Jay, as one of the players who helped me smite Matt and BFD and others in Fantasy Football, I feel compelled to tell you that I often thought about trading you and starting Aaron Rodgers. You know why Jay? Because I live in the real world.

See, Jay. In “trades”, people think about trading players who have a high value for other players that they think have a high value. By extension, this means you are thought highly of by two teams: the one that thinks you are valuable enough to deal, and the one that thinks you are valuable enough to trade other things for. Now, instead of taking this as a compliment on your skills and remembering that football is a business, you have chosen option B: crying like a little bitch about every little thing the Broncos have ever done to upset you.

I know a few diabetics Jay, it’s a tough disease to live with. It impacts your whole life to a certain extent, and it requires vigilance and attention. I know more than a few people who have chosen not to date diabetics, solely for the reason that they are then marrying themselves to an up-and-down situation that can often require special treatment. When it was learned that you had diabetes, the Broncos bent over backwards to accommodate you. Instead of being grateful for this, you are whiny.

Now, I’m not going to go all Florio on you. I’m not going to call you a locker room cancer, or say that you signed a contract and they have a lot of money invested in you and that this could decrease your future earnings. No Jay, I am calling you out because you are being completely illogical. First of all, for someone who went to Vanderbilt, you sure don’t seem to know much about how the sports world works. The proper reaction to stop people from making up trade rumors about you is silence. No smoke, no reason for there to be a fire.

Instead, you have come out bawling. Jim Bates isn’t here! My quarterbacks coach left! Brandon Marshall get suspended too much! I need a new juice box! All this has done is make more people think it is inevitable that you’ll leave, which then makes Josh McDaniels and his crew think “well we don’t want him to leave while we get nothing”, which in turn leads newspaper/internet writers to think “hey, Jay Cutler is available! Lets make up landing spots for him!”

Instead, might I suggest a new tact: realizing that you are not the only person on the planet. You are alienating your fan base, you are pissing off a team that invested heavily in you, and by doing both of those things, you’re only making the trade rumors continue to swirl. It’s situations like this that truly separate the fan from the player. You have one of the best jobs in the world, you are probably financially set for life, and you’re still pouting and moping like a ten-year-old every time something doesn’t go your way. Grow up, Jay Cutler. Your onfield success is very lightly tied to these people you mope about, and might I add, your onfield success has never taken you to the playoffs with these people.

There aren’t many things in the world that bother me these days, but one of them is the constant advertising creep that envelops the internet and society in general. I often wrestle with the question of how far this can go before the ends stop justifying the means. While I’m not sure how far it goes in society at large, I’m positive that Mike Florio’s constant shilling for Sprint on his premiere rumor-mongering site, Pro Football Talk, is offensive to the senses.

It’s not just that he has an advertiser, there are ways to have an advertiser and at least be light-hearted with it. Bill Simmons, a frequent target of my criticism (not in print yet, but trust me) has handled Subway sponsoring his podcasts by playing up their product with a self-aware praise (and thus funny) of the product that is so over the top that you’d think he was Joe Buck and Subway was David Eckstein. It’s the way that Florio just attaches his mouth to Sprint’s antenna and slobbers on it for dear life. Gobbles for every last customer. You tell Florio how high to jump and he’ll do it, especially because Sprint gets reception that far up!

Look, I’m not a take down artist for other columnists, thus the pieces cheesy sub-title. There are many things about Florio’s writing and style that bug me, especially the constant nicknames for players (I did this when I was in 10th grade) and the way he comes off as a big subjective dick about any player who happens to get arrested. That said, he runs a great site. Not a site that I would put in my RSS feed because it posts a bit too much and because of the things I’ve already been over, but nonetheless a very informative and involved blog.

But, the Sprint thing bothers me a lot. To go back to Simmons, he talks about how he won’t be surprised if in 2012 we have the Chevrolet NBA Finals. Where does this stop? I don’t know that it does. We already have the Subway Simmons Podcast and Pro Football Talk brought to you by Sprint Mobile. What’s next, Gregg Rosenthal’s Pancake Blocks sponsored by IHOP? (Gregg will never read this, but if he does and this happens, I demand a cut.) As long as advertisers keep following the eyes, I think we’re destined to have “______ blog brought to you by _______”.

However, just because you run a blog and have a sponsor does NOT mean you have to be a complete shill for them. Passionate sports fans and advertising overkill have met several times over the past few years: This Is Our Country, FrankTV, and Saved By Zero are perhaps the best examples of products that have been shoved down our throats so many times that there isn’t a chance in hell of us thinking of the parent company without adding on “…those annoying sons of bitches” in our heads. Florio and Sprint are arguably worse than that: they’re breaking the fourth wall, if you will. It’s one thing to have ads, for those ads to make arguments, and for us to then decide. It’s another completely to sponsor someones website and then put them on the company payroll to shill out for their services in the guise of an actual blog post. Without getting off on a total tangent here, advertising agencies need to learn that “creative marketing” like this ultimately does more harm than good. Fans, exempting Super Bowl wives who are watching because everyone said they should, only tolerate ads. Stepping outside of boundaries you’ve already pushed to the limit by sponsoring every damn stat shot that gets put up on the screen is something that ultimately creates more ill will than new customers.

As for Florio, I hope you weren’t planning on clicking any of those links of the proof of his Sprint work, as his website crashed under the pressure of a trillion page views of people trying to figure out which uniform Albert Haynesworth would be stomping opposing linemen on the ground in next year. So he’ll be running off of NBCSports for a little bit. To end with a glib judgmental remark like Florio would, perhaps he should have tried to get a server company to sponsor him.