John Kass of the Chicago Tribune penned a great take on the Michael Vick case. Here is an excerpt:

Vick's indictment comes as the league opens training camps across the country, and the sports media have flocked to the camps to advertise the NFL's treats to come. We'll marvel at the violence about to be unleashed on the fields for our enjoyment, all those young bones to be torn and crushed on Sundays after church, right after the players say the Lord's Prayer in the locker room before rushing out to snap some sinews.

But those are human sinews, human bones, not dog sinews, not dog bones. Dogs have no free will. And humans do, although how much free will is conditioned out of football players is a subject best left to sports psychiatrists and other experts.[snip]

All this will play out as Vick's trial approaches, and so will the NFL season, and millions of Americans who care nothing about anthropology will read the injury reports on Thursdays and bet accordingly.

And as America bets, the athletes will prepare for the games, and visit the doctor and have their knees scraped out, and call each other on the phone, and say, "What up, dog?"

Kass' use of the parallels between dog fighting and the NFL is a good one, though it especially resonates when you think about players from an era long gone in professional football. The men who built the league and sacrificed their bodies for peanuts are a far cry from today's athletes who make millions of dollars a year -- with large portions of that money now guaranteed whether they play a single down -- and whose interests are constantly looked after by agents and a players union.

But the key difference between the two, which Kass points out, is free will. Football is a violent sport and a multibillion dollar business, to be sure. But at its core, it's still a game that men play because they love it. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head, and there are tens upon millions of people who would kill to have the talent and the opportunity to make a living playing a sport they love.