Terrible news out of Toronto: Former Flyer Peter Zezel has died in a hospital as a result of a rare blood disorder.

Multiple reports indicate that Zezel had fought the disorder, hemolytic anemia, for the last decade, but that he was thought to be coping well in recent years. His family made the decision to turn off life support this afternoon.

Zezel was drafted by the Flyers in 1983 and was a very popular player, especially among the females in the stands, when he played here from 1984 to 1989. In that time, he and his young teammates made two trips to the Stanley Cup finals under coach Mike Keenan. He was one of the faces of that popular young group that never was quite able to knock down the door.

The end of Zezel's career told you something about the man. He was in Vancouver and requested a deadline trade to the East so that he could be near a young niece who was dying of cancer. Instead, he was traded to Anaheim and promptly retired.

Now, this.  Zezel was only 44 years old.

Sonia Sotomayor, announced as President Obama's choice to succeed the retiring David Souter on the Supreme Court, has been involved in two huge sports cases over the years.

In one, during the baseball strike of 1994-95, she ruled in favor of the players over the owners, effectively ending the owners' ability to impose a tough contract on the players and start the season with scab replacement players in an effort to force them to agree. The ruling pointed out, in painstaking detail, the serial ineptitude of commissioner Bud Selig and his lieutenants as they presided over this mess. It was Selig's worst moment as commissioner and there wasn't a close second.

A decade later, Sotomayor ruled for a league over a player when, as an appeals court judge, she wrote the ruling that overturned a lower court decision that would have allowed Maurice Clarett to enter the NFL draft despite the age restriction that the union had collectively bargained.

The similarity in both cases, it seems, is a respect for the collective-bargaining process and the place of unions in the corporate world. In the baseball case, Sotomayor backed the National Labor Relations Board and slammed baseball for unfair labor practices. In the NFL case, she (and the justices who supported her position on the appeals court) supported the notion that labor law should trump anti-trust law in the Clarett case, and the idea that a union had the right to collectively bargain such an age restriction with an employer.

In other sporting news, Sotomayor apparently is a Yankees fan. Now that Jimmy Rollins has sort of predicted a Yankees-Phillies World Series, it would make for nothing if not an interesting opportunity for a wager if Sotomayor and Justice Samuel Alito -- an avowed Phillies fan -- would serve on the court together.

Loser wears the other team's cap during oral arguments one day. What do you say?

Here is the real news from the Eagles' roster:

Macho Harris is his name. Not Victor. Macho.

It says so, right there on the Eagles' website. And the change was confirmed by the club. The cornerback from Virginia Tech whom the Eagles drafted in the fifth round last month has a real first name on his birth certificate, name of Victor, but that's done. The preference now, on first reference, is to use the nickname that his family gave him as a young child. Macho Harris.

The Eagles have done this before. This club has endured more name changes in the last couple of years than the Wachovia Center.  Tra/William/Tra Thomas was one. Will Peterson/William James was another one. Juqua Thomas/Juqua Parker was still another one. Then there is Tank Daniels, who is really Torrance Daniels, except that he is now Tank Daniels. Got all that?

As you are no doubt aware, the NFL can get a little persnickety about all of this when it starts to touch the revenue stream, as it did in the case of the Bengals' Chad Johnson, who wants to be known as Chad Ocho Cinco. The league fought him on this for a while, mostly because of all the jerseys in stores with "Johnson" on the back of them. Now the NFL has relented -- except that, because of the manner in which the official paperwork was filled out, the league is insisting that the official name is "Ochocinco" and not "Ocho Cinco."

But if you want to change your first name, the league apparently doesn't care so much. There aren't any legal documents consulted or anything like that. You want to change your first name, you just change it. In fact, if Macho Harris wanted to change his name again, he could.

Machocinco is still available, for instance.

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Click here for an earlier post about the NFL and the labor hammer is now wields.

The news was in The New York Times the other day. At the NFL owners' meeting, as a result of making a deal with Comcast on carrying the NFL Network, the league's deals with CBS and Fox were renegotiated as well. The key point, though, is that the owners will get the network cash even if the league were to lock out the players in a labor dispute in 2011.

From the Times report:

The N.F.L. will receive a 1 to 2 percent increase over the previous contracts that averaged $712 million a year from Fox and $622 million a year from CBS. According to two people with knowledge of the deal who were not authorized to speak about it, the N.F.L. will get that money even if games are not played in 2011. (The networks will receive credits for the payments in following years.)

This is news but it isn't news. As far as I know, every NFL television contract in the modern era has included a clause that calls for payment in the event of a work stoppage, and this clause has affected every labor negotiation the league has ever had. The reason is obvious enough: during a work stoppage, the teams would lose ticket revenue and other sponsorship revenue, but they would continue to receive the TV money, which is about two-thirds of what comes in every season, while not having to pay the players.

In other words, the owners will continue to be able to operate indefinitely while the players lose 100 percent of their income. The players already have short, tenuous careers as it is. It is obvious why these television contracts are such a hammer in any negotiation.

This is not good for the players but it is probably good for the rest of us. Why? Because it would be suicide for the union to allow this thing to get to a work stoppage situation.  The union got a small victory in the last negotiation, which was held in a unique circumstance as former commissioner Paul Tagliabue was taking a valedictory lap. But it was not a huge win, even as the owners complain about the deal, and nobody is worried about anybody's legacy anymore.

The union has one hammer of its own: the Federal court system. The only time it ever won anything that mattered against the league, it was because the union disbanded and sued the NFL for free-agency rights. The current system was birthed out of the union's victory in that lawsuit in the famous case where Reggie White agreed to be listed as the main plaintiff.

It is becoming more and more clear that the union will have to accept some concessions at the bargaining table or head to court before the NFL locks out the players. Maybe that threat of a court fight will give the players a bit of a hammer of their own. We'll see.

But a work stoppage? I don't think so, especially now that the networks have again agreed to bankroll the owners.

Michael Vick is out of jail.

Now, the maneuvering begins.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is playing this very cozy. He said he is looking for Vick to show proper remorse before reinstating him, all of which is fine. But what nobody is really saying out loud, but which everybody knows in their heart, is that no NFL team is going to touch Vick -- even after serving his debt to society in this despicable dog-fighting business -- unless there is some reasonable certainty that the resulting publicity firestorm will blow over fairly quickly. That is, no one will want to deal with PETA picketing their games and their practice facilities and their sponsors for months on end.

This is all about PETA right now, and PETA does not appear to be placated. There is talk that Vick and the Humane Society might be getting into bed together, but PETA? Not yet.

In January, PETA said that it could not support Vick's return unless he underwent psychiatric testing, including a brain scan, to determine if he is likely to get involved in animal cruelty again. This is a bit, uh, intrusive -- and it goes against the whole paid-his-debt ethos to which most people in this country subscribe -- but PETA is driving the bus here. Don't kid yourself on that one.

Anyway, according to a published report, here is the latest PETA statement:

In January, after a U.S. Department of Agriculture report on Vick's dogfighting activities revealed that Vick enjoyed placing family pets in the ring with fighting pit bulls, PETA called on NFL Commissioner Goodell to require that Vick undergo a full psychological evaluation before any decisions were made about the future of his football career.

Until Michael Vick undergoes the vigorous psychiatric tests now available to determine his ability to experience remorse, there’s no way to establish whether he will re-offend and he therefore has no business being primed to become a role model for children, which is what an NFL star is. PETA will not take anything off the table when it comes to any team or league that may sign Michael Vick.

In the meantime, other athletes are coming forward to speak out against dogfighting, including Houston Rockets forward Ron Artest, mixed martial arts fighter Tito Ortiz, and World Welterweight Champion "Sugar" Shane Mosley, who is shooting an anti-dogfighting ad for PETA this week.

The key phrase: "...will not take anything off the table when it comes to any team or league that may sign Michael Vick."

That is known as a threat, ladies and gentleman.

In other words, this might take a while.

This is awful, as anybody who knows Jim Johnson can tell you. Even if you only know of him, the news of his leave of absence to resume chemotherapy treatments just grabs the air out of your chest. This is a good man, and a tough man, and the idea that he is involved in this kind of a struggle is disheartening. If prayers and good wishes and hopeful thoughts matter, Johnson will get through this -- because his friends and admirers in a tough business are legion.

In the meantime, Sean McDermott runs the Eagles' defense. He is young, only just 35, but he has been in the building for 11 years now. He actually pre-dates Andy Reid, arriving as an assistant in the scouting department in 1998. When Reid got here, McDermott became assistant to the head coach. Those are great stepping-stone jobs in the NFL -- you see everything and learn everything and work your ass off, and then you work your way up from there. This is what McDermott has done, from quality-control coach (another work-your-ass-off/learn-the-business job), to coaching both the secondary and the linebackers with the Eagles.

Is McDermott ready? You never know until you know, obviously, but it is hard to believe somebody could be better prepared to run this system. And if track record matters, people named Leslie Frazier, Ron Rivera, Steve Spagnuolo and John Harbaugh (for a season) have all worked under Jim Johnson and all gone on to success in other places. We all have talked and written in the past about the connection Johnson has had with his players, but there is a clear connection with his coaches, too.

Again: you never know until you know. But as we wait and hope for Johnson's return, there is every reason to believe that Jim has taken care of the interim as he now takes care of himself.

Back in the day, one imagines that the success of a television commercial was dependent upon whether or not people were whistling the jingle on the street, or repeating the catch-phrase in conversation, or some other such human-based measure. No longer. Now, you know your commercial was a success if it is parodied on YouTube in big numbers. All of which brings us to the NBA's where-amazing-happens ad campaign.

Go on YouTube and there are several zillion copycat commercials on pretty much every conceivable theme, all in the now-familiar style: a series of still pictures, simply captioned in the "where-xxxx-happens" manner, all backed by that hauntingly-insistent piano music.

If your team doesn't have one of these at this point, you don't have fans. Needeless to say, each of the Philadelphia teams have a couple of them. I'm still waiting for the cynical Philadelphia version -- you know, "where throwing up happens" -- but I haven't found that one.

Well, not yet.

From Mike Florio at profootballtalk.com comes this latest accounting of cap space around the National Football League.

In a shocking development, the Eagles have a ton: $23.1 million, fifth most in the NFL.

Months ago, club president Joe Banner said the Eagles couldn't possibly spend it all, and he is proving to be accurate. The Eagles will not be able to spend it all. They have enough cash to go out and make another move, if that is their desire. They have enough money to make another move and to extend Donovan McNabb, if that is their desire. They can make another move, extend Donovan McNabb and Sheldon Brown and drop hundred dollar bills from a helicopter and still have money left over to stuff into a very comfortable mattress.

You know what the saddest part of going into an uncapped year in 2010 will be -- if that, indeed, is the result of the collective bargaining negotiations that are supposedly going to begin in the coming months. If the NFL loses its salary cap, it will lose this readily-available accounting of who is spending what. It will leave us all without anything to talk about -- except the run-pass ratio.

My apologies if this list has already been chewed over, but if it was, I missed it. It is annual springtime fodder, the NFL over/under list for wins in the upcoming season. I can't believe the Eagles' over/under is only 9 wins.

Just look at these three numbers:

Giants, 10.5 win.

Cowboys, 9.5 wins.

Eagles, 9 wins.

Maybe it's because New York is a bigger market. Maybe it's because everybody follows the Dallas Cowboys. Maybe the totals of those two teams are over-inflated as a result. I don't know. But I have a hard time seeing it. When the games mattered last year, when the final accounting was done, a schizophrenic Eagles team was better than the Cowboys and beat the Giants at the Meadowlands in the playoffs -- and, on top of that, the Eagles have remade their offense in an attempt to remove some of the schizophrenia.

I know, I know, I'm counting on Jason Peters being a player at left tackle, and Leonard Weaver at fullback, and LeSean McCoy at backup running back. But McCoy is the only one who doesn't have an NFL track record. It just seems to me that the Eagles have created more options for themselves to win close games, or ugly games. They won nine and tied one last year, and they lost (and tied) a number of tight and nasty games, and even if they pull out only one more of them, they're better than 9.

What am I missing?