Yet another reason it's ridiculous Ray Lewis works for ESPN

There are, like, 99 problems with Ray Lewis working as an analyst for ESPN and this particular ethics violation totally is one.

On Sunday night, one day before commentating on Monday night’s Buffalo-New England game, Ray Lewis gave a pep talk to the Bills, coached by Rex Ryan, Lewis’s former defensive coordinator in Baltimore. The next night, he “analyzed” the game on Monday Night Countdown and said Ryan was a better coach than Bill Belichick (which is sort of like saying AskJeeves is a better search engine than Google — and yes, AskJeeves still exists, I highly recommend going).

The pregame speech probably sounded a little something like this and hit all the key points of Ray Lewis speeches: discussions of the man beside you, a higher calling, coming together as one, a little poetry, lots of clapping, wild gesticulations and imploring men to “do what we do.”

I really hope Sunday’s ended with some shot at Belichick and if it didn’t, Rex Ryan definitely slid in to make one, then earned a scowl from Ray, who never allows anyone else on his pep-talk turf. Ed Reed found that out the hard way one day. (This is all in my imagination, but you know it’s true.)

Okay, so this news of Ray-Ray’s Sunday pep-talk led to some deserved hand-wringing about how he can commentate on a game in which he clearly has a rooting interest. While the Rex > Belichick comment is completely idiotic, I can’t say I’m exactly fainting like a petticoat-wearing woman in the 1870s proclaiming “well, I never!” over this. Yeah, Lewis should have disclosed he talked to the team the night before. But so what if he didn’t? There are conflicts of interest every day in sports announcing — the coach calling his brother’s game, the coach calling his former team’s game, the coach calling the game of a team he’d like to coach, the wife of a tennis player’s agent analyzing other players on Tour, a tennis coach commenting on his pupil’s next opponent and basically everything that happens on NFL pregame shows. You don’t think it’s weird when Ditka analyzes a Bears game, Ray does a Ravens game, Dan Marino talks Miami or Cris Carter just says anything? So why the consternation now?

None of it matters. When everyone knows the news — like, the real news — is biased, what does it matter that sports coverage is too? Shoot, even the Supreme Court has bias. It doesn’t make them poor magistrates, it just means they’re human.

But you know why this Ray Lewis thing especially doesn’t matter? Because it’s Ray Lewis. No one cares what he says anyway. No one expects him to be a rational, unbiased observer. And though I disagree with every single aspect of ESPN paying him money, clearly they’re not paying for moral integrity. They’re paying him for headlines and so that we’ll write posts like these, seemingly bashing Monday Night Countdown but in essence hyping it as something to watch to see what Ray Lewis will do next.

Monday’s “incident” isn’t the first and won’t be the last. But it raises the question about the chicken and the egg: Is it a joke that Ray Lewis didn’t disclose he talked to the Bills before saying Rex Ryan was a better coach than Bill Belichick or is Ray Lewis just the joke?