Column: Pointing fingers at NFL and ESPN, and turning thumbs up at Derek Jeter

Sometimes, we typists look for a column and find several. So today, instead of pontificating, we shall parse.

• Is there anything more useless than the NFL’s overtime rule? Could its basic idiocy have been showcased any more clearly than last week’s Seattle-Denver game?

Peyton Manning was Peyton Manning, with the kind of masterful comeback to tie the score that leaves fans wide-eyed and committed to never missing another NFL game. Then, in overtime, they never give him the ball back. Huh?

All credit to Russell Wilson and the Seahawks. They did two things perfectly — win the coin flip and drive the ball to the end zone. We watched all this to see a game decided by a coin flip?!!

Thumbs down to the NFL rules committee. Could it be that they didn’t adopt the 500-times-better high school and college overtime rule because they didn’t want it to seem that high school and college officials had a better idea than the great NFL?

• Speaking of that league, and his excellency, Roger Goodell, our friend, Jerry Izenberg, longtime star columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, has a new book out on Pete Rozelle. The timing, with Goodell currently ducking and weaving, is perfect.

For those who may not remember, Rozelle was a Southern California guy who was NFL commissioner during expansion, during battles with Al Davis, the creation of the Super Bowl and turning television into the league’s personal yellow brick road. Other than that, he didn’t do much.

As you conjure up a mind’s picture of Goodell, tiptoeing through the minefields of truth and fiction in his recent news conference, we will quote from Izenberg’s book, Rozelle: “By the end of his [Rozelle’s] first decade in office, he would take the NFL and the AFL in his hands and shape them into one league, with liberty, justice and guaranteed serious profits for all.”

• Speaking of that league again, and one of its great enablers, ESPN, there was a fascinating juxtaposition of events recently involving the worldwide leader in self-indulgence.

First, we hear that ESPN, a bastion of ethical behavior when it doesn’t create any problems with the business partners it sleeps with — which is about 80% of the sports world now — has suspended Bill Simmons.

Writing star and TV personality Simmons, a very smart guy, who has climbed the ladder at ESPN like a firefighter with a jetpack, momentarily reverted to his days of banging his pacifier on the high-chair tray table to get attention. In a podcast, he called Goodell a liar and used several others words you don’t want to teach your 7-year-old.

For this, and apparently for challenging his bosses to do something about his outburst, he got spanked and sent to his room for three weeks.

That, of course, raises the usual questions about the big guys at ESPN saluting the NFL paymasters. Sadly, that has become a given. ESPN has more conflicts of interest than a cat with a dead mouse and a ball of string.

More amusing, in the same week that the worldwide leader in journalistic integrity was slapping down Simmons, it was pimping for a documentary it will air — read this carefully; we don’t make ‘em up — on Morganna, the Kissing Bandit.

If you don’t remember who she is, Google it. You will quickly see how this “documentary” is motivated solely by the most serious and meaningful journalism.

How about an ESPN exacta? Simmons interviews Morganna and then gets kissed? Oh wait, he can’t. He’s suspended.

• Speaking of the league that gets billions of dollars for putting games on Simmons’ network, there is another juxtaposition in the category of treatment of women.

Goodell’s current mess was triggered by Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens, punching his wife-to-be into unconsciousness in an elevator.

During this time, five NFL cheerleading squads have filed suit against their teams for what they called lack of fair wages.

The cheerleaders, from Tampa Bay, Buffalo, Cincinnati, the New York Jets and Oakland, say they worked for $5 an hour — minimum wage in California, for example, is $9 — and worked hundreds of hours for free. They also say that their pay came only in one lump sum at the end of the season. The Raiders have settled their lawsuit and their cheerleaders will now get that $9.

ESPN could wrap all this into a neat journalistic package by having Simmons interview Morganna about why she never became an NFL cheerleader. Oh, wait. That would make the NFL angry. Plus, Simmons is suspended.

• Let’s end on a more positive note.

Has there ever been a more feel-good ending to a highly hyped grand finale than Derek Jeter’s walk-off hit Thursday night in Yankee Stadium? You can hate the Yankees, but you can’t hate Jeter. It is unconstitutional.

The only thing missing was Simmons interviewing Jeter about whether Morganna had ever run out onto the field and kissed him.

Oh, wait. Simmons is suspended.

(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)