The Road to Redemption: Richie Ross' Journey to Football Salvation

Some say the path to greatness comes from traveling a road less taken. For Richie Ross, that path has sent him from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the ocean, and everywhere in-between.

Ross, a 2006 graduate from the University of Nebraska-Kearney, recently made his debut with the Omaha Beef of the Indoor Football League, catching a touchdown pass and solidifying his position on the team. But it wasn’t that long ago that Ross was donning the NFL logo on his jersey instead of the Beef logo.

During his career at Kearney, Ross set multiple school records and impressed not only the coaches, but NFL scouts as well. Upon graduating, Ross entered himself into the NFL draft and the whirlwind that was to be his NFL future was set to begin.

“When the draft came around, I got a couple looks. In the seventh round, the Houston Texans were looking to draft a wide receiver and they were looking at myself and David Anderson from Colorado State,” Ross said. “Unfortunately, they chose him over me, but decided to sign me on as undrafted free agent a couple of weeks later.”

So Ross traded in his Loper gear for a Houston Texans helmet, where he eventually was signed to the team’s practice squad. The marriage between the Texans and Ross was short lived, however, as he was waived from the team half way into the season. Despite the heartbreaking news, Ross’ NFL dream continued when the Tennessee Titans picked up his rights only a couple of weeks later.

With a new start and a new team, Ross packed his bags and headed for Tennessee. Team management informed him that while he was on their top priority list, that he was to be sent to the NFL Europe for developmental and evaluation reasons.

Then all four walls came crashing down on top of Ross’ NFL aspirations.

“During training camp for Europe, I was running a vertical route against one of the cornerbacks. The pass was underthrown, so I cut off my route and jumped up to get the ball; it’s something I’ve done thousands of times in my football career. When I was up in the air, the back came forward and his knee hit my knee and it broke my patella in two,” Ross said. “The doctors say it was truly a freak accident in the way it went down.”

So instead of heading over to Europe with his Tennessee teammates, Ross was on his way to Birmingham, Ala., to take care of his broken patella. Doctors told Ross that the contraction in his quadriceps from jumping up to catch the ball, combined with the force of the contact between knees, forced the break of the bone, something that is not too common in football injuries. For the next three months Ross was on crutches watching and wondering if his team would still want him.

Once Ross was able to ditch the crutches, he began working out and rehabbing with a new metal plate that was essentially screwing his leg together. As time progressed, however, the pain didn’t subside, even though team officials thought the rehabilitation process should be going quicker than it had been.

“They kept telling me during my treatment and workouts to fight through the pain, but the pain never went away. About seven to eight months after my procedure, I started developing a knot in my knee that shot pain throughout my leg. Doctors in Birmingham couldn’t explain to me what this knot was and all of the X-rays I had done showed nothing,” Ross said. “So I continued to push through the pain, but I knew something wasn’t right.”

Eventually the pain became too much for Ross and he demanded an answer from the staff that had been treating his surgically repaired knee. He was told that the knot in his knee could be a bone growth, but that it shouldn’t be affecting him nor should it be painful. Doctors then suggested to Ross that they go back into his knee, shave the bone growth, and hopefully that would relieve him of any pressure.

This was his third procedure on his knee in just over a year from the time it happened. What doctors found in his knee wasn’t a bone growth, nor was it anything that Ross was doing wrong in his rehab.

“After the third surgery, the doctor came in and said to me ‘I think we finally have this thing beat.’ He then told me that the painful knot in my knee was a stitch that the surgeons had left in my knee, which formed scar tissue around it. It was a very simple mistake, but it cost me a year of pure playing time,” Ross said. “I was going on almost two years in this Birmingham facility and I wanted to be back playing football.”

Not only did the surgical mistake cost Ross practice and playing time, but it also cost him his spot on the Tennessee roster.

“Tennessee looked at my progress and felt that I should be further along than where I was. They basically thought that I had given up and that I had nothing left,” Ross said. “They thought I was milking the injury so I could keep getting a paycheck from the team, which is completely untrue. Why would I go through all of these surgeries and rehab so I could make $600 a week? I wouldn’t do that.”

So the team released Ross in 2008 and he was left to wonder what would become of not only his NFL, but also his entire football future. Ross eventually left the confines of the Birmingham facility to attempt a comeback into the sport that he had made his living for years.

Within the next year, Ross would compete in tryouts for teams in the Canadian Football League (CFL) and other leagues, and came away with nothing positive to show for his efforts.

“Some of these tryouts had 600 wide receivers and my tryout consisted of me running two routes and one 40-yard dash, and that was it. These tryouts were also ones that players paid to be at and the whole situation was just bad,” Ross said. “I was living out of my suitcase and I was running out of options. It was then that I had to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my career and where it would go from here. I knew I had something left, but I felt empty, like something was missing.”

Ross said that he even had thoughts of coming back to the college where he re-wrote the record books, to help out with the coaching staff. But with that thought behind him, Ross made the decision to move back to Lincoln, Neb., to be with his family that had been waiting for him during his NFL career.

That empty feeling, however, wouldn’t go away and left Ross wanting more as life continued to tread through murky waters.

“When I came back to Lincoln, I just wanted to find a job, to work and support my family, but everywhere I looked, the door was closed,” Ross said. “I was of no worth to anyone, including myself.”

That is when the opportunity to play for a team from up Interstate 80 came knocking on Ross’ door. The Omaha Beef were holding open tryouts and Ross, with nothing on his plate and a chip on his shoulder, wanted to prove that he could still play.

Ross made his way to Omaha and played his way onto the team’s roster for their exhibition game against the St. Charles Cyclones. Only the players who stood out in this game would be offered a spot on the team’s official 2010 roster.

On the field, Ross was easily noticeable as one of the team’s tallest wide receivers. Early in the second quarter, Ross went in motion and ran a fly pattern up the middle of the field, finding open space for an easy touchdown catch and a celebratory back flip in the end zone to cap off his first career IFL touchdown and first career touchdown celebration.

His play earned him a spot on the Beef’s 2010 roster and gave Ross a glimmer of hope that he could once again become the receiver he once was.

“Right now I am nowhere where I used to be, my route running is very rusty and my feet are pretty clumsy when working against corners. I mean, it has been close to three years since I have had any type of football action,” Ross said. “But one thing hasn’t been lost is my ability to go up and catch the ball. I can still do that with the best of them.”

While looking back on his short-lived career with the NFL, Ross said he has no regrets with how his life has gone, but he did accredit some of his downfalls to a bad attitude and offered some advice to fellow Division II players with pro football dreams.

“If I could say anything to the kids coming from a small school, I would say that you need to continue to get better every day and work constantly on becoming the best player you can be,” Ross said. “That was one of my problems when I was signed by an NFL team. I assumed that once I was in the NFL, that only the best players play in the league. So instead of working on my route running and physical conditioning, I was too worried about the players ahead of me who were getting more opportunities than I was. In the end, my bad attitude about my playing situation set the course for where I am now. Regardless of your position, you can’t let your spot in somebody else’s shadow affect who you are”

“You can ask anybody, any quarterback I played with at UNK, that I was always the first to blow up their phone in the summer trying to get them to go to the park, go to the field, to work out routes and just throw. Somewhere along the line, I lost that in myself and I’m trying to get it back.”

The road to redemption for Ross has been filled with potholes and obstacles, but it’s nothing that he hasn’t dealt with already – and he isn’t taking anything for granted.

“I’ve seen up close that you can be here today and gone tomorrow. It’s something that has been on my shoulders and I want to take my time with the Beef day by day, using the practice time to become the receiver that I once was and the one that I know I can be,” Ross said.

For now, the former Lincoln High and UNK star will don the orange and black and suit up in front of 5,000 fans shaking cowbells. While it’s far from the bright lights of the NFL, something is better than nothing, no matter what league you play for.

The "List": Why Does It Exist?

Well, it has been a solid two or three months since the end of the JMC 425 class and my last blog. I have taken a sebaticle this summer because I wanted to relax from everything that was school. I probably should have been blogging more to work on my writing, but it is what it is. This is why I am writing now, to work on my writing as school is no more than two weeks away. Today I am going to write about a topic that has been bugging me lately and does not seem like it will go away any time soon, and that is the phantom 2003 steroid "list" compiled by the MLB Union to determine if they needed stronger testing in baseball.

This list first became public issue back in March/April, when an SI report flooded the sports newswires stating that Alex Rodriqguez, star third baseman for the New York Yankees, was on this list of 104 players in a 2003 voluntary testing session who tested positive for a perfomance enhancing drug. Now there are a couple huge problems I have with the release of A-Rod's name, and his only at that time, from this supposed "secret" list which was only compiled because players volunteered to get tested for the sake of baseball: 1) the players agreed to be tested on the basis that once the research was complete, that the list would be disposed of and no one would know and 2) what some or most of the players tested positive for during this 2003 test, was not illegal to take according to MLB testing policies during that time. So with the leak of Rodriguez's name to the media, someone knew the contents of the list and they were releasing that information at their own will.

Since then more than a half dozen names have been leaked from this list of 104 players, culminating with the names of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, two key components of a Boston Red Sox team that captured World Series glory in 2004 and again in 2007. I remember sitting in my hotel room in Las Vegas when I heard of the news on ESPN and I brushed it off as nothing that surprised me. As time passed, however, I started to think about the contents of the list and those who have been thrown under the bus at the expense of the media. It wasn't until I listened to Mike Greenberg this morning on "Mike and Mike In the Morning" that it struck me that while these names were released as supposedly being on the list, that it was never reported what they tested positive for. In the case of Ortiz and Ramirez, an anonymous individual who is leaking names reported that these two names were on the list, without any information as to what they tested positive for to trigger the positive test.

The response has been curious to a spectator such as myself. Ortiz was immediately approached and questioned by members of the media as to why he would be on the infamous 2003 list, to which Ortiz responded that he wanted to gather facts before he addressed the media. Because just like the rest of us, Ortiz had not been told what he had tested positive for, let alone that his name was actually on this list. When Ortiz came out this past Saturday, it was just him, no agent, no left-hand man telling him what to say, no piece of paper to read off of. He also had the backing of the MLB Union president who stated that he was tired of this list and that the 104 was an inflated number to the real number, which is more around 83-96. Ortiz maintained his innocence, claiming that he was careless in purchasing LEGAL vitamins and supplements, but that he never purchased or took anabolic steroids. Now the talk of the town is whether or not to believe Ortiz and his reasoning for being on the list.


My question is, where is Manny Ramirez and why is no one on his dreadlocks asking for a reason why he was on the list? As far as I'm concerned the whole steroid talk has been about Ortiz and none of it has surrounded Manny, who was already suspended 50 games this season for a positive test, in which he tested positive for a female fertility drug, commonly used by males coming off of a steroid cycle. But for some reason, people don't want to put 2 and 2 together and put Manny under the spotlight.

Regardless of whether or not this occurs, I feel that no names should have been leaked from this 2003 list where players tested with the promise that nothing would become of it. I also have a problem with players being accused of using PEDs when they weren't illegal to use in baseball. Back in 2003, the supplement ingridient "nandronine" was legal to purchase and ingest according to baseball policy. Since 2003, it has become illegal and is now on the list of banned substances. For example, Mark McGwire was accused of taking an anabolic steroid during the peak of his career in the late 90's and early 2000s, but what people don't care about is that this steroid was not illegal to take during this time period. This means nothing to the public, however, as any use of a PED constitutes instant infamy, a bold "x" stamped on their forehead, a cheater for eternity.

As for this list, it needs to be demolished and the person or people responsible for the leaks needs to be prosecuted and sent to jail. The players who agreed to test for this list agreed to do so with the protection that it would be vaporized once completed. But once the federal government became involved with baseball, steroids, and BALCO, it confiscated the list and ever since then, has been responsible for the leaks. Destroy this list and get it out of baseball because it is a disgrace that players who thought they were safe now have to fear for their reputation because of an individual hellbent on ruining baseball, one name at a time.

Where Has Everyone Gone?

This is what I thought would happen to the blogging class as soon as summer hit. I know it has been hectic, with people moving and getting back with old friends, but I am still surprised that there hasn't been a post since May 7th.

Well I will be the first to post back and just give an update on my summer. Omaha has been very boring, but I am currently conducting research for a 10 page paper due May 20 for my online class. Wow, someone here forgot that summer was a time to relax, especially after taking 19 credit hours. But what can I say, I want to graduate in four years.

So I hope everyone is having a safe summer so far, I have already seen my fair share of tragedy while here in Omaha and may I send my prayers and condolences out to the Ford family of Ainsworth. Not only did the Ford's lose their 16-year-old daughter, Ashley, in a car accident, but two days later, their son Andrew, 21, died in a car accident. I don't know how anyone can handle that. My prayers and wishes to their family.

Mission Accomplished

Well, this semester was an overwhelming success in my eyes. Coming into the semester, I was registered for 22 credit hours, before dropping my Meteorology class (don't ever take it), to still leave me with 19 credit hours..which is more than I have ever taken. Well finals was a culmination of hard work and dedication in the classroom as I pulled out a 4.0 for the semester, with almost as many A+'s as I had A's (3 compared to 4).

Now I am just 30 credit hours away from finishing my degree and it has not struck me yet that I am officially a collegiate senior and it's scary. It's scary that this time has gone by this fast, as it was just yesterday, or so it seems, that I pledged to be in Alpha Tau Omega. Just yesterday that I was elected as president of that very organization. Just yesterday that I was a member of the UNK Golf team, living out a high school dream. There is so much I have accomplished in three years, 4.0's, member of a collegiate athletic team, photographer at nationally televised games, interviewed nationally known comedians and bands...the list could go on and on. But yet I still have so much more to do with my life and I thank God that I still have a year left to sort it all out.

As for this summer, I am going to relax. I turn 21 at the end of July and already have a trip booked to Vegas, so let the good times roll.

Dallas Cowboys Facility Collapses: Video

Text for my video commentary

Every year, video game consouers around the country begin clamoring for the release of one game that begins its hype in April and climaxes with the release of the game in August. That game, of course, is the coveted, and haunted, Madden series.

Now I know those of you who don’t watch sports and read up on your video game twitter accounts, are asking yourself, what does he mean by haunted? How could a video game be haunted?

Well for years, pundits and critics have claimed that whoever graces the cover of the new Madden game that year is doomed to fail and fall under what sports enthusiasts everywhere have coined as the “Madden Curse.”

Let’s take a look at past cover boys and how the success of becoming the face of the video game industry’s best-selling franchise has affected their season that year.

The first was in 1999, when San Francisco running back Garrison Hearst was pictured on the cover of the game. He had a solid regular season (3rd in rushing), but in the NFL playoffs against the Atlanta Falcons, he suffered a severe broken ankle that required Hearst to miss two full NFL seasons. In 2000, Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders was featured over Madden’s shoulder and how did Sanders fare that season? Well he retired abruptly in July before the start of the season.

In 2001, Tennessee Titans running back Eddie George was selected as the Madden cover boy and responded by failing to break 1,000 yards and his team missing the playoffs. Ex-Minnesota Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper flaunted his arm on the cover of the 2002 Madden game and during that season, he missed 4 games with injury, threw for 1300 less yards and 19 less TD's then in 2000.

See a trend yet? No? Well let me give you some more food for thought.

In 2003, St. Louis Ram’s running back Marshall Faulk had his picture plastered across the cover and during that subsequent year, Faulk rushed for 430 less yards and had 4 less TDs compared to 2001. Faulk's worst season since 1996. Coming into the 2004 version of the game, no player was hotter than Michael Vick, which gave the cover spot to the Atlanta Falcons signal caller. That year, however, Vick suffered a broken leg in the preseason and missed the first 11 games of the season, all stats were down from the previous year.

As for the 2005 season, the curse seemed to be broken with the installment of Baltimore Raven linebacker Ray Lewis. His numbers were slightly down from the year before but were still above the league average. He did, however, miss one game and failed to record an interception for the first time in his career. Also, he dropped a crucial interception in a playoff game against the Tennessee Titans that season which cost his team the game.

For Madden 2006, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and savior Donovan Mcnabb suffered a hernia and was lost for the season after appearing on the cover. Mcnabb threw for more interceptions and his yards per attempt and completion percentage were down from 2004. The Eagles finished 6-10, in last place, and missed the playoffs for the first time since 1999

Seattle Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander was featured on the Madden 2007 cover of the game after a record-breaking previous season. That year Alexander missed 6 regular season games with a broken foot. He finished the season with 896 yards and 7 touchdowns, which were the lowest since his rookie season. For Madden 2008, the dubious title of Madden cover boy went to Tennessee Titans rookie quarterback Vince Young, who proceeded to have a ratio of 2 interceptions for every touchdown he threw that season.

Then for Madden 2009, the video game figured it would get around the curse by featuring Brett Favre, a recently retired Favre, in his Packers uniform. Well, the trick was on them as Favre un-retired and returned to play with the New York Jets. Favre and the Jets started the season hot, but after Favre injured his throwing arm, the season collapsed quickly. Favre threw 6 less TD's and 7 more int's then in 2007. The Jets finished 9-7 after starting 8-3 and missed the playoffs.

So what will happen with the release of the brand new Madden 2010 game, as Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu and Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald were selected as the first ever duo cover boys. Is there really such a thing as a Madden Curse?

When thinking about it using general common sense, there is no way that becoming the poster boy for a video game series can affect your career. But when looking at the track record of the past players to grace the Madden cover, it is almost too spooky.

Critics have been talking about this ‘Madden Curse’ for years now and it continues to happen with each player. Is it really fate or is it merely a coincidence?

While people worry about whether Polamalu will get the hair yanked out of his head or if Fitzgerald will tear an ACL, the real video game fans are looking forward to the release of the game and so am I. In a recently released interview with “Madden NFL 2010” senior producer Phil Frazier, he gave a few hints as to what to expect with the new game, building the excitement for one of the most hyped games of the summer.

The first new feature of the game is a program called Pro-Tak. This new technology system “is a new animation technology that helps drive several new features in the game," Frazier said. "This includes nine-man gang tackles, a brand new pocket for the offensive line, steerable blocks, steerable tackles and the fight for the fumble feature that really lets you fight for that ball at the bottom of the pile.”
That’s right. a fight for the fumble feature. In perhaps the most exciting new feature to come about in any NFL franchise football game is this new piece of heaven. The fight for the fumble will allow you to scrum on the bottom of the pile, fighting for that elusive turnover, mashing buttons on your controller to keep the ball for your side. Never before have players been able to fight for the ball and Madden 2010 will give gamers the opportunity to do that.

Another sweet new piece of technology making its debut in the Madden 2010 game is the quarterback avoidance system. This system will allow you to continue to look downfield for receivers as the pocket collapses around you. When you have a defender breathing down the back of your neck, your controller will begin to rumble and you have a second to flick a button to hopefully avoid from becoming that player’s sack lunch.

Other features in the game include the introduction of the “Wildcat” offense which, for those of you who have no idea what a wildcat is, is when the running back assumes the position of quarterback and then with a running back next to them can either hand off or run it themselves. They can also throw the ball if you have a really athletic quarterback.

The whole purpose of these new features is to make the game as real as possible, to bring what you see during games on Sunday into your game console. The Madden franchise has continually provided excellence in the field of sporting games, proving to be the leader in technological advances in the field, making the game as real as possible. The series has been able to remain a mainstay in popular culture and continues to be a giant in the video gaming industry.

Madden 2010 looks to build on the previous success of the franchise and with these new features, there is no doubt that the 2010 reincarnation of the game will prove to be the best yet.

The jury is still out, however, in regards to the curse, but we’re only 3 months from release and 4 months away from seeing if the Madden Curse will strike again.

Final Project: Madden 2010 Curse/Preview