Remembering Steve Sabol

Sharp-eyed viewers of last Monday's game might have noticed that coach Mike McCarthy was wearing an unusual pin on his team-issued jacket.

The black and white pin, featuring an "SDS" logo with a sprocket-hole border, honors Steve Sabol, who passed away last week. As a co-founder (with his father) of NFL Films, Sabol had a profound impact on the way the game has developed in the last half-century. It seems to me inarguable that professional football wouldn't be the colossus it is without his highlight films bringing us all the action in slow-motion over an orchestral score.

At the risk of seeming a contrarian, I also wonder if Sabol's influence wasn't entirely benign; those same highlight films glamorized and glorified the hard-hitting style of football now causing the NFL so much trouble in court at the moment. He went a long way to giving so many in the press and at the League the (mistaken) impression that it was those hits football fans crave. But that's a conversation for another day, and shouldn't diminish his other accomplishments as he remember him.

The memorial logo was worn last weekend by all NFL Films personnel.

Pins were distributed to all NFL clubs, and it appears that several head coaches wore one (Seattle's Pete Carrol, notably, did not).

And if you noticed all that, you were watching the game more closely than some other people I could mention.