Chad Ochocinco Bribe Scandal is just what it is: Funny Plain and Simple

Love him or hate him, Chad Ochocinco is one of those guys you simply can’t ignore. Whether he’s tweeting all night, staging a ridiculous end zone celebration or arguing with Skip Bayless, he’s always doing something to distance himself from the crowd. The latest in a long line of attention-grabbers? He tried to bribe an official with a dollar. Yep, a one-dollar bill.

The attempted — and fake, by the way, because he was smiling the whole time — bribery occurred during the Bengals’ pivotal victory over division-foe Baltimore. It didn’t work — and, again, he wasn’t really trying to bribe the official — as the play in question went against the Bengals after review. Hopefully Ocho kept his dollar and will be tucking it elsewhere in celebratory fashion.

Now, there is sure to be a large group of people who don’t like this. There will be:

- People who think he was actually trying to bribe the official and should get in serious hot water with the league.

- People who think Ocho is such a clown that his antics need to be dealt with just to put a stop to the madness.

- People who think bribing officials is too delicate a subject and shouldn’t be openly joked about, even though it was clearly evident he wasn’t serious.

On the flip side, he was just trying to have fun.

“You saw that?” Ochocinco said after the game. “I was going to give them a dollar just to bribe them. ‘Just give me the call, give me the catch, we need this one.’

“I might get fined. Mr. [Roger] Goodell, I’m sorry. I’m just having fun.”

While I don’t actually think it’s creative or funny (seriously, people do this every Saturday when I officiate elementary football … when you hear a “joke” roughly seven billion times, it ceases to be funny and becomes more than annoying), this is nothing we should work ourselves into a tizzy about. It’s just a guy, who is desperate for attention, trying to have fun with his job. I can’t find a problem there — again, other than the fact that it’s an overplayed and uncreative “joke.”

By Matt Snyder (RSS feed)

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