Return of Vick

Matthew Roberson | Sports Editor | The USD Vista | @mroberson22

 

Every NFL season features its own set of captivating storylines. Some player always seems to rise from the dead after a gruesome injury the year before, or an unknown rookie takes the league by storm and becomes a hot fantasy football commodity. Despite being less than halfway through the season, the 2015 campaign has already given armchair quarterbacks plenty of things to discuss.

The dominant narrative surrounding professional football right now is probably the high volume of injuries that have sidelined several prominent players. With marketable, successful players like Tony Romo, Andrew Luck, and Jordy Nelson all battling the injury bug, fans are left to wonder what could have happened if their favorite team was at full strength.

Ben Roethlisberger, another member of the injured quarterback club, has played an inadvertent role in creating one of the league’s most interesting subplots. With the injury to Big Ben, his backup Michael Vick was reintroduced to televisions across the country. Perhaps more well-known for his off the field transgressions rather than his revolutionary style of play, Vick is undoubtedly one of the most divisive figures in recent sports history.

Even if you had never watched a single play of Vick’s career, you likely heard about his 2007 arrest for dog fighting. Is that a prisonable offense? Absolutely. Is it the type of act that makes most people sick to their stomach, searching for answers to questions they never thought would come up? Totally. But this is a country that loves a good redemption story, which is why part of me is very excited to see Michael Vick scrambling around the pocket again.

I vividly remember, as some of you might as well, owning a red #7 Vick jersey and torturing my friends on the GameCube by playing as the Atlanta Falcons. I have images in my head of the left-handed quarterback evading gargantuan linemen as if they were toddlers. He could outrun most defensive backs and throw a football with the speed of a big league pitcher. He was the Allen Iverson of football, the dude that your parents probably didn’t want you rooting for. But now, over ten years after Vick graced the cover of Madden 2004, here I am hoping that he can somehow regain the physical powers that made him the most watchable football player I’ve ever seen.