New NFL Rule Proposal on Penalties: “No Sizable Advantage”

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“How many penalties are we going to call in this game?” the National Football League (NFL) fan asks when they watch a game now. We know we’re not alone when we say, “Something has to be done here. This is just getting ridiculous.”

“Don’t complain unless you have a proposed solution,” my 6th grade teacher said so often that it’s so ingrained that I wouldn’t write this article without a proposed solution.  

Have you watched an NFL game recently? Of course you have, we all have. Have you noticed the number of penalties called? Of course you have, we all have, dating back to our dads and our grandads. Our complaints usually center around three things: Too many rules, too many flags, and how all of the above often prevents the players from playing the game. We blame the on the field NFL referees, which is a little unfair, because it’s not their fault. They’re the face of the NFL rules developed and handed down by the NFL’s Competition Committee (NFLCC), and those rules are so numerous and restrictive that when officials don’t throw flags, players complain. They’ve become so accustomed to so many flags being thrown that when they’re not the players are shocked. We all are. In some ways, I think NFL officials would welcome a new rule by the NFLCC that takes some of the burden off them by reversing the current trajectory of annually adding so many rules that it inhibits the fans’ enjoyment of the game. Let these incredible athletes play the game to determine the outcome. The collective we should vie to go back to the day, not so long since passed, when the NFL, the NFLCC, and the NFL referee’s goal was for no one to know their name at the end of the game. That’s gone. It just is. 

Another point of emphasis we should add here, to sympathize with the average NFL referee, is that they, like most of us, are graded on performance. They are heavily scrutinized. They’re graded on accuracy of course, on calls made, on the flow of the game, on proper positioning and general professionalism. In the 2021 regular season of the NFL, referees made 11.8 calls per game, up 4% over 2020. In 2023, referees average around 12.5 calls per game. That .7 isn’t a huge uptick, but it does feel higher. 

The next question we have is has the NFLCC added .7 more penalties occurring on the field? Is there stricter enforcement of the rules, or are referees more scrutinized than ever before? After every game, referees are scrutinized on a play-by-play basis, and they receive a coaching session on how they could’ve called various plays better. At the end of the regular season, those referees with the highest grades make the post-season roster of referees. 

Somewhere, in the recent history of the NFL, the NFL’s Competition Committee (NFLCC) realized that they went too far making rules in favor of the offense. They realized that were making it almost impossible to play defense without some sort of penalty being called. It’s one thing to institute rules that protect players from injuries and potential injuries, but offense-friendly rules progressed so much that some former defensive stars of the NFL said things like, “I’m just glad that I don’t have to play in the modern game.” Some former defensive stars suggest that some of their hits, and the methods they used to defend a player, would’ve been legislated out of the game. (Think Rodney Harrison, Ronnie Lott, and Ray Lewis.) The NFLCC decided, in their infinite wisdom, to correct that unfairness, perceived or otherwise, by instituting more rules and more penalties, this time on the offense. That, of course, resulted in more flags, tons of them.

I don’t know if this was a general practice that dates back decades, but the current NFL players is now coached, in sessions, how to comport themselves according to the rules. In the past, I can only imagine, players went through drills and coaches said, “Yeah, that’s illegal now, according to the new NFLCC rules.” The players are now coached in closed-room settings put on by an instructor from the NFL. If this has always occurred and I’m unaware of it, that’s fine, but it appears as those there are so many rules now that the average NFL player has such a tough time keeping up with what’s legal and illegal that they need a closed-door session, put on by the NFL, just to keep up. 

There are now so many flags thrown a game that not only does it inhibit the game, but it gives the officials far too much power in determining the outcome of games, power I would guess NFL referees would gladly relinquish. Rather than pass more rules to counter the counter, I suggest that they institute the two new words sizable advantage to the 2023 NFL Rulebook.

Anyone who has watched the NFL for as long as I have, has blindly accepted meaningless and ticky tack penalties for most of our lives. We’ve seen them so often and for so long that we accept the idea that officials are going to make certain calls. We’ve accepted that a twitch by a left guard is a five-yard infraction called illegal motion, for example, but does that twitch give the offense a sizable advantage in that play? As I wrote, we’ve accepted this for so long that it’s accepted. Yet, if there is no discernible advantage, and the left guard returns to a stationary position, the 2023 NFL should not require that the official throw a flag under the new, 2023 no sizable advantage rule. The NFLCC should require their officials to determine if that twitch gained the left guard an advantage against a D-lineman, or does the D-lineman gain an advantage, based on the idea that the left guard just tipped him off regarding what direction the play is headed in? In my sizable advantage rule, if a referee throws a flag, a three panel replay review board would determine, via expedited review, if the offense gained a sizable advantage by the twitch. If they decide there was no sizable advantage, the officials pull the flag. One asterisk: if a D-lineman spots the twitch, they can come across the line and force the official to throw the flag, but they run the risk of the officials missing the twitch. Whatever the case, if that twitch that doesn’t draw the defense offsides, the twitch rule needs to go.

My new “sizable advantage” rule would receive applause and boos throughout the league, as officials would be calling it both ways of course. The call would be “expedited review claims that the offense did not receive a sizable advantage for the infraction, no penalty.”

The same process would apply to the “two men in motion” and “illegal formation” penalties. As long as both players become set before the snap, no “two men in motion” men in motion penalty will be called. As for the illegal formation penalty, one definition of it states that someone on the end of the line has to be equal to the center’s waist, near the line of scrimmage. As we saw in a Washington vs. NY Giants game, a touchdown was called back because a receiver was about a half a yard off the line of scrimmage. Say what you want about that penalty, but Washington received no “sizable advantage” by one of their receivers standing a half yard off the line of scrimmage. That particular play was a run up the middle, and the receiver played no role in it. The referee would then say, “Expedited review has declared no sizeable advantage for Washington on the illegal formation call, no penalty, touchdown Washington.”

In some instances, officials follow the current rulebook regardless the circumstances, and they slow the game down by doing so, in my opinion, because calling innumerable ticky tack rules often diminishes the game. The officials also make subjective errors all the time, and when they make such errors “we” call for more replay reviews. I don’t know why a fan would call for more replay reviews, but I understand that they, officials, and the NFL in general, want to get it right. If there are more replay reviews, they should all be by the new “expedited review” process we’ve witnessed in the playoffs in 2023. Expedited reviews can also be used to determine if the letter of the rules applied in this case, or if the subjective, discretion officials might be called upon to make when it comes to determining sizable advantage. The NFL needs to place three officials in the review room to make expedited reviews of various calls like, hands to the face, illegal contact after five yards, and all of the “ticky tack” holding calls on the offense and defense to determine if they provide a sizable advantage to one team or the other. If the advantage cannot be determined in an obvious and expedited manner, with a very specific and short time limit, the officials should probably, and unfortunately, default to the call on the field, as they do other replay reviewed calls. My standards of operations of NFL referees would be expressly interested in limiting the number of penalties, as such there would be no reviews, and no downgrades, of of referees for non-calls, unless they are deemed egregious missed calls. 

We could go through each individual penalty to determine some of the silly, “ticky tack” calls, but we would be here all day arguing about the definition of certain calls vs. sizable advantage. Yet, there is a “we all know it when we see it” principle to on the field calls that can be meted out in an expedited review process.

There is some frustration we feel when an NFL analyst, and former rules official in the booth arguing that a penalty should’ve been called there. Some of us, and I dare say a progressively growing majority, were done with that about ten years ago. “You actually want more penalties?” I scream at these two from the comfort of my home. “Just let them play!” I scream that, even EVEN when the calls benefit my favorite team. For most NFL fans, I realize their complaints are relative to their team and situational, but my bet is if the NFL sent out a survey that asked the question, “Do you want to see fewer penalties called, even if those penalties benefit your team,” the result, I think, would hover somewhere around 100%. If not, the future viewer at home would start citing the sizable advantage asterisk as often as they do the roughing the passer rule now.

The old adage “The best official is the one you don’t remember” is gone, it just is. The typical, modern NFL fan thinks that the NFL official currently wields far too much power in the game, because there are far too many rules that we’ve accepted for so long that we no longer question whether or not they provide a sizable advantage. I suggest the NFLCC steer the NFL in the opposite direction, for the first time in NFL history, and limit the number of penalties called in a game. As long as said penalty doesn’t result in an injury, or the possibility thereof, I say the NFLCC starts to review the number of penalties called and invokes rules like this one to diminish them going forward. The NFLCC needs to make a concerted effort to limit the number of calls in a game by invoking the “sizable advantage” rule that referees will enforce on the field. We understand that this is a subjective review that might make it harder to gauge and grade an NFL referee, but something has to be done here. The number of calls has been arcing upward for generations now to the point that the NFLCC rules are just taking some of the most compelling and fun elements out of the game. Most NFL players know that it’s a privilege and not a right to play in the NFL, and if they want to continue to play there, they have to conduct themselves according to the rules, but the average NFL fan doesn’t view it that way. We want to see the top athletes compete against each other to see who wins the game, and in an ever-progressing manner, the NFL referee is inserting themselves into the battle and helping decide the outcome. That’s not fair, and it’s not right to characterize it that way, but that’s the consensus, and even though the current monster of professional sports organizations, they still need to address the complaints of their customers. The consensus also has it that the current NFL referee is the bad guy, and the referees know it. My guess is that the modern NFL referee would not only see the logic in the new and improved “sizable advantage” asterisk, and they would probably go behind the scenes to encourage members of the NFLCC to approve it.

Harry Markopolos Tried to Take Down the Madoff Monster

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Investment advisors suggest that if we only worked half as hard trying to figure out how and where to invest our money as we did to earn it, we would be better off. It’s sound advice, but how much quality homework can we do when our resources in the media and watchdogs in the government are either inept or in awe of financial “genius”? Some reports suggest that the SEC sent second rate investigators to examine the books of books of Bernie Madoff, and that they may have accepted Madoff’s excuse that his trading strategies involved “proprietary information”. As we all know now, his proprietary strategies involved not making trades. How could anyone in the media, or the SEC, know that? Well, as the man who “discovered” the fraud, Harry Markopolos said, “They could’ve called people. They could’ve called the people in banks and the traders Bernie claimed to have trading relationships.” Why didn’t they make a few calls? As Shortform.com suggests, concerned parties defaulted to the truth when they examined Madoff, and the truth suggested that a fund worth around $3-$7 billion just couldn’t be fraudulent. 

Madoff also sold educated insiders responsible for money in charities, pension funds, and hedge funds digging through his numbers and asking numerous questions, saying, “If you have to ask, maybe this isn’t for you,” which surely elicited a “Hold on, hold on, we’re just trying to do our due diligence for out customers here. Please, get insulted” type response. This pitch appealed to numerous banks and financial firms including, The Fairfield Greenwich investment Group, Sonja Kohn, Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, and many other esteemed luminaries in their field. These pitches led to a mysterious enigma that gained Madoff a reputation as a guru of Wall Street, and he used it to intimidate the referees in the SEC to avoid investigating him, and when they eventually did investigate him, they did so with the same truth-default. The only person who wasn’t duped, and tried to get the SEC to shut it all down was the could’ve been, should’ve been hero of this tale, Harry Markopolos, who “discovered” the Madoff swindle nearly a decade before Madoff’s Ponzi scheme folded under its own weight.

Harry Markopolos was an expert at analyzing and managing quantitative data (a quant), a math nerd, an obscure financial analyst, and a fraud investigator who worked for Rampart Trading Management, one of Bernie Madoff’s competitors. His entry into the unfolding drama began when his Rampant boss, Frank Casey, learned that one of their firm’s biggest investors, Access International Advisors (AIA) was pulling their money out of Rampart and putting it all into a hedge fund headed up by respected financial guru Bernie Madoff. AIA CEO Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet informed Casey that he was doing so based on the incredible returns Madoff’s fund was producing. Upset that he couldn’t prevent Villehuchet from leaving, Casey instructed Markopolos to reverse-engineer Madoff’s trading strategy and revenue streams so Rampart could duplicate his results.

“It took me five minutes to know that [Madoff’s hedge fund] was a fraud,” Harry Markopolos said, after conducting his own investigation. “It took me another almost four hours of mathematical modeling to prove that it was a fraud.” 

Markopolos wasn’t the first to “discover” Madoff’s fraud, but he pursued the SEC for an investigation when no one else could? The question is why? If you watch the YouTube video of Markopolos “Assessing the Madoff Ponzi Scheme and Regulatory Failures”, it will take you about five minutes to know Harry Markopolos is a nerd. We can probably all beat a nerd to the women, and we might be able to make them look foolish in sports, but don’t try to beat a nerd at math. Markopolos has confessed many times, in roundabout ways, that when he set about trying to reverse-engineer Madoff’s incredibly consistent returns, he took it personal.

“[Madoff] was stealing from me, he was stealing customers from me, and if you steal from a Greek, we will come after you,” Markopolos said in an interview. He didn’t say geek, he said Greek, but the rule still applies: “If you try to beat a geek, at their geeky games, they’ll come after you.”

Some might view this characterization of Harry Markopolos as disparaging, but it’s not intended that way. A true math nerd doesn’t care about success, wealth, imperiousness, a reclusive nature, or any of the mysterious characteristics that the rest of find so alluring. The rest of us can be duped by narratives, sex appeal, and charisma, but to a math nerd the universe doesn’t make sense, until we insert numbers and mathematical equations. If someone in the media, and the SEC, was brave enough to heed Markopolos’ detailed findings, 37,000 individuals from 136 different countries they could’ve spared a lot of pain and suffering in the world.   

“I’ve taken all the calculus courses, from integral calculus through differential calculus, as well as linear algebra. And statistics, both normal and non-normal,” Markopolos said. Madoff didn’t care for Harry Markopolos-types poking around in his “proprietary” investment strategy, “and look at the results the man produces,” the uninformed probably argued, “you can’t argue with results.” Harry Markopolos could, in his numbers world, and in that world, Madoff’s success in the options trading market made no sense to him. 

“As we know, markets go up and down, and his only went up. He had very few down months. Only four percent of the months were down months. And that would be equivalent to a baseball player in the major leagues batting .960 for a year. Clearly impossible. You would suspect cheating immediately.”

“Maybe he was just good,” CBS’ Steve Kroft remarked in a 60 Minutes interview.

“No one’s that good,” Markopolos said.

In his opening statement before a Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises, Harry Markopolos assessed the Madoff Ponzi scheme and the regulatory failures by the SEC that contributed to the Madoff scheme amassing more than $43 billion dollars of innocent victims’ money between his first report to the SEC and the scheme eventually falling due to the 2008 financial crisis. 

Markopolos also stated that if the SEC followed through on his report on Madoff’s scheme in May of 2000 with a thorough investigation, the SEC would’ve found fraudulent activity in the range of $3-$7 billion dollars of investors’ money. He submitted another report to the SEC in October 2001, when the damage to investors would’ve been in the $12-$20 billion dollar range, and in 2005 he submitted a report with a detailed listing of 29 red flags that occurred when the Madoff fund was worth $30 billion. He submitted two more reports in 2007 and 2008. Markopolos concludes this portion of his opening statement, saying, “A fraud that should’ve been stopped at in May 2000 at under $7 Billion has now grown to $50 billion.” (Some have since listed the fraud as high as $65 billion.) 

“In your first letter to the S.E.C. back in 2000, you’re a little tentative. You say, ‘Look, I have no hard evidence, no smoking gun,’” CBS News Steve Kroft observed in the 60 Minutes interview. 

“In 2000, it was more theoretical. In 2001, it was a little bit more real. By 2005, I had 29 red flags that you just couldn’t miss on. By 2005, the degree of certainty was approaching 100 percent,” Markopolos explained.

As the 60 Minutes interview between Steve Kroft and Markopolos further reveals there were a lot more insiders who knew, or suspected, Madoff was not completely on the level. As the CBS News article states, “Over time and with some simple math calculations, Markopolos concluded that for Madoff to execute the trading strategy he said he was using he would have had to buy more options on the Chicago Board Options Exchange than actually existed, yet he says no one he spoke to there remembered making a single trade with Bernard Madoff’s fund.” 

“I would talk to the people I had trading relationships with and ask, ‘Did you have a trading relationship with Mr. Bernard Madoff?’ And they all said, ‘No. We don’t think he’s for real,’” Markopolos said.

“Markopolos said he found no one who ever had traded with Madoff. “And I traded with some of the largest equity derivatives firms in the world.” 

“And that’s because Madoff’s investment fund never actually made any trades, at least going back to 1993, and probably further – a fact confirmed at a meeting of Madoff investors by the trustee charged with liquidating Madoff’s assets. No one knew the depth of the fraud but a lot of people had questions.”

“Who else figured this out besides you?” Kroft asked.

“I would say that hundreds of people suspected something was amiss with the Madoff operation. If you look at who the victims were not, you’ll notice that the major firms on Wall Street had no money with Mr. Madoff,” Markopolos said. 

“I’m quoting from the letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, red flag number 20. ‘Madoff is suspected of being a fraud by some of the world’s largest, most sophisticated financial services firms.’ And then you list some of the firms,” Kroft said. “The biggest firms on Wall Street. And conversations with people high up in those firms.”

“That is correct. And the SEC ignored that,” Markopolos said. “All the SEC had to do was pick up the phone. They never did.”

“If you had executives at the biggest investment houses on Wall Street that knew something was wrong, why do you think they didn’t go to the SEC?” Kroft asked.

“Because people in glass houses don’t throw stones. And self-regulation on Wall Street doesn’t work,” Markopolos said.

In January 2006 the New York office of the Securities and Exchange Commission finally opened a case file to look into Markopolos’ allegations about Bernie Madoff. Despite uncovering evidence that Madoff had mislead them about his investment activities, the SEC closed the case 11 months later without ever opening a formal investigation. The staff said there was “no evidence of fraud.” 

“What I found out from my dealings with the SEC over eight and a half years is that their people are totally untrained in finance; they’re unschooled; they’re un-credentialed. Most of them are just merely lawyers without any financial industry experience,” Markopolos said.

“Well, if the people there aren’t trained in securities work, what are they trained in?” Kroft asked.

“How to look at pieces of paper that the securities laws require. They can check every piece of paper perfectly and find misdemeanors, and they’ll miss all the financial felonies that are occurring because they never look there,” Markopolos replied. “Even when pointed to fraud, they’re incapable of finding fraud.”

No one at the SEC would talk to 60 Minutes on the record about Markopolos’ allegations. But one person who seemed to have had a high opinion of the agency was Bernie Madoff.

“I’m very close with the regulators so I’m not trying to say that what they do is bad. As a matter of fact, my niece just married one,” Madoff said in 2007.

Besides his niece’s husband, who left the SEC last year, Madoff had longstanding ties to agency and was called upon to give advice. At a 2007 meeting of a non-profit group called The Philoctetes Center, he seemed to think the SEC was doing a great job. 

“In today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules. This is something that the public really doesn’t understand. But it’s impossible for a violation to go undetected, certainly not for a considerable period of time,” Madoff said.

No one other than Bernie Madoff and some members of his executive staff, should be blamed in the beginning. In the beginning of his fraudulent activity, which Madoff stated began in the 1990’s, we can forgive the media and the SEC for not investigating his activity, but at some point the truth-default should’ve faltered. At some point, and go ahead and take Harry Markopolos and all of his detailed reports out for a moment, those suspicious of Madoff’s documented 20-year history of nonstop gains should’ve prompted reverse-engineer inspections from members of the media, the financial community, and our employees in the SEC should’ve dropped their views of the Chairman of the Nasdaq and investigated him properly. We can only guess that when competitors and regulators went through Bernie Madoff’s books, they kept looking up at the name on the masthead. We can also guess that if any of their underlings spotted some level of chicanery, the higher ups in the office decided against risking their reputations on uncovering a man considered the genius of Wall Street. For varying reasons, including the competitive nature of losing one of their most profitable and most loyal clients, the higher ups at Rampart Investment Management decided to let Markopolos go to the SEC with his findings. As we’ve witnessed with what happened at FTX, a certain level of financial chicanery keeps happening in this country, and the media and government agencies are constantly caught with their pants down. 

John Coltrane is a Bad Guy

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“John Coltrane is a bad guy,” they say. “He’ll be whoever you want him to be, when you talk to him, and all that, but the one thing that you should keep in the back of your mind is that he’s just a bad person.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” we say.

“If he’s not a bad guy,” they say, “Who is?”

“It’s complicated.”

Actor Ian McShane

“It’s not complicated,” they say. “He steals money, because he wants more of it. He hurts people too. Some bad guys say they aren’t afraid to hurt anyone who stands in the way. It’s more than that for John Coltrane. He enjoys it, and he always has.”  

“John Coltrane is a victim of circumstance,” we say. “Have you heard him talk about his childhood. His upbringing makes Oliver Twist read like a day at an amusement park, “and nobody ever talks about any of that,” he says. I think he’s right.” 

“If he’s not outright lying about his circumstances,” they say. “He’s exaggerating. He’s not a victim of circumstance, unless we count the circumstances of his own making. He doesn’t steal, hurt people, and kill to support a cause, and he’s not poor or hungry, and he never has been. He’s not desperate to feed his children. He doesn’t have any. He tells us he has a son. He doesn’t have a son. He’s lying. That’s what bad guys do?”

“Why would anyone lie about something like that, something easily disproved?”

“That’s what bad guys do.”

“What does he gain?” 

“He studies us,” they say. “He studies us a culture, and us individually. He tells us the tale we most want to hear. Has he ever prodded you? He prods me all the time, going deeper and deeper into an issue. I don’t think he prods to find weaknesses. I think that’s just what he does, but he uses the weaknesses he finds later. Finding our weaknesses is a byproduct of his constant prodding. The ‘I need to provide for my kid’ narrative is a powerful one, because it garners all types of empathy and sympathy from people like you. 

“As for the more general search for truth,” they continue, “I don’t think he cares about what we call the truth, to be quite honest with you. I think he’s beyond caring about all that, or what we think the truth is. When we catch him fudging the truth, you know what he says? He says something along the lines of, “All right, all right, if it’s not that, what about this? Have you ever considered this?” How does someone do that when you catch him in a bold, irrefutable lie? He does it. He does it all the time. I’ve caught him lying so many times that I no longer believe him. Others do. They continue to believe him even though they know he’s lying to him, they have to know, but he’s so charismatic and convincing that they want to believe him, which says more about them than it does him.”

“That is fascinating,” we say. “I’m not saying I agree, because I don’t know him as well as you do, but it’s fascinating to think that even the modern bad guy learns that he has to change with the times. We all have figurative schemes of thought. When we create a vision of the future, for example, the audience expects some characteristics, flying cars, over population, and corporate monoliths constructed in a manner that makes them look creepy. We also expect some sort of corporate takeover of the planet that removes homes and anything green to feed the corporate monster. Ok, but who’s going to give the corporation money if it takes all the city blocks and drives out the innocent people, its consumer base. The answer obviously is, the corporate monster doesn’t need money in the future, and it doesn’t need people to run it anymore. It is now a self-serving monolith. This is supposed to be a horrifying view of the future, and the movie makers provide guidance for how to avoid this dystopian future, but it makes no sense to me. The same is true with the modern bad guy. The modern bad guy doesn’t do anything but sit around and be evil. He might look and act creepy, and he might promise to do evil things, but he doesn’t do any of them. Every time he appears, creepy music ensues, and we’re convinced he’s a bad guy, but he doesn’t actually do anything incredibly evil to them.      

“Similarly Our definition of the modern bad guy requires that he follow all of the societal norms as best he can. The trope is that he can’t, because he doesn’t know any better, or he won’t, because he’s a bad guy, but the character adjusts to what the audience wants from a bad guy to fulfill their figurative schemes of thought. What the audience appears to want now is a bad guy who doesn’t do anything but sit there and be spooky. I was watching a fictional horror movie in which the bad guy kidnaps a kid, but he didn’t do anything to the kid, because that would’ve been too over the top for most audiences. So, he sat in another room with a weird mask on and acted spooky. We could probably say that everything, pro and con, boils down to John Coltrane’s youth,” we say. “You say he’s a liar, thief, and worse. I’ve known liars and thieves, and they, like Coltrane, often talk about how dumb and stupid they were. Coltrane often talks about how incredibly naïve he was, and how he found it so embarrassing.”

“Weren’t we all,” they say. “Didn’t we all stand at proverbial forks in the road. Didn’t we make decisions along the way that led us to where we are today? Didn’t we all have friends and family who point and counterpointed us to death? Did you ever have that guy, some guy you worked with at a dive restaurant, who told you everything you needed to know about the world from some deeply cynical and awful pocket of the world, his world? He told you that the world you were about to enter into was one big moral equivalence? Did you believe them, or did you see him as an embittered old man who got rolled over in life? Our lives are dotted with points and counterpoints from friends and family, and embittered dishwashers. Who takes advice from a forty-year-old who isn’t cut out for anything better in life than being a dishwasher. They have it all figured out, right? Some people, like John Coltrane, romanticize their notions so much that they begin to believe them. They think they’re cool and funny, and that they’ve unlocked some truths about life they’ve never heard before. If those who cared about him gave him counterpoints to correct the path he was headed down, he either didn’t hear them, or he decided not to abide them.”

“And you think John listened to them so much that he developed a life’s philosophy around them?” we ask. 

“Philosophy is a stretch,” they say. “I don’t think John Coltrane ever developed a philosophy. I think he’s more of a code fella. Whether right or wrong, a philosophy involves a deeper understanding of complicated, almost literary grasp of the way the world works. People like John Coltrane don’t have philosophies, they have codes. It’s a fine distinction, I’ll admit, but a code might be, be nice to your mother, don’t poop where you eat, and don’t eat yellow snow. People like Coltrane prefer superficial, cinematic sophistry that everyone from your best friend to your aunt Donna says to get you to laugh. Deep, complicated, and conflicted bad guys with a philosophical understanding of human nature and the way the world works are a reflection on modern writers hoping readers see the same in them. Their bad guy chracters have vast amounts of knowledge that leads some of us to say, “If he’s so smart, why didn’t he land himself some sort of prosperous career?” No, most criminals are rejected by the greater digestive system of the world, until they fall out the rectum a professional dishwasher, or whatever job title John Coltrane gives himself.”

“I’ll admit I don’t know John Coltrane as well as you,” we say, “but he does have a deep philosophical take on life. I’ve heard it in the hours we’ve spent together. He has a good head on his shoulders, especially when it comes to self-importance. He asked me the other day, ‘who’s the most important person in your life?’ I gave him some answer I thought he wanted to hear. He said ‘Wrong, bongo, you should be the most important person in your life. Who is most affected by your decisions?’ I like that general thread, because it’s so unique in the modern era.”

“Hey, you’re not going to get me to say there’s something wrong with self-importance,” they say, “but at what point does it become delusional narcissism? We were all innocent and naïve at one point, and we were chiseled by the world around us. Some of us developed strong minds that could recognize the wrong read for what it was, and some of us didn’t. Some of us corrected our errors, and some of us developed excuses for who we are, but others just lash out at the world around them.”

“It’s the latter that really gets to me,” we say. “I don’t get the lashing out at the world in general. Let’s say you see an otherwise innocent bystander walking down the street by themselves. What prompts you, a relatively sound individual to rob him to rectify what everyone did to you as a kid? How would a John Coltrane square that?”

“Coltrane’s a big guy, tall, broad-shouldered, and all that, so my bet is no one would dare ask him that question,“ they say. “If they had, he’d have an answer. That answer might be meaningless to us as it is to him. It might deal with the general idea of innocence “Nobody is innocent,” is something his type often says. Here’s the most fundamental characteristic of John Coltrane that you need to know before you get to know him. The man always has an answer. If you asked him the question you just asked me, he’d give you an answer. He might give you an answer that strikes you as profound but strikes you as gibberish later, or vice versa. That answer would also be as meaningless to him as it is to him, and it might change if you ask him it a month later, or however long it takes for him to forget the first answer he gave you. Regardless the answer, he always has an answer. There’s always a quick, off the cuff answer that leads you to believe that he’s given this a lot of thought. He hasn’t. He just answers the question. 

“The comedy comes into play when the question of morality arises,” they continue. “John Coltrane knows moral values. He has codes by which he thinks everyone should live, if they want their society and culture to advance. He might even have a long, engaging conversation with your paragon of virtue, your dad, and your dad might find him so pleasant and respectful, and right. The two of them might share so many principles and values, over that steaming bowl of soup, that a friendship could develop. The idea that he doesn’t display his own values doesn’t seem to faze him in the least. If you called him a hypocrite, he’d have an answer. He always has an answer. The most important thing to him in life is finding happiness, and he doesn’t care what he has to do to get it. He’s just a bad guy.”