Jason Whitlock had another provocative column last week on foxsports.com, headlined “NFL Truths: It’s all about character.” In it, he takes to task organizations that draft, and trade, based solely on perceived talent, and ignore “character” issues. His none-too-surprising conclusion: “The lesson from this entire NFL season is embarrassingly obvious and cliche: Good and bad character are difference-makers.” He hammered at that theme some more on Monday, when he subbed for Jim Rome on KLAC.

There’s obviously some truth to that old saw. Nothing can undermine a coach, or tear apart a locker room, like bad character players — especially bad-character guys whose talent or natural charisma draws teammates to him. But it’s really not that simple.

In the first place, what does “character” mean, anyway? If it means fire in the belly, hard-driving work ethic, will to win, hatred of defeat, tolerance of pain, and on-field smarts, I’ll buy it. The only problems with those qualities, is that a lot of really, really bad people also have them. There are a lot of really tough, fearless, hard-working, never-say-die narcissistic a-holes and sociopaths out there.

Ray Lewis is a tough player and a leader on the field and, presumably, in the locker room. He proved that all season, and certainly didn’t disappoint against the Dolphins last Sunday. Just don’t go to any club where he and his posse are hanging out around Super Bowl time, unless you’re wearing heavy armor. Or at least that’s the advice the two dead guys for whose murder he was arrested several years ago should have heeded.

Lewis ultimately pleaded to lesser charges of obstructing justice, so I guess he’s not a murderer, just a guy who likes to pal around with murderers. But his utter lack of remorse over the murders of two people — a young barber and an aspiring artist not known to be gang-affiliated — and his general attitude throughout that sordid process, strongly suggest that “character” means something different in football than it means in the rest of society.

I hate to pound on Nick Saban again, but whatever excellence he has as a college football coach is counterbalanced by his vile lack of honesty and inability to fulfill his agreements. He’s had a lot of success, despite his own appalling “character.” I’m sure he tells recruits and their parents that “character” is paramount to him, and I’m sure it is. He just doesn’t factor in his own. Not a lot of dry eyes outside the state of Alabama when the “plucky” Utes boatraced his Tide team in the Sugar Bowl.

Also, too, as Sarah Palin likes to say, what about all those high-“character” guys who play on losing teams, or on winning teams that just fall short? If character is the “difference maker,” does that mean that only the winningest winners have it? This is a variation on the penchant of athletes and coaches to credit prayer and the intervention of The Almighty for their victories and successes, which merely begs the question whether they just didn’t pray hard enough before every game they lost, and/or whether their opponents are, by contrast, minions of Beelzebub.

After all, Tony Dungy has been a prayerful man and by all accounts a man who doesn’t just preach, but performs, good works. He’s been an outstanding NFL head coach. Nonetheless, his teams have won a grand total of 1 Super Bowl, while the NFL’s Prince of Darkness, Belichick, of whom more, later, has won 3 as a head coach, and has 2 other rings as the Igor to Bill Parcells’s Dr. Frankenstein. So, Belichick and Parcells have more character than Dungy?

Last Saturday, Dungy’s Colts lost yet another playoff game they coulda’, shoulda’ won. Did he and his players on all those other good teams lack “character” every year but one? Remember, Peyton Manning, the quintessential “high-character” guy has been on Dungy’s Colts for a lot of years. Unfortunately, Manning’s surfeit of “character” doesn’t seem to translate to stellar performances when it’s one-and-done. Indeed, some uncharitable souls, including myself, believe he chokes in big games in the postseason.

Not that he doesn’t burn to win; not that he doesn’t practice and prepare obsessively; not that he’s unwilling to play with pain. He gets high scores on all those “tests” of “character.” He just happens to choke in “money” games. On the other hand, his team this year wouldn’t have had the chance to see him choke, had he not performed at a preternatural level in the regular season.

Heck, the Giants beat the Patriots last Super Bowl, with such “character” guys as Plaxico Burress. Was it simply the case that Burress’s lack of “character” was canceled out by some of the Pats’ own players, like, say, Randy Moss, or was the balance upset by the king of detestable “characters,” Bill Belichick — who, perversely, is renowned for insisting on “high-character” players?

What about the Pats’ Randy Moss, who’s generally regarded as a “high-character” player now? Folks in Oakland and Minnesota, who knew him when, might beg to differ.

Voltaire, I believe, is the one who said that God fights on the side of the big battalions. In football terms, God fights on the side of the teams with the best talent at key positions, the best coaching, the best preparation, the best game plans, the better match-ups, and the fewest key injuries. A “high-character” guy who can’t run, can’t jump, and/or is weaker than his opposite numbers, may or may not be able to compensate for the disparity of talent in certain situations, but a team built solely on “character” and not on the other things that make a football player effective is likely to be left in the dust by the lower-“character” teams with better personnel.

Sure, you can’t predict winners, or successful players, simply by relying on the “measurables.” The Cowboys are Exhibit A for the proposition that boatloads of talent on paper don’t guarantee success on the field. Exhibit B may well be the Redskins, who paid a huge amount for a former Pro Bowl player bitten by the acting bug, Jeremy Taylor, and thereby helped the surprising Miami Dolphins achieve a remarkable comeback, while themselves falling into the pit of unmet expectations. Exhibit C probably is the Jets, who spent and spent and spent in the offseason for proven talent — and not just on Brett Favre, either. They ultimately exited the stage with both a whimper and a bang — the bang being the end of Eric Mangini’s head coaching job, and the whimper, perhaps, the ignominious end to Brett Favre’s career.

Character, shmaracter. Favre had plenty of “character” when he won one Super Bowl, went to another, and almost beat the Giants last postseason, didn’t he? Apparently, he only lost his “character” when he presided over a season-ending losing streak of epic proportions, in which his interception-to-TD ratio looked like Lehman Brothers last financial statement. So, does “character” determine results, or does it only become evident AFTER the returns are in?

It sure looks from my armchair as if Favre proves that “good” and “bad” character can coexist in the same damn player! (It also seems that he was the world’s biggest idiot not to take the Packers up on their offer of $25 Million to stay retired, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

So, while “character” may “count,” the teams that have won, and won consistently, sure seem to have more good players at more positions — and better coaching and management — than the teams that failed. Call me naïve.

It stinks big-time that a team that finished with an 11-5 record is out of the NFL playoffs, while two 8-8 teams (both of which won last weekend, incidentally) and one 9-7 outfit got in. But when the 11-5 team is the New England Patriots, coached by Bill Belichick, it’s just chickens come home to roost. Who, other than a “chowderhead,” could possibly be unhappy that the Pats got screwed?

Still, the Pats’ record this year may have been Belichick’s best-ever coaching job. The guy has some skills, no doubt. It’s just that his general schmuckiness tends to overshadow them.

And, getting back to the “character” issue, is it fair for all the high-character players on that team to suffer due to the karmic payback that Belichick invited? Was it fair that the sailors on the boat where Jonah stowed himself just before being swallowed by the “great fish” almost died because Jonah had seriously pissed off God?

We hear all the time that if your number’s up, it’s up, and that’s all well and good. But what if the number that’s up happens to belong to the guy standing next to you, and you’re just “collateral damage”? Anyone remember the poor guy in Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” who DIDN’T eat the salmon mousse, but wound up in the afterlife anyway, along with all the ones who did? So, Mr. Whitlock, one “bad-character” player is enough to ruin the fate of multiple good-character teammates?

I see where Bill Simmons, outstanding sportswriter and raconteur, and irrationally biased Celtics-lover and Lakers-hater (although the latter is virtually a given if the former is true) has written off the Christmas Day Lakers’ win over the Green Machine as essentially meaningless. I have to take issue with the reasoning that got him there. I mean, come ON, blaming the refs for the outcome because they gave the Lakers a 15-8 advantage in free throws — ZERO to Kobe, who deserved a few — while whitewashing the pro-Celtics free throw disparity in last season’s Finals?

But I have to agree with his conclusion. 92-83, at home, in a regular-season game on Christmas Day 2008 is “redemption” for losing last year’s Finals in 6 games, losing Game 4 at home despite an 18-point halftime lead, and losing Game 6 on the road by a deceptively CLOSE 40 points like — well, I have not idea like what. Nice that the Lakers won the game, but there’s no comparability or proportionality.

I remember sometime site contributor Damon Baldwin, an unrelentingly enthusiastic Raiders fan, taking me to task for daring to suggest that the Raiders’ regular-season win over the Pats the season after that heartbreaking, highway-robbery “Tuck” Rule playoff loss in Tom Brady’s first Super Bowl season didn’t quite even the score. I was perhaps a trifle more rudely dismissive of his Rai-duhs than I should have been — they were a pretty good team, back then — but I remain unrepentant about the conclusion.

Not that the regular-season win wasn’t welcome and important in its own right. But, unless it’s the win that knocks the hated rival out of a postseason berth, or gets team seeking “revenge” into the postseason, NO regular-season win properly compensates for a devastating playoff loss that prevents a team from going to a Super Bowl — as the Raiders might well have done had the refs not blown that “tuck” call. And I’m in surprising solidarity with Simmons that the Lakers’ Xmas Day win, heartening and welcome as it was, doesn’t begin to compensate for what the Celts did to the Lakers — and what the Lakers did to themselves — in last year’s Finals.

I’m writing this after the Texas-Ohio State Fiesta Bowl game and before Florida plays Oklahoma for the mythical “National Championship.” But even if Oklahoma beats Florida, I don’t think my conclusion is likely to change. The game was exciting, in its own way — or at least the finish, aided by a questionable call, was exciting. But based on what I saw last night, neither team was likely to beat USC on a neutral field.

In fact, we already know that Ohio State couldn’t beat USC at the L.A. Coliseum, with Beanie Wells unable to play. The final score might have been a bit less embarrassing to Ohio State had they played the game in Columbus with a full complement of players. But nobody who saw that game could doubt that Ohio State would have emerged the loser, wherever or whenever the game was played. Well, who knows what might have happened had the game been played on frozen tundra with a wind-chill of -30 degrees, but otherwise, case closed.

Colt McCoy said that Ohio State’s defense, which the Trojans went through, in Patton’s immortal phrase, “like crap through a goose,” was the best one the Longhorns had faced all season. He may have just been trying to be “politically correct,” to justify the close score and his own offense’s struggles in the game, but I suspect he was telling the truth. If so, that pretty much confirms what our own Jon Castro has been saying for a while: they play mediocre defense in the Big 12, so the top teams’ vaunted offensive statistics are inflated.

Assuming that Florida beats Oklahoma, as I expect, the question then arises whether the SEC, as Jon also contends, is overrated. The fact that Florida lost at home by a single point to Ole Miss does suggest that BOTH the top team in the SEC, and the top team in the Pac-10, which lost an away game it really had no business losing, have some warts.

But it’s not clear to me that Florida’s one-point home loss to Mississippi is substantially worse than USC’s loss in Corvallis. It turns out that both Ole Miss and Oregon State (when it had its top rusher healthy) were much better teams this year than anyone thought they’d be. Mississippi had 4 losses, true, and the losses at home to South Carolina and Vanderbilt were particularly embarrassing. And, frankly, their 23-21 away win over Arkansas, which lost to Texas (in Austin) 52-10 (but “held” Florida, in Fayetteville, to a “mere” 38 points), doesn’t give me a lot of reassurance.

Still, they did kick ass at LSU, barely lost at Alabama, and pummeled Texas Tech in their bowl game. Of course, Texas Tech had been leading a charmed life for most of the season, and they do come from the no-defense conference, but all in all, Mississippi was a lot better this season than they’d been at any time since Eli Manning left.

Certainly, what Utah did to Alabama is some evidence in favor of the “overrated league” conclusion. But Utah and other WAC teams also beat the Pac-10 teams they faced — except for Arizona’s bowl game win over BYU. Heck, Utah beat Oregon State (barely, and playing in Utah, but still . . . ), which beat USC. Does that make USC overrated? Or the WAC, which lost 3 of 5 bowl games — with the non-Utah win being a squeaker by Colorado State over an unimpressive Fresno State squad — underrated?

The point is that comparisons based on anything other than actual on-field competition, while fun, are impossible. As Colin Cowherd suggests, in the absence of any playoff system, bowl games are basically beauty contests. I happen to agree that the USC team of November, December and January deserved a chance to play some team other than Penn State in a bowl game, and, had it received that opportunity, would have more than held its own against any of the teams ranked above it. But we’ll never know.

We’ll especially not know because Oregon State lost to Oregon at the end of the season, dooming USC to yet another Rose Bowl. So, the real villain in this whole melodrama is Oregon State, which early in the season deprived USC of a chance to play for the national championship, and late in the season deprived USC of a chance to prove definitively that the Big 12’s offenses couldn’t beat its defense — or, for that matter, that the Big 12’s defenses would be as capable of stopping SC’s offense as the Maginot Line was of halting the German invasion in WWI.

Every time I see a running back who’s smaller than conventional wisdom says running backs should be, dominate at the NFL level, I have to wonder why the conventional wisdom got to be, well, “conventional.” The latest example is Darren Sproles, listed at 5’6” and 181 pounds, who merely accounted for 328 all-purpose yards and the game-winning TD in the Chargers’ “upset” of the Colts last Sunday. (I out “upset” in quotation marks because, really, is any victory over the Colts in a playoff game ever a true “upset”?) Heck, Ladainian Tomlinson himself is only 5’10”.

The great Jim Brown, the gold standard of running backs, for my money, is 6’2”. Eric Dickerson is 6’3”. Marcus Allen, who’d have challenged for the all-time mark had Al Davis not hated him so, was 6’1”, as was O.J. Simpson. Franco Harris was 6’2”. But a lot of the great running backs have been under 6 feet — some considerably under. Here are just a few: Earl Campbell – 5’11”; Terrell Davis – 5’11”; Emmitt Smith – 5’9”; Tony Dorsett – 5’11”; Walter Payton – 5’10”; Thurman Thomas – 5’10”; Barry Sanders – all of 5’8”.

The point isn’t that “smaller” running backs are better or more effective — although one theory of why USC lost to Oregon State was that the small stature of Jacquizz Rodgers, who’s listed at 5’6” and torched the Trojans’ defense for 186 rushing yards, enabled him to hide from the linebackers until after he’d hit the hole. The point is, instead, that NFL teams shouldn’t be afraid to draft, or play, a running back just because he’s a little shorter than what the computer says he should be.

And don’t even get me started about the NFL’s obsession that QBs should be 6’2” or above. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because QBs who are shorter than that generally aren’t drafted — at least, not to play quarterback. But I’ve never bought the rationales advanced for such height discrimination.

One rationale that I love is that shorter QBs won’t be able to see over oncoming rushers, or their own blockers. Sounds plausible, until you realize that in order to see “over” linemen who are well over 6 feet tall themselves, a QB would have to be 7 feet tall or so himself. Who’s the last 7-foot QB who played in the NFL? He hasn’t been born yet. As far as I can tell, QB’s, no matter what their height, “see” through the gaps between players, not over their heads. But everyone still repeats this old saw as if it had been handed down from God on Mt. Sinai.

So ingrained is this belief that coaches willfully refuse to change it even when events on the field prove them wrong. A case in point, I will maintain until my (hopefully, far-off) dying day, is the way Doug Flutie was treated when he came into the league. He wasn’t drafted high coming out of college — mainly because he’s 5’9” in shoes with heels — but performed pretty well for a couple of USFL seasons.

I can understand why the first NFL team for which he suited up, the 1986 Bears team a year removed from Super Bowl success, didn’t give him much of a shot and then dumped him. Jim McMahon hated Flutie from the git-go because the Bears had jettisoned McMahon’s best friend on the team to open a spot for Flutie; the other QBs, who in fairness were awful, treated the addition of Flutie as an implicit affront to their own abilities; and, let’s face it, Flutie didn’t do all that well, to put it charitably, when he was thrown in against a good Redskins team in that season’s playoffs.

But I think that the Patriots, with whom he signed after that season — or, perhaps more accurately, Raymond Berry, an all-time great pass-catcher but a so-so coach — really hosed him. Some say it was because he crossed the picket lines in the 1987 strike. He did, after all, QB the team to a 21-7 win against the Oilers in the last “replacement” game before the strike was officially settled. All I know is that he outplayed both Tony Eason and Steve “Touchless” Grogan whenever Berry had to, grudgingly, put him on the field, but that those two always got the benefits of any doubts — and there were many doubts.

Flutie led the Pats to a come-from-behind win off the bench in Game 5 of the next season, and was the QB, mainly because of injuries to the more favored passers, for the next 9 games. He won 7 of them. With the team needing just one win in its last 2 games to make the playoffs, Berry benched Flutie, inserted Eason — who basically hadn’t played all season — and the Pats missed the playoffs when Eason couldn’t get the job done. Flutie may not have had the most prepossessing stats around, but he did go 9-4 as a starter for the Patriots.

And, oh, yeah, in 1998, after the Bills started 1-3, he was allowed to be the Bills’ starting QB when Rob Johnson, a USC alum, was injured in the fifth game. All he did in his first start was pass for 2 TDs and lead a 4th-Quarter comeback against the Colts. The next week, he scored the winning TD against the Jaguars on a naked bootleg just as time expired. All told, he was 8-3 as a starter that season, made the Pro Bowl, and led the team into the playoffs, where Miami beat them.

The following season, he “merely” led the Bills to a 10-5 record. His reward was to have Coach Wade Phillips (‘nuff said) decide that the Bills really, really needed bigger, far less mobile, and consistent loser Rob Johnson under center. Showing his usual lack of acumen, Phillips benched Flutie for the last regular-season game, and for the playoff game against the Titans, and relegated Flutie to the bench for the next season.

I can’t blame Johnson for the bizarre “Music City Miracle” ending of that game — some Flutie enthusiasts suggest it was karmic payback for Phillips’s brain-dead personnel decision — but I’ve always believed that Flutie’s mobility and resourcefulness would have had the Bills ahead by enough that no miracle ending would be possible.

Thus was born the infamous “Curse of Doug Flutie” that has (deservedly) dogged Wade Phillips ever since. Just as a side-note, Phillips refused to learn from his mistakes, and kept Flutie’s posterior on the pines the next season, allowing him into games only after the outcome had been determined, or when Johnson was injured — which wasn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence.

For the record, the Bills finished the 2000 season 8-8, and have never even approached 10 wins in a season since that fateful benching. In fact, they haven’t even made the playoffs. Also just for the record, Phillips doggedly stuck with Johnson as he went 4-7, and only put Flutie in after Johnson went down. Doing the arithmetic, Flutie led the team to a 4-1 record in the games HE started. But Phillips made the correct decision, because Johnson had a better NFL body, right? NOT.

Flutie’s final F.U. to the organization — a bittersweet reminder of what could have been had they kept faith with him — occurred in the final game of that season, when he led the Bills to a 42-23 win over the Seahawks on the strength of 20 of 25 pass completions (80%) for 366 yards, 14.6 yards per attempt, 3 TDs, 0 interceptions, and a perfect 158.3 passer rating. As far as I’m aware, no Buffalo QB has had a better game since that one.

Am I suggesting that Flutie was a Hall of Famer in the making unjustly denied greatness by the blinkered prejudices of the coaching fraternity? Of course not. He never would have been a Joe Montana, John Elway, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Steve Young, Troy Aikman, or even a Dan Marino or Jim Kelly.

But there are plenty of NFL QBs who also would never be confused with the above luminaries, who’ve had a lot more support from their organizations, and who’ve produced a lot less than Flutie did when he got his chances. Heck, Super Bowls have been won by the likes of Trent Dilfer, Brad Johnson, and Mark Rypien, who also never reminded anyone of the aforementioned greats. Indeed, Jim McMahon, Flutie’s tormentor in Chicago, wasn’t all that great himself, winning his only Super Bowl mainly because of the team’s monster defense.

So I certainly do think that Flutie could have had a nice little career as a starter, winning more games than he lost, with some reasonable playoff success, had he been given a fair shot. When circumstances forced coaches to play him, he won games. Despite winning, he was nonetheless benched by those coaches as soon as they could conjure up excuses to do so, and kept there even as his replacements kept losing games. And I believe that the main reason he was never given a fair shot is because coaches everywhere are so mesmerized by numbers like height, weight, etc., that they could never accept the possibility that a smaller-than-normal QB could lead a team, even when the results prove otherwise.

The prejudice applies beyond height issues. Joe Montana is 6’2” and Tom Brady is 6’4”. Yet, would Montana have been Montana (or, for that matter, would Jerry Rice have been Jerry Rice) in any system other than the Niners’, under any coach but Walsh or one of his epigones? Would Brady have become Brady under any coach but Belichick? Remember, neither was particularly well-regarded coming out of college. Montana, “Comeback Kid” though he’d been at Notre Dame, wasn’t considered real pro material, and didn’t go until Walsh took him late in the Third Round. Not only did Brady last until the 199th pick, because no one thought he’d be any good, but the Pats actually drafted two other players AHEAD of him in Round 6!

It’s easy, in hindsight, to suggest that they’d have risen to the top in any system. But the reality is that there are a lot of inflexible, unimaginative — okay, stupid and pigheaded — personnel people in the NFL unable or unwilling to look outside their specifications lists, and even more coaches unable or unwilling to accommodate different talents. Would Montana have even started, let alone lasted in the league, had, say, the aforementioned Wade Phillips been his coach? Would Brady have ever had the chance to impregnate one super model and become engaged to another, had he gone to Dallas, or Kansa City, or . . . well, you get the idea.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.