KICK THEM WHEN THEY’RE DOWN – CEDRIC BENSON

by Zac, Throwing Into Traffic

From time to time, professional athletes remind us why they're often stereotyped as overpaid, entitled ingrates. Every once in a while, one of THOSE athletes falls...hard. When they do, we at Epic Carnival step in to kick them when they're down. Getting salt in the wound in this first ever edition: Cedric Benson.

One day, when Matt Forte uses a revamped bears offensive line and a surprisingly vertical pass attack to rush for over 2000 yards in a season, Cedric Benson is going to be too drunk to notice. But when he stumbles off of his couch hungover the next morning, he’ll probably hear about it on his way to go be an assistant high school football coach somewhere, and he’ll be pissed. Or maybe he won’t; after all, Benson, by all accounts, is pretty much a grade-A asshole. His fellow running back in Chicago had so much trouble getting along with him that the Bears had to split them up and send Thomas Jones away due to the team’s investment in Benson (money well spent). Benson’s teammates disliked him so much that they tried to injure him. To clarify: They would rather have THOMAS JONES starting. This is the same Thomas Jones who spent so much time running into the backs of his offensive linemen that they should all file sexual harassment lawsuits against him. Now, Cedric Benson is without a job. He went from being a top five draft pick to out of the league in THREE SEASONS.

Worse still, Benson has had not one, but two run-ins with the law on his way out of the league. In one, he was allegedly boating under the influence, and walked away looking like he’d gotten the holy hell beaten out of him. He insists that police manhandled him and forced him to the ground, and I for one believe him, but I don’t know that he was necessarily brutalized; anyone who watched Cedric Benson run knows it doesn’t take much to bring him down. Then in the next one he gets pulled over allegedly driving drunk in a shirt that he was either going to be a male stripper in or was going to look at male strippers in. Either way, poor image choice.

At this point, it’s pretty much a lock that Cedric Benson will never see action in another NFL game. After all, this is Commissioner Roger Goodell we’re talking about; he suspends black athletes because it’s a day ending in Y. And yet it’s a testament to Benson that not one single “what a waste” article has been written. This means that Benson’s fall is even sadder than wasted talent; it means that he was just never that good to begin with. So because he can’t navigate sober by land or by sea (Cedric, whatever money you have left MUST go toward buying a Cessna and a handle of Cuervo), because he will be a permanent testament to wasted drafts (Cadillac Williams’s kneecap is in three pieces, and he looks like a safer investment for the future), and because he made Chicago long for the plodding stylings of Thomas Jones (whose career highlights will have to dig into footage of him in that Trina music video), lets all take this chance to kick Cedric Benson when he’s down.