuse his sin for sanctity.

Culpability is a dated concept. To be guilty you’ve got to be wicked; to be wicked you’ve got to be in control. The truth is that Pacman Jones is beyond defending, for the very same reason he’s beyond reproach. Adam and Eve forsook the blessing of a supremely benevolent Creator. The rest of us can hardly be blamed for aping such a Fallen set of role models.

I'm certainly no Einstein on the concept of universal order, so perhaps you'll forgive me if I defer to the genuine article:

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the benchwarmer as well as the star. Human beings, video game characters, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

Which is bad news if you get stuck working for a deadbeat record label.

Because free will always sings the song of destiny, and anyone who argues with the chorus is bound to wind up only just saying, is all...