Many of you are likely familiar with Redskins tight end Chris Cooley and the rather strange mistake he made on his blog over the weekend. If you are not, please allow the words of Mr. Cooley to be your guide, as posted on his blog:

All apologies from the website. We are very sorry that we showed a penis on our website all day yesterday. That was by no means our intention and we did not want to offend anyone. The picture wouldn’t have been up for so long, but we were in the middle of winning a big game. Once again, this was a complete accident and we regret not reviewing the post more closely. Thanks.

The big whoops — the appendage in question belonged to Mr. Cooley — made the Interweb rounds in a hurry and eventually made it to more mainstream outlets (we saw it on SI.com yesterday). He probably could have used a pair of his own shorts. But we digress …

The main topic of interest to us, though, is the nature of Cooley’s blog in general. While most athlete sites to this point have been dedicated to shameless shilling (inflating egos and moving merchandise) or Shameless Schilling (controlling the media message by refusing to speak anywhere but there), Cooley is new-school in that his blog seems to be more Deadspin than ESPN. Penis-gate aside (and yes, we just broke our “gate” rule because that sounds funny), Cooley also posts videos of his fantasy football league (featuring Fred Smoot!) and other things that would otherwise seem “out of bounds.”

With many other athletes seemingly petrified of what might wind up on YouTube (and perhaps rightfully so), Cooley has gone the complete opposite direction and embraced his human-ness. It’s refreshing, confusing and perhaps revolutionary. Will he jump-start a new era of young athletes ready to give fans a glimpse into their lives, thus controlling their own P.R. in a different sort of way? Will his employer, particularly in light of what happened recently, try to put the kibosh on some of his honesty? (It’s only a major media market and the most powerful and uptight league in America). It will be interesting to watch.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.