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" Michael Sam is a defensive end out of a Mizzou. He&amp;#039;s the SEC&amp;#039;s Defensive Player of the Year. There are some good points about how Sam&amp;#039;s best games as a pass rusher might have come against bad competition. That&amp;#039;ll likely keep him out of the first couple of rounds of the 2014 NFL Draft. But he&amp;#039;s a winner, a beloved teammate, and a leader of a consistently overachieving team. Sam saw his older brother die in front of him of a gunshot wound. His other brother went missing in 1998. This is all in his Wikipedia page. Somewhere in the middle-bottom of that thing in a few years, it will be noted that Sam is gay, and he will have been the first NFL player to have come out, and the young will wonder why this is so high up on this Wikipedia page when they&amp;#039;re doing a bad job on their book reports. It&amp;#039;ll be even lower on the Wikipedia page of the fifth or sixth gay player to come out \u2014 maybe in the section next to &amp;quot;philanthropy&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hobbies. &amp;quot; Those out player will invariably follow now, in short order. It will be a footnote, or it might not be there at all. But it&amp;#039;s a noisy footnote right now, that Michael Sam is gay, and that some NFL GMs cannot get over it, and that they&amp;#039;re using the same sort of language that was used to keep black players out of pro sports in the &amp;#039;40s and &amp;#039;50s. Here&amp;#039;s what an anonymous executive told SI.com. Not that they&amp;#039;re against gay people. It&amp;#039;s more that some players are going to look at you upside down. Every Tom, Dick and Harry in the media is going to show up, from Good Housekeeping to the Today show. A general manager is going to ask, &amp;#039;Why are we going to do that to ourselves?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Those GMs are afraid it will create a separate class of player \u2014 one that is immune to public criticism, one whose off-the-field stuff inhibits a coach&amp;#039;s ability to make a decision on the field without calls from casual fans for more or less playing time. But that would be to avoid all kinds of precedent. We do not call Jacoby Jones the salsa extraordinaire out of Lane College, even though he is. We do not call Tony Gonzalez the serial life-saver out of Cal, either. Maybe we should. He&amp;#039;s done it twice. But we don&amp;#039;t. We call him future Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez, because we know him best from catching all of those footballs in the back of the endzone, no matter how out-of-the-ordinary a part of his personal life is. Criticism of Sam&amp;#039;s football is necessary. Michael Sam is, first and foremost, a good football player with football problems in big games. But take Gen Y&amp;#039;s lead here. Their indifference toward sexuality is so overwhelming that they don&amp;#039;t even feel the need to take to Twitter to self-congratulate or loudly hum how tolerant they are when these kinds of news stories now break. No shit there&amp;#039;s about to be an NFL defensive end. There have been dozens in the past. We just do not yet know their names. Michael Sam is a defensive end out of Mizzou. He&amp;#039;s going to be just fine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a27273/future-of-michael-sam/>