Football

Dave Pietramala smiles when he hears the question. It's one he has heard before. They look at him - his big-barreled chest, his oak tree of a neck and his linebacker-thick arms - and just assume. You played football growing up, didn't you? No, sadly, Pietramala did not play high school football. It wasn't that he didn't want to, and it wasn't that his parents wouldn't let him. Quite the opposite. There simply was no football in his small world. His tiny Catholic high school, St. Mary's in Hicksville, N.Y., couldn't afford the insurance, and so in the mid-1980s, a generation of broad-shouldered young men like Pietramala were steered to lacrosse and told to seek athletic glory scooping ground balls instead of wrestling running backs to the ground.

What was your welcome-to-the-NFL moment? When then-New England Patriots guard Damien Woody knocked me on my butt in my first preseason game in 2002. I had already had the sack, but I got greedy, and I went in there high, and he came up and blocked me. He knocked me on my butt. What was your proudest moment in the NFL? My rookie year when nobody expected us to beat the Tennessee Titans and I intercepted Steve McNair in the end zone to lift the Ravens to a 13-12 win. That was a big game.

Las Vegas -- Wearing a Ravens baseball cap and an old No. 31 jersey, Charlie Carnaggio was a beacon of Baltimore pride sitting among several hundred fellow gamblers packed into the Las Vegas Hilton's cavernous sports and race book last Sunday. There were Romos and Bradys and Mannings all over the place, but Carnaggio was the only one sporting purple and black. "My father goes back to the 1958 Colts championship game and used to work the gate at Memorial Stadium," Carnaggio said. "Me, I go back to Bert Jones.

News item: The Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers meet Thursday night in a renewal of one of the NFL's greatest rivalries, but two-thirds of American homes will not get the game because of a dispute between the NFL Network and the major cable providers. My take: It'll be a great night to own a sports bar. I'll have the chicken fingers, the nachos, the mini-burgers, two orders of jalapeno poppers and a Diet Coke. News item: Disgraced track star Marion Jones was stripped of all her victories since September 2000 and ordered by the International Association of Athletics Federation to repay $700,000 in winnings.

BOYS Michael Campanaro River Hill, football Campanaro rushed for 209 yards - his fourth 200-yard rushing game of the season - and two touchdowns in leading the top-ranked Hawks (9-0) to a 48-0 rout of Reservoir last week. The 5-foot-10, 170-pound junior running back-defensive back also caught two passes for 42 yards and returned three punts for 49 yards to give him 300 all-purpose yards. On the season, Campanaro has rushed for 1,243 yards and 17 touchdowns on 123 carries, caught eight passes for 226 yards and five touchdowns, and returned two punts for touchdowns.

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- It was the end of a late-summer practice, and Virginia Tech football players pulled off their jerseys and shoulder pads. Two team assistants carefully removed and folded a flag that had been suspended from an observation tower high above the practice fields. The flag, featuring a burnt-orange ribbon on a black background, is routinely unfurled at practice to pay homage to the 32 victims of a student's April 16 campus rampage - the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

During the news conference Thursday in which former Sen. George Mitchell unveiled his 409-page report on baseball's performance-enhancement scandal, I kept waiting for him to announce that he had been hired by the NFL to perform a similar investigation to root out the cheaters in America's most popular television sport. Stop laughing. Of course I'm kidding. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell would sooner make "Pacman" Jones the league's head of security than let some politician poke around in his basement, especially with Major League Baseball so willing to take the public relations hit for everybody.

Football camp -- Howard County Football Technique Camp for children and youth in grades three to nine will be held from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. July 9-13 at Hammond High School in Columbia. The camp, which is staffed by Howard County high school coaches, offers offensive and defensive position techniques, and instruction in the kicking game. Certified coaches will teach speed training. Each day's camp concludes with non-contact, competitive football games under coaches' supervision. Tuition is $160.

Ask any NFL coach what he thinks of Thursday night football and - apart from the traditional obligations of Thanksgiving - he'll tell you, "No, thanks." Players, too. But we're seeing more Thursday NFL games these days because of the opportunity for more prime-time television, and that's especially true since the NFL, in the guise of its own network, hijacked a handful of games for telecast, including tonight's Washington Redskins at Chicago Bears game. Now, there's an additional issue of the Redskins having to play not only on a short practice week, as do the Bears, but also just days after burying teammate Sean Taylor.

So much has changed, but so much has stayed the same. It's a late fall day. Army and Navy, hyped to the hilt, prepare to play the only football game that matters. Next year, players from both sides will be on a battlefield without hash marks, fighting in an unpopular war. It was true 40 years ago, and it is true today. "I remember standing on that football field and not being able to catch my breath," Rob Taylor said. "And that was before the game." Taylor, Navy's star receiver in 1967, recalled "the enormity of walking out there, knowing that those watching included people you'd only read about in history books - and that, for an hour or two, we were expected to relieve them of the things that weighed on their minds."

During the past week, the Ravens have had to come to grips with who they are and how they're perceived around the NFL ... and we'll find out when they greet the Cincinnati Bengals today at M&T Bank Stadium whether they reached the same conclusion that I did in the aftermath of last week's officiating controversy. They need to embrace their bad selves. That's right. They need to serve notice right away that they aren't going to tiptoe around Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer just because their reputation for aggressive defense precedes them into every game.

One day, Max Coale would like to be a doctor. He already appears to be training for the long hours necessary to get through medical school with a schedule that keeps him studying past midnight six days a week. "I take Sunday off," he said. Though his future is bright, current events occupy his every minute and his main concern at the moment is River Hill's next football game. The senior, 6 feet 4 and 240 pounds, is the Hawks' senior starter at offensive tackle and defensive end. In the spring, he plays lacrosse for his school team.

Geaton Caltabiano Mount St. Joseph, soccer The senior All-Metro center midfielder is more often the Gaels' playmaker, but he scored both goals in last week's 2-1 upset of then-No. 1 McDonogh, which had won 38 straight IAAM A Conference games and was ranked No. 1 in the nation in both the NSCAA/Adidas and ESPN Rise polls. He has six goals and seven assists this season. A club player with the Casa Mia Bays, who won national titles in 2007 and 2008, Caltabiano has a 3.5 grade-point average and has narrowed his college choices to Wake Forest, St. John's, Towson, UMBC and Loyola.

Ted Patterson has hung up the microphone, ending a terrific 45-year career in radio and TV broadcasting that should not go unrecognized. If you follow sports in this town, you know Patterson. The guy worked just about every sports gig around before retiring last week after 11 years as sports director for WCBM-AM. He had the same job at WPOC-FM for 16 years as well as at WMAR-TV and WBAL-Radio, where he hosted Baltimore's first regularly scheduled sports talk show. But those were just his day jobs.

He was the smallest offensive tackle of his day, and maybe the smartest. It wasn't size but savvy that made Bob Vogel one of football's top linemen and a pillar of the Baltimore Colts' storied front wall. Vogel, the team's top draft choice in 1963, spent the next decade taming sack packs and clearing paths for Colts' runners despite a 240-pound frame that even then was underwhelming. "I wasn't one of those guys who could lift the stadium," said Vogel, who attended Ohio State. "I was purely a technician.

Michael Vick is returning to professional football with the Philadelphia Eagles, where he'll team with a respected owner, coaching staff and quarterback. ESPN first reported the contractual agreement Thursday evening, and two sources close to Vick confirmed the deal to the Newport News Daily Press in Hampton Roads, Va. A former Pro Bowl quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, Vick has not played football since 2006. He served 18 months in prison on a federal conspiracy charge related to a dogfighting ring and was suspended indefinitely by the NFL. Under the terms of his recent reinstatement, Vick is eligible to practice immediately.

If you're a sucker for feel-good NFL training camp stories, you'll want to hear about Tony Fein. Fein, 27, is an undrafted rookie linebacker out of Mississippi who's trying to catch on with the Ravens this summer. Depending on whom you talk to, he either has no shot to make the team or the kind of shot you have of hitting the trifecta at the track tomorrow. If he's lucky, he could stick as a practice-squad player. This would be bitterly disappointing to Fein. But it won't kill him. And that's fine with him, since the man has already seen death up close as an Army combat veteran in Iraq, where he served for a year as a 19 Delta recon scout.

His parents, his girlfriend and his teammates all say the same thing about Domonique Foxworth. The Ravens cornerback might look like a 26-year-old, he might run like a 26-year-old, but he thinks and conducts his life like a 40-year-old - always has. n His parents considered him more responsible than his brother, who is two years older. His NFL mentor, Champ Bailey, considered him the levelheaded one in their relationship. Whether the subject is President Barack Obama, the role of a black athlete in modern society or the NFL players union's treatment of retired players, Foxworth can deliver a well-crafted opinion.

NFL NFL broadens 'Rooney Rule' to include senior posts The NFL has broadened its "Rooney Rule" by requiring teams to interview at least one minority candidate when seeking to fill its senior football operations positions. Commissioner Roger Goodell informed the NFL's 32 member teams by memo Monday of the new requirement, which received strong endorsement after being recommended at league meetings last month. The change is expected to provide minorities more opportunities to fill each franchise's one senior football post, which varies in title from team to team.

The storyteller always knew he had the makings of a good tale. He was writing about a good kid, a promising football player and an unbelievable back story. In many ways, he had found the perfect character. But the most surprising thing - for the storyteller and especially for his subject - turned out to be the ending. "It's so seldom that things work out the way they're supposed to work," author Michael Lewis said, "that I'm a little shocked." Lewis profiled Oher in The Blind Side, the 2006 New York Times bestseller that is being turned into a movie.