Fred Smerlas is a legendary former NFL lineman. A five-time Pro Bowler best known for his work with the Buffalo Bills and Boston College Eagles, Smerlas is something of a legend in his hometown of Waltham, Mass.

Smerlas is well known in the Boston area for his mush-mouthed appearances on sports talk radio station WEEI, where he never hesitates to interrupt co-hosts, callers and any and all non-Smerlas entities (including Bill Belichick) with his ruminations on sports, being a tough guy and hatred of liberals.

However, Smerlas is beginning to gain notoriety for the company he runs, All Pro Productions. It’s not the good kind of notoriety, either.

Smerlas has run a number of disparate ventures under the All Pro banner. There’s the All Pro Celebrity Tailgate, which was once shut down by the Patriots for ticket reselling…

The All Pro fundraising arm for first responders, which ended up harassing thousands of citizens and was the target of a local news investigation…

Now Smerlas and his crew have moved on to staging All Pro fundraising basketball games where former NFL linemen maul teenage basketball players for fun and profit.

WCVB’s TheBostonChannel.com has been onto Smerlas’ shady game for some time now, and they were the first to break this tale of courtside shenanigans.

The Stow po-po are involved, and accusations of child abuse and expletive-laden trash talk are flying!

Stow police are investigating complaints against five former New England Patriots players who parents say roughed up several high school students during a charity basketball game on Saturday night.

The event, which was held at Nashoba Regional High School, was a fundraiser for the Stow Police Benevolent Association and was intended to be a contest between the former Pats players and a team of police officers and students…

During the course of the game, parents say, spectators leapt onto the court in anger and at least one student refused to continue playing because referees allowed the former Patriots players to muscle the students around the court.

Some of the highlights from this gruesome game of charity ball:

• None of the Stow police officers showed up, which left the high schoolers, their coach and a janitor to fend off the merciless Patriots alums all alone. Now, of course, they’re investigating how this horrendous breach of child protection laws could possibly have occurred. Hint: you guys forgot to show up.

• 6’4″ D-lineman Garin Veris took offense when a high schooler stripped him of the ball, and angrily threatened revenge. Mere moments later, Veris went flying into the same player and took him down to the ground. While Veris remorsefully claimed it was just an accident, the old “means, motive and opportunity” trifecta leave him looking mighty culpable.

• 6’4″ linebacker Matt Chatham put one of the kids in a remorseless headlock and threw him to the floor. He then refused to comment on the matter when contacted by the media. Guilty!

• The NFL veterans trash-talked, threatened and cursed the high schoolers, to the shock of the crowd. How profane!

• O-lineman Max Lane leapt upon the audience and broke a woman’s neck. (Back in the 1990s.) Nevertheless, Lane was there at the teen-pummel-athon, as were Smerlas’ usual sidekick Steve DeOssie, Ed Ellis, Vernon Crawford and Robert Perryman. While none of the five were implicated, I have it on good authority that Pete Sheppard put his cigar out in a small child’s eye.

WEEI personalities Steve DeOssie, Pete Sheppard, Glenn Ordway
and Fred Smerlas smoke celebratory cigars after beating
a middle-school soccer team to a pulp in the name of charity.

All Pro Productions CEO, the aptly named John Dumas, denies the charges leveled by Stow parents and WCVB.

“This notion of physical abuse is upsetting and sickening to me and I don’t agree that’s what happened,” said Dumas, who attended the game. “To those who were upset about how the game went, we do apologize. We’re not trying to be combative. It was a bit of a two-way street.”

Wait a minute, did he even deny the charges at all? That was more of an “eye of the beholder” defense.

As in, “While the NFL giant I hired did indeed hurl your child to the ground after he was offended that the kid tried to box him out, it’s in the eye of the beholder whether that constitutes abuse. Some would say he was merely giving him a tutorial in How To Be A Man 101.”

Dumas also said in a statement, “The high school students who played in the game played hard and wanted to win the game, just as the Patriots team did. Because of that the competitive nature came out on both teams throughout the game.”

Yup, just a couple of basketball teams battling it out on the court with the refs letting ‘em play. Except one team was composed of massive NFL veterans and the other was composed of wiry teens…

These kids were no match for gargantuan NFL linemen in a bball shove-fest.

And let’s not get it twisted – while it does many things in the name of charity, All Pro Productions is not itself a charity.

It’s a for-profit enterprise that has cleared up to 60% of its collected donations on past fundraising drives for its own purposes.

The most obvious and obnoxious of these efforts are the phone calls that All Pro telemarketers make on behalf of “police relief organizations.”

Callers are duped into believing that their help is needed to support the local police department, when actually, that’s part of the tax bill they already pay.

As WCVB (there’s that thorn in Smerlas’ side again) reported recently, the telemarketers’ aggressive tactics and constant bombardment of phone calls annoyed almost everyone in Massachusetts, including some of the policemen they’re ostensibly drumming up cash to support.

“I want to be sure that the public understands this. This is not the North Andover Police Department making these phone calls,” North Andover Police Department Chief Richard Stanley said.

We’ve all received the calls for cash, but it’s illegal for police officers to make them, so who is it on the other end of that line? Team 5 Investigates discovered they are professional telemarketers who work on commission. Some allege that they use high-pressure tactics.

In North Andover, the Police Relief Association recently hired All Pro Productions for a fundraising campaign.

“People think the police are on the other end of the phone,” Wornick said.

“Sometimes, it can be misunderstood. I have had people call me with the same kind of complaint,” said Sgt. Tim Crane, of the North Andover Police Relief Association.

There have been other troubling complaints to the chief’s office. Residents cited rude and insulting calls, verbal abuse and repeated calls. One resident wrote “many of the seniors do not want to report this because of a fear of not supporting the North Andover police.”

I’ve witnessed this first hand — these people are legit telemarketing assholes. In the age of the do-not-call registry, they set the standard for obnoxious cold calling.

The most mind-boggling detail drudged up by WCVB’s Susan Wornick was the fact that All Pro Productions doesn’t turn over the full donations to the charities it’s calling to support.

Instead, it pockets 60 percent of the donations and sends 40 cents on the dollar along.

Now, I’m sure All Pro incurs some overhead expenses in collecting donations for police…but 60 percent? This article on non-profit charity overhead indicates that most organizations spend less than 10 percent of donations on non-service-related expenses.

“The part that really breaks my heart is when I hear the story from an elderly person who I may bump into that I’ve known for years saying, ‘Chief, we helped you out. I want you to know that I sent you a check for $25,’” Stanley said.

Team 5 investigates reviewed the state’s most recent fundraising report and found startling numbers. More than $14 million was raised in 2005 in the name of police, firefighters and paramedics, but less than $4 million actually went to the groups. The rest — more than $10 million — went to the telemarketers.

The largest company, All Pro Productions, raised $5 million in 2005 and on average gave 37 percent to charity. The contract in North Andover was for 40 percent.

Lord knows how much Smerlas and Co. cleared on the teen beatdown in Stow.

So Massachusetts residents, if Fred Smerlas and his All Pro posse come to your town peddling their fundraising wares, tell them to head elsewhere.

If they invite your kid to play in a “charity” pickup game, grab his hand and run like you’re Viggo in “The Road.”

Smerlas, you and your homies ought to stick to picking on people your own size – like the time you clowned a Littleton firefighter in a flag football game:

Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports has an amazing story up today that details the deceptive tactics pro teams are taking to ensure they don’t have egg on their faces come draft day.

Once upon a time (last millennium) a few interviews with the player, his family and his coaches pretty much provided the team with sufficient assurance that the athlete they coveted wasn’t secretly a pimp, player or drug fiend.

Nowadays, any enterprising fool with a Facebook account can out an athlete who’s doing the dirt, and there are thousands of blogs all too eager to print the lurid details.

So teams are getting ahead of the curve…with fake Myspace and Facebook accounts designed to trick college players into friending!

The woman in the Facebook picture is attractive, with auburn hair and icy blue eyes. She is flanked by several other women, each armed with an inviting smile and curvy features. Along with the photo is a hopeful note from the female “fan” asking to be added to a player’s personal networking profile.

The twist? These women don’t actually exist, at least not in the way that some unsuspecting NFL prospects are led to believe. Indeed, they are a figment of one NFL team’s imagination – a phony Facebook profile, used as a tool by one franchise in the pre-draft vetting process. A Trojan horse that, when used effectively, unlocks a door to a world of Internet pictures and information which most NFL teams are now consistently compiling to help polish their dossiers on draft picks.

“It works like magic,” said a personnel source that was familiar with his team’s tactic of using counterfeit profiles to link to Facebook and Myspace pages of potential draft picks. The source directed Yahoo! Sports to one of the team’s “ghost profiles” – a term he coined because “once the draft is over, they disappear. It’s like they were never there.”

The practice may have an underhanded, back-alley feel to it, but most NFL teams are unapologetic when it comes to picking through the lives of prospective players. And with the tentacles of the Internet extending further than ever into the lives of athletes, online information has offered a wealth of fresh ammunition for teams. Whether it’s networking sites like Facebook, Myspace or Twitter, personal blogs, or just the random bits of information that can be found with an hour of free time and a powerful Internet search engine, NFL teams are gleefully delving into new cracks and corners that didn’t exist even a decade ago.

“Twenty years ago, if you weren’t getting a lot from a [college team’s] coaching staff or a family, you might put weeks into gathering good information on a couple guys,” the personnel source said. “Now, we can do a lot of it in a few days. We can sit down with 20 guys that we might be looking at, and have a pile of pictures and background things to hit them with. And every once in a while you come across something that probably saves you from making a big mistake. Not as much as you might think, but if it happens every couple years, it keeps you ahead of the game.”

You’re SOOOO good at football. Wanna be friends?

One example that Robinson cites is the notorious case of the 7th Floor Crew. We somehow never heard about this, and it’s simply amazing.

Basically, a bunch of Miami freshmen – including a number of top football players, some of whom are now in the NFL – recorded a rap track that detailed the sexual depredations they enjoyed indulging in.

Years later, it leaked to the press, leaving a bunch of teams with PR nightmares after they’d acquired members of the crew.

Since ROTI doesn’t want to completely offend our female readership, we’ll limit our lyrics excerpt to the verse performed by Chicago Bears tight end Greg Olsen, who apparently raps under the moniker G-Reg:

(What’s your name?)
G-Reg
(What’d you do?)
Get head
(How you do it?)
Drop my drawers and let her see my third leg
Chillin on the 7th floor
I gotta let these chickens know
Big Greg is in the house
And I’m fi’n’ to make these hoes choke
On my balls, on my dick
Then I bust a nut quick
On her face, on her chest
Stick my dick between her breasts
Come on fellas lets get weird
Stick your dick up in her ear
While I’m laughin’ at these guys
A second nut all in her eyes
(Wait a minute, in her eyes?)
In her eyes!!

(CHORUS:)
If your ho only know
That she was getting fucked on the 7th floor
If that bitch only knew
The she was getting’ mutted by the whole damn crew
What would she do?
What would she do?

That was actually not that bad of a verse, considering it came from the one cracker in the Crew…and believe us, it was the tamest. (Or see for yourself.)

When this guy says “Let’s get weird,” cover your ears!

Chicago media types like Jay Mariotti later ripped the Bears for selecting Olsen on account of his wicked, wicked rapping.

The award for funniest line in the song goes to the Baltimore Ravens’ Tavares Gooden, who came up with “She thought 5-2 was just my number/ Then she realized/ You multiply the bitch up/ Dog you get my dick size.”

Gooden told Yahoo that “My main thing is just not to worry about the past. If somebody else wants to chuckle and laugh about that, they can go right ahead…. All of us were young when we made that song. … That taught me, you’ve got to watch that you say, and who you do it around.”

Meanwhile, teams continue to scour the web to weed out – get it? – the next generation of athletic troublemakers.

Rick Spielman remembers one Myspace page, the kind that makes a personnel man sit up in his seat, reach for a pencil, and push a particular question to the top of his list. He refuses to divulge the name of the player involved, but concedes that the Minnesota Vikings ran into the profile “a year or two ago.” One that the Vikings looked at very closely at the league’s annual scouting combine in Indianapolis, then grilled privately over some of the things he had posted on his networking profile.

“He had a big picture of a bunch of drug money and drugs on a carpet,” the Vikings’ vice president of player personnel said, shaking his head. “It was the kind of thing that, you know, it was under his name. So when we had some time with him, of course we were like ‘What is this all about?’ … It was an interesting conversation. He had a legitimate explanation for what happened and we followed up on it and we believe it was what he said it was. But that’s one of the things that happens [with networking profiles].”

[...]

It has been a lucrative pursuit, too. One NFC North coach said his team has gotten particularly adept at collecting information from networking sites. The team combs through pictures, goes through archived “comments” sections, breezes through friend lists for other potential contacts, and spends untold amounts of time dissecting pages of information based on the potential draft status of a player.

And the process of “ghosting” – creating fake profiles to get added to the private pages of some draft picks – isn’t isolated. Executives from three NFL teams admitted that at one point or another, they had used a similar method to get information. And all three suggested that it was something that was likely used by the investigative sources of all teams.

Sometimes these searches produce nothing. Other times, they pan out with suggestive pictures or interesting tidbits of information that open other doors.

“It all depends on the context,” said Detroit Lions coach Jim Schwartz. “On the surface some things don’t necessarily matter. But if it’s something deeper, if it’s a sign there are some deeper problems, sure, it matters.”

The Internet age has brought a little bit of peril for everyone.

Still, the idea of fat, middle-aged NFL scouts making fake online profiles and friending players in little sting operations is more than a little reminiscent of Perverted Justice, the organization behind NBC’s To Catch A Predator.

You can imagine it now…the 7th Floor Crew lured to a “recording session” by a hot babe, only to have Chris Hansen walk out from the next room saying, “Nice to see you, why don’t you have a seat over there?”

“So…you call youself the big dick bandit, do you?”

The actual chapters of How Football Explains America are all but unreadable. Paolantonio rehashes a game or a heartwarming football-related anecdote with the gusto of the true bore. Then he explains why this explains how football explains the battle of Midway. Or Davy Crockett. Or manifest destiny. Each chapter more tedious than the last.

The prologue is a masterpiece of bombastic ignorance in which Paolantonio inadvertently reveals that he has apparently never actually watched any other sport. Or indeed read about them.

“Go ahead, you try going to a rugby game and writing about it. Soccer? Ninety minutes of whatever and then maybe one goal scored by accident. Tough to create a coherent narrative out of that.”

…Paolantonio is the sports journalism equivalent of the saloon bar patriot who doesn’t actually own a passport.

Sal Pal: Offending non-American English speakers worldwide.

Obviously, Sal Pal’s ham-handed shots at FIFA football curdled Wells’ opinion of this book from forgettable to utterly odious…

We also learn that American football is replete with the “underlining mythical structures” of “our Judeo Christian heritage”, “our immigrant experience”, “masculinity and violence” and “the romanticized storyline that Americans demand from their television sets every night”.

Which makes perfect sense — especially when you realise that America is the only country in the world with Jews, Christians, immigrants, men and television sets.

How Football Explains America is a canard built on a false assumption based on a lazy anthropological cliché.

Tell us what you REALLY think, buddy.

[via SPORTSFILTER]