With Plea, Vick Sacrifices His Career

Less than two months after he turned 27 years old, Michael Vick likely ended his football career yesterday. He had no other choice.

Vick, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, announced through his lawyer that he will plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges and confess to a longtime involvement in the grisly underground world of dogfighting. That confession will almost certainly end the National Football League career of a player who just a few months ago was among the most marketable stars of America's most popular sport.

Vick agreed to make the plea in exchange for a lenient sentence, and he is expected to serve a year or two in prison, meaning he will be a free man some time in 2008 or 2009. But Commissioner Roger Goodell will not welcome Vick back to the NFL when he gets out of jail. Goodell will certainly suspend Vick from the league for at least a year beyond his prison sentence, and even if the league eventually lifts its suspension, this wouldn't happen until, at the earliest, the start of the 2010 season.

Goodell has said suspended players need to earn the right to be reinstated. In Vick's case, earning that right would entail showing genuine remorse for his involvement in dogfighting, speaking out publicly against it, and making large donations to animal rights groups. In the best-case scenario, the NFL might allow Vick back when he's 30 years old and hasn't played football in more than three and a half years. At that point, any NFL team that signed him would bear the brunt of protests and boycotts from animal rights groups. Even if the league allows him to play again, no team will want him.

And that's just based on what is known right now. Although his plea deal ensures that this won't get worse for Vick from a legal standpoint, the NFL is conducting its own internal investigation, and it could find that Vick violated the NFL's prohibitions against gambling. As part of their guilty pleas, all three of Vick's co-defendants signed statements saying that Vick supplied their operation (which they called Bad Newz Kennels) with money to gamble on dog fights. The standard NFL player contract contains a clause entitled "Integrity of the Game" that says gambling activities that "bring discredit to the NFL" can result in a lifetime suspension. There's no evidence that Vick gambled on football, but gambling on dogfighting is enough to make Goodell kick him out of the NFL forever.

Pleading guilty was the right choice for Vick, however, because the evidence against him was strong and the charges he faced were severe. Federal prosecutors said they had seven eyewitnesses prepared to testify against Vick, including all three of his former friends who were indicted along with him last month. Prosecutors were also said to be preparing racketeering charges that, with a conviction, would have put him behind bars for a decade or more.

The Falcons released a statement yesterday saying the team hadn't taken action against Vick only because the league told them not to. Falcons owner Arthur Blank has said he would have suspended Vick if Goodell hadn't ordered him to allow the league to handle the punishment.

Blank is talking tough on Vick now, but he's not blameless in what has become his team's — and the league's — biggest embarrassment. Blank signed Vick to the most lucrative contract in NFL history in 2004, and Blank is one of the people who contributed to Vick's obvious belief that the rules don't apply to him. Blank was often described as Vick's biggest fan, but in reality, Blank was Vick's biggest enabler. When Vick broke his leg in 2003, Blank said he cried when he heard the news, and Blank himself pushed Vick's wheelchair onto the sideline during a game. When it came to Vick, Blank always acted like a cheerleader, not an owner.

It's not Blank's fault that his star player was deeply involved in a crime as bizarre as dogfighting, but it is Blank's fault that he knew nothing about it until a local sheriff's office raided Vick's Virginia property in April of this year. The subsequent evidence has shown that Vick has been involved in dogfighting for at least as long as he's been an NFL player, and a smarter owner than Blank would have hired investigators to find out what kind of person Vick was off the field before committing $130 million to him.

Perhaps Blank has gotten tougher on Vick recently because the NFL now has a commissioner, Goodell, whose top priority is cleaning up the league's image. Vick's lawyers were said to be seeking an assurance from Goodell that a guilty plea would not result in a lifetime ban, but Goodell has offered no such assurance.

Still, Goodell must be relieved that Vick pleaded guilty. The only way this could have gotten worse for the NFL is if the case had dragged on and been a daily distraction during the regular season. There were reports last week that if Vick went to trial, two of his Falcons teammates would be called to testify. It's hard to imagine that a trial wouldn't have further tainted the NFL's image.

Vick and Goodell met in New York four months ago at the NFL draft as part of the NFL's announcement that it would contribute to a memorial fund for victims of the shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech, Vick's alma mater. Goodell said that Vick assured him then — just days after the raid on his property — that he was not involved in dogfighting.

That was when Vick made his only public comments about the dogfighting investigation. At the time, he blamed his cousin, Davon Boddie, who lived at the Virginia property where law enforcement authorities seized 66 dogs. Vick said of the property, "I'm never there." Boddie was not charged, and he is believed to be one of the unnamed cooperating witnesses that federal prosecutors said they would call if the case went to trial.

With friends and relatives lining up to testify against Vick, prosecutors had an incredibly strong case, and that's why Vick's lawyer, Billy Martin, told him to plead guilty. Martin is the lawyer who got former New Jersey Nets forward Jayson Williams acquitted of aggravated manslaughter in the 2002 shooting of a chauffeur at his home. If there were any way for Vick to be acquitted, Martin would have found it. Vick pleaded guilty because he is guilty.

From the day in April when authorities first found evidence of dogfighting at his property, an acquittal was the only hope Vick had to save his NFL career. Vick knew the evidence against him was so strong that an acquittal wasn't possible, so yesterday he gave up any hope of spending his 30s on the football field in exchange for an assurance that he won't spend his 30s behind bars.

Mr. Smith is a contributing editor for FootballOutsiders.com.