During Week 4 of the 2018 NFL season, Seattle Seahawks safety Earl Thomas suffered a broken leg on the play that ended his season.  As he was being carted off the field, he gave the middle finger...to his own bench.

Read that again.

Why would a player do that?

Simple:  money.

You see, Thomas was holding out for a better contract prior to the start of the season and didn't get it.  Therefore, when his season was cut short due to this injury, he no longer had any leverage in trying to earn additional money.  Further, who knows if his career has taken a hit based on the nature of the injury?  Some teams may not want to shell out money for his contract knowing he suffered such an injury.

The "hold out" for better contracts in the NFL is an interesting topic because it doesn't happen in certain other sports for a variety of reasons.  In fact, it doesn't happen much else in life.  If you sign a contract, you are obligated to fulfill your responsibilities assigned with that contract unless the other party or parties breach or violate the contract.  Just ask any judge.

But in the NFL, there are some factors that make you begin to understand why players might hold out.

First, take a look at the career length of football players.  It's very short.  The physical nature of the sport does not bode well for people to wish to last long in the league.  You're more likely to end your career due to an injury than to choose when it's time to retire.

Now, here's the big one.  Unlike other sports, the money owed to NFL players is not guaranteed unless it specifically says so in the contract.  So if you are cut from a team, the money stops.  That's not how it works in a sport such as Major League Baseball:  if a team releases you, they are obligated to pay you the remainder of the contract (with the possibility of a slight reduction in cost if another team signs you).

Therefore, NFL players hold out for better contracts in order to help guarantee that they will be financially secure if something happens to them physically and cannot work.  Think of it as a form of insurance.

None of this excuses Thomas.  His gesture, although understood, was probably not the best idea.  And perhaps he should have taken the smart route and continued to hold out.  But it focuses a light on something else:  the system that governs the payroll structure of football players contains a flaw based on the ability to hold out, and it has consequences on multiple sides.

Imagine if your NFL team went from being a playoff contender to a hopeless pretender because your best player decides he wants more money.  Would you immediately blame him?

The point here is that there is no clear cut answer.  There are no heroes.  This is more about debunking certain myths and asking people to take a step back and consider the bigger picture, which is one of the staples at understanding sportsmanship.

Have you ever had a bad day?  Have you ever had a bad day at work (or, if you're young, at school)?

If the answer is anything other than a resounding "yes," stop reading now because you do not exist.

Now, you may go to an office for your job.  If you don't go to an office, you probably go to some "place" to do a job.  (Even someone self-employed has to go somewhere, even in the house, to do their job.)  Do you know where people involved with sports go when they go to the office?

It may be described in a number of ways:  the field, the stadium, the park, etc.  It all means the same thing.  But if you're a professional athlete or official, your office is literally the playing field.

So if a star athlete has a poor performance, is it not fair to say he or she had a bad day at the office?  Does that give others the right to boo that athlete and make sure he or she knows that fans disapprove of their performance?

Let's put it another way:  if you're having a bad day at the office, how would you feel if people who didn't work at your office came into your office and just verbally abused you over the job you were doing?

If the answer is anything other than a resounding "bad," stop reading now because you do not exist.

The next time you're not happy with a player or an official at any level in any capacity, keep one thing in mind:  that person is trying very hard to do their best.  Your negative critique isn't helping and serves no purpose.

This past MLB season saw something happen that not many people noticed:

The World Umpire Association (WUA), which is union that represents MLB umps, rebranded as the Major League Baseball Umpires Association (MLBUA), and became the fifth of the "big five" professional team sports to have a major online presence through websites and social media.

MLB umpires join officials from the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLS as becoming more transparent to the public.  Granted, the public will probably go the way of abusing this privilege (see the #RefWatchParty that occurred during the NBA Finals), but the intent to keep the conversation open and ongoing is a fantastic thing.

The union has actually been very active on Twitter (@MLBUA), showcasing good calls by umpires in an attempt to educate the general public on how they work.  Possibly the best part of this work, however, is even more highlights for the UMPS CARE charity.

Officials in these major sports take unfortunate abuse from the uneducated public.  Players, coaches, and the media have a tendency to speak and act in ways that do not represent the educated point of view of the official.  These actions speak to a psychological issue of scapegoating, leaving the officials as the common enemy among rivals.

The officials are tired of being treated as sub-humans.  These platforms will allow their voices to be heard.  The public would be smart to recognize this and know they are proud to uphold the integrity of the game and do their job.

On August 31, 2018, a feat occurred in a baseball game between the Yankees and Tigers that doesn't happen too often:  both managers were ejected.

Aaron Boone (Yankees) was ejected by Home Plate Umpire Nic Lentz for arguing balls and strikes.  Ron Gardenhire (Tigers) was ejected by First Base Umpire Paul Nauert for arguing a check swing no-call.  Both cases contained an element of absurdity that further proves that the theater of baseball disqualifications regarding managers is not only a joke to the game, but also an abhorrent way to influence others who witness it.

Boone took exception with the strike zone of Lentz to the point where he made contact with the umpire and put on a demonstration in a catcher's crouch that did nothing more than delay the game and solidify his ignorance towards the arbiters of the game.  What Boone probably didn't know is that, according to the official plot of the zone after the game by Brooks Baseball Pitch f/x tool, Lentz really only missed two pitches the entire game.

Further, Boone was clearly upset at his team's lack of offense and used the ejection as a way to "fire up" his team.  This translates to the idea of yelling vociferously at an innocent umpire to vent your frustrations over your own team's inability to hit with the hope that your players decide to change their ways somehow.

The fact of the matter is that these arguments are rarely filled with the tirade we think they are.  Usually, the manager is yelling about how bad his team is, leaving the umpire the unfortunate target of hate where the fans usually pile on him as the bad guy for tossing the manager (assuming it's the home team).  In fact, even if the manager is yelling about his displeasure with an umpire, the confrontation has the ability to make even a professional umpire begin to question his calls, resulting in more displeasure.

On the flip side, Gardenhire was ejected when Nauert ruled that Yankees hitter Luke Voit did not swing at a pitch.  It was a close pitch and a tough call to make in real time, but the replay seemed to make me think the call was incorrect:  Voit did offer at the pitch.  Gardenhire's argument resulted in ridiculous accusations that Nauert could obviously see through, but it wasn't until the argument finished that it was clear it was a joke of an argument.

As soon as Gardenhire turned around to walk back to the clubhouse, he looked right at Voit who was standing on first base (the no-call resulted in a walk) and asked him, "Did you swing?" as he walked by, followed by a smirk .

Even Gardenhire knew this was a joke.

A few days later, Boone was hit with a one-game suspension for making contact with Lentz during the confrontation.  To quote Boone:

"I was arguing, I got kicked out of the game, I reacted how I reacted.  Unfortunately, I got a little too close, and I do regret that.  I always want to be in control of my emotions, to a degree.  But sometimes you also have to state your claim and defend certain things that are important.  I definitely shouldn't have nicked his cap."

In this brief statement, we got a cop-out about responsibility for one's actions and emotions as well as evidence of misplaced priorities.  No mention of an apology...no mention that Lentz actually was doing a good job...just a lame way of getting around talking about something where Boone was at fault.

Sorry, Aaron.  Cancer is important.  Poverty is important.  Borderline pitches are not.

We've praised Janis Meredith before for her work as a parenting coach.  She recently wrote an article on a topic we have discussed many times before:  abuse of officials.  Her thesis:  how to stop it.

Meredith begins by doing the obvious and the easy:  telling people to JUST STOP.  You would think it should be that easy, but unfortunately, it's not always that simple.  She goes on to give three steps to assist with the process:

1. Sit down.  Many parents get up close and personal (or within earshot) of officials so they are sure officials can hear them.  If you want to stop it, just find a seat and relax.

2. Imagine the official is your child.  In the vein of "treat others as you would wish to be treated," take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you observed someone berating your child in the same way that you might berate an official.  Doesn't feel so good, does it?

3. Remember who is watching.  Can you imagine what would happen if someone used their phone to record your poor behavior and spread it everywhere?  You could lose your job, among other things, if your employer didn't want you associated with the company after seeing it!

If that's not enough for you, then become an official.  After a year, you'll change your tune.  Trust me.

Put aside the tumultuous ride that was Mike Francesa's "retirement" and return to sports talk radio in New York for a second and look at where his content and opinion is headed in the future.

Francesa has been very clear that much of his future plans involve interaction with fans (as sports talk radio usually does), but it goes beyond just calling in to his show.  He has an app for fans to use.  In conjunction with this plan, he did something that he said he would never do (until they told him to do it):  join Twitter.

In an interview with ThePostGame.com, Francesa was asked about his methodology for Tweeting, and the answer is not surprising because it works:  negativity sells.

Think about it.  Whether you read, watch, or listen to any news, be it sports, politics, or any other topic that gets reported, discussed, and dissected, the negative news gets far more play than the positive news.  The report about the good deeds being done at the local animal shelter are pushed to the last segment of the local newscast so that doom and gloom can headline the show.

The same goes in sports.  The discussion about a player's inept play gets far more attention than the praise of a masterful performance.  People are looking for heads to roll or a target to point their finger when their team doesn't win, and this type of outlet feeds that.

Nobody is suggesting that sports talk in any form should be eliminated.  Debating sports is a great escape.  But perhaps all sports fans need to take a step back and savor the sport for what it is:  sport.  It's supposed to be fun and entertaining.  It is never supposed to be life and death.

There was a large chunk of my early high school years spent in front of a television with my Nintendo 64 powered up for too many consecutive hours while my friends and I became almost numb to what it took to play each game, regardless of what it was.  Eyes were glazed over; thumbs and other fingers were calloused; and bodies were thankfully still young enough not to feel the effects of being in the same position for too long, so long as the stimulation in our brains was at maximum speed.

Out of all the games we played, the one that dominated the first two years of high school for us was GoldenEye 007.

This game was revolutionary for the industry.  I'm not sure I would say it was ahead of its time, but the impact it had on how future games were developed and produced was outmatched only by the staying power it had to capture people and bring them back to the game years later, regardless that graphics had advanced significantly beyond mere polygons.

Beyond the ability to bring friends together for hours of entertainment, the single-player mode was equally as enthralling, and not just for the regular game-play.  There was something else that fueled our fire:  cheats.

Cheats were not negative in this sense.  Normally, in dealing with sportsmanship, we hear the word "cheat" and we renounce it.  However, in this case, cheats were unlockable modes that altered the coding in the game purely for entertainment purposes.  They included Paintball Mode (where every gunshot produced a paintball splatter), Fast/Slow Animation (where the non-playable characters would move at different speeds), and All Guns (which unlocked all the guns for you to use in each level).

Cheats were unlocked via a time trial.  So if you finished a level on a certain difficulty setting under a specific time, you would unlock that cheat.  And there were two cheats that probably drove most players crazy in trying to unlock them:  Invisibility and Invincibility.

Invisibility required you to complete the Archives level on the hardest difficulty level in under 1 minute 20 seconds, whereas Invincibility required you to complete the Facility level on the hardest difficulty level in under 2 minutes 5 seconds.  To say my friends and I discussed and debated and tested everything under the sun regarding how to achieve these feats is an understatement.  In fact, I'm quite surprised we didn't have laboratories set up with white boards and corresponding diagrams to help show the amount of brain power we used for this.  However, in hindsight, it definitely makes me wish we had done this and provided significant evidence of doing this in order to earn some sort of advanced college credit while still in high school...seriously, we should have written multiple dissertations.

So much of my free time would be spent trying to beat each level under the required times.  I'd restart levels immediately if I screwed up.  I'd yell at the television if I missed it by one second.  I would cripple with anxiety in my gut as I waited to see if I had finally achieved my goal, only to crumple in disappointment each time I would be significantly short.  I imagine many of my teachers would have wished I spent more time doing other things...seriously, can you imagine where I would be if I used all those hours practicing music or taking extra swings in the batting cage?

The point here, however, is that this leisurely recreational activity that took so many hours proved a very important point:  there was no need for significant competition with another person to ensure entertainment.

In Alfie Kohn's book "No Contest," which presents various arguments against competition, one section is dedicated to the idea that competition is needed to ensure entertainment.  In other words, how can we have fun without competing?  And is fun only had if we win?  When I read this section, my experiences with GoldenEye came to mind immediately because it checked every box:

• I wasn't competing with anyone (outside perhaps of myself).
• I was clearly having fun since I came back to it constantly.
  
• And even though I kept not meeting my goal, I continued to pursue it, further reinforcing the idea of having fun.
  

Perhaps it wasn't necessary to yell at the television, but when you're in your early teenage years and filled with hormones, a bit of empathy begins to allow for a small exception while in the privacy of my own home.

Ultimately, although Kohn's book is clearly to the extreme side against competition, one wonders if the objective is more so to get the reader to meet the extremist in the middle and compromise on some of the ideas regarding competition.  That's where I find myself:  understanding that competition needs to be viewed in an almost omniscient point of view, rather than being so invested in it that it is easy to lose sight of reality.

Oh, how easy it is to forget this while so invested in GoldenEye!  But the lesson is easily learned:  there are infinite ways to find entertainment without the vicious requirement of cutthroat competition.

A media piece earlier this year submitted by Today/The Today Show finally provided some statistical data we suspected all along:  we're losing a significant amount of youth sports officials at a rapid rate.

According to the National Federation of High Schools (NFHS, the governing board overseeing high school athletics), 80% of high school sports officials quit before their third year.  The most common reasons are always the verbal and physical abuse from coaches and parents.  In fact, many states are facing the crisis of having to postpone athletic events due to a lack of officials.

Fanning these flames are the threats of social media, where one call can go viral very quickly thanks to the recording capabilities on phones and other devices.  Verbal abuse doesn't just occur on the field anymore:  it's online.

The obvious solution is for people (players, coaches, parents, fans) to behave better.  High school sports are an extension of the classroom.  If you wouldn't act a certain way inside a school, don't act that way while at the field.

But another solution?  If you think you could do better as an official, there is a class waiting for you!  There are cadet courses always looking for more officials.  Why don't you sign up and show everyone your skills?

If you're of a certain age, perhaps you've seen the movie "The Matrix."  If you haven't, here is your spoiler warning...

Have you ever had a point in your life where you can't go back to things the way they used to be?  Have you ever noticed that "life will never be the same?"  That's what Thomas Anderson, a.k.a Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), experienced in "The Matrix" when he was awakened from the false reality and shown what life really was:  a barren landscape left from a war between humans and machines.

There are a lot of points in my life where I felt that way.  But when it comes to sports, I can pinpoint one moment where I experienced it:  the moment I became a baseball umpire.

Since I started officiating baseball games, life hasn't been the same.  Sure, I still root for the Yankees, but I watch umpires just as much.  It's an odd situation where my friends give me a friendly about of grief for my knowledge about umpires!

In an article in Referee Magazine back in March discussing the integrity of officials, it was pointed out that some officials don't treat other officials with respect when they're watching a game, especially if it's a game involving their kids.  For example, if I went to go see my proverbial son play a baseball game, it would be considered wrong if I berated the officials on the field when they know I'm also an official.

Officials are a special breed who are charged with upholding the integrity of competition.  Whether we're on the field or in the stands, all officials have to stand together, like a fraternity of people sharing a common bond.  We cannot complain about fans one day and then be those complaining fans the next.

That's how officials experience the Thomas Anderson effect.  Life is never the same once you step on that field!

A few months ago, I was in line to check out at the store.  There was a family ahead of me looking for any way to move faster in the line.  The mom even asked a supervisor if he could scan all the items so they could keep moving since they had a baby with them.  (The baby, for the record, was sound asleep and quite peaceful, which we all know can be a rarity!)

When the supervisor refused, instead offering the service the store has where the customers scan the items as they pick them up in the aisles in the hope of speeding up the check out process, the mother took it upon herself to continue to give a nasty look at the supervisor as she had to go through the normal process of paying for her groceries.

After I checked out, I went to leave in a long line of people with carts full of groceries, all moving as fast as they could in an orderly fashion as we all tried to get to our cars and back to our regular lives.  A young man with a soda decided to just continue to cut in front of people since he was not pushing a cart.  He saved himself a whopping three seconds by doing so.

While I was driving home, a motorcycle sped by me at a speed that could only appear to be at least 20-30mph over the speed limit on a four lane highway.  When he came up to two cars that were practically next to each other heading in the same direction, the motorcyclist decided to take his own life into his own hands and weave in and out of the cars along the dashed line that separates the lanes in order to maintain his speed and leave the slower cars in the dust.

When we think about sportsmanship, we commonly think of athletic competition as the common arena to exhibit it.  However, the same rubric of good sportsmanship can be used in so many other places in life.  As we are all trying to achieve a goal in the above examples (checking out, leaving the store, and driving home), sportsmanship can be exhibited through the observation of cooperation.  We are all trying to achieve a common objective, much like athletes have the objective to win.  However, we are not competing with or against anyone.  The goal to check out, etc., is the same for everyone, and one person's victory does not equal another person's defeat; everyone can be philosophically victorious.  Cooperation (and, thus, the necessary patience) can go a long way to help everyone achieve the same goal.

In short, there's no reason to look for an advantage to check out quicker, cut in line to get to your car, or speed past other cars to get home unless there is a true emergency.  In searching for these advantages, we actually put more people at a disadvantage because of the waste of time, the lack of guarantee that the maneuvers will pay off, and the upset nature that more people will exhibit.