Getting Away With It

Vick has skills that will make him some money in pro football, but maybe up in Canada before the NFL. Marcus Vick isn't his brother.

He thinks he is, but I'll believe the NFL scouts I talked to this weekend who say he isn't worth the trouble or anything above their second-day draft pick. I'm sure he's not worried, though.

Neither is Sean Taylor about a $17,000 fine, because he knows he's great and everything will be forgiven or winked at or explained away by coaches or lawyers.

Taylor awaits a Jan. 17 court date after being charged with felony aggravated assault and misdemeanor battery over the summer. On the field, off the field . . . it doesn't seem to matter to Taylor, who bailed on the league's mandatory rookie symposium, who refused to return his coach's phone calls during the offseason. Hey, when you're talented enough and rich enough to get your court date moved so it won't affect your football season, you can do whatever you damn well please, right?

You think Marcus Vick doesn't already know that's how the game is played? His problem is he overrates himself dramatically. Taylor, on the other hand, may operate this way for years for one reason: He's great on a football field.

An NFL quarterback who played against the Redskins this season told me that Taylor can be taken advantage of on certain kinds of plays, but otherwise he's often the baddest man on the field. He can run like Jerry Rice and hit like Night Train Lane, and if he does hit you a little too far out of bounds or just a little late after the whistle, then so be it. Receivers don't remember penalty flags; they remember writhing on the ground in agony.

Have you noticed that more receivers are dropping balls against the Redskins than in previous seasons? That's largely because they're distracted by the presence of Sean Taylor. Yes, there are players who are afraid of Taylor, just like they were afraid of Lane and Jack Tatum and Ronnie Lott and Dick Butkus. Taylor will mangle you. Any coach worth the chalk he uses to diagram plays loves that from his free safety.

And they love that he's a roughneck with that 1970s Raiders sort of mentality, a thug persona. When other football players say -- and believe me, they say it privately -- that Taylor has that thuggish quality, they're saying it half in admiration, half in fear. No team wants to quiet that entirely. We see Taylor as being in trouble. In football, it's thought that he is trouble.

So this whole thing sort of works in concert, being a menace on the field and off it. Taylor gets to play this week in Seattle, and he might just be the difference in the game because he's that effective in a game that amounts to one big organized fight. Or he might be the difference in the game for drawing a 15-yard personal foul penalty or getting ejected when his team needs him.

The NFL could have gone a long way toward letting Taylor (and anybody else who wants to spit on somebody) know what acts simply wouldn't be tolerated on a football field. Instead, they took some pocket change off him and sent him back on the field. We'll see whether fining Taylor was a deterrent or a mere annoyance en route to more trouble.