You may not have noticed but the NFL has decided to take some time out of its busy Super Sunday schedule to mark the centennial of the birth of Ronald Reagan, the celebration of which is going to overwhelm the weekend news programs elsewhere on your television dial. (Richard Nixon's centennial is two years down the line, and he was a real NFL fan, and so the mind boggles at what the League may concoct for that milestone.) What this has to do with football in 2011, of course, is anybody's guess. Maybe Commissioner Goodell will cease his herculean labors at Just Getting A Deal Done and arrange to ship some NFL tschotkes to Iran.


By way of historical comparison, the centennial of Franklin D. Roosevelt's birth took place in 1982. The halftime entertainment at that year's Super Bowl -- the telecast not yet having been blown up to 96.5 hours -- consisted of Up With People singing a medley of Motown hits. Somewhere between those two events is something that says a great deal about this nation, not much of it encouraging. Maybe the NFLPA should change its acronym to PATCO and eliminate all confusion.