Richard Sherman, human

Well, that was awwwwkward....

Why you mad, Bro?  You are a Stanford grad, in communications no less, and you drop to that level? On National TV?  That was almost as bad as watching Joe Namath drunkenly hit on a sideline reporter during Monday Night Football.  Here's a hint, if, as soon as you open your mouth, you see the normally composed Erin Andrews face contort in shock, well, maybe time to scale it back a bit.

That said, on some level, you have to give the man a lot of respect.  We all knew before hand that "the best corner in the League", Mr. Richard Sherman, is not an individual hesitant to speak his mind.  Never has been, probably never will be.  So, as soon as we saw the camera pan from Erin's face to Sherman's, we had to know we were in for a treat.  Little did we know that the treat was going to be served raw and unfiltered.

That is the beauty of humanity though, every moment can bring us something unexpected.

While I get that Sherman's rant was probably uncomfortable for most to experience, especially in the moment, it doesn't take a lifetime of playing competitive sports to understand where it comes from.  If you still cannot get past the raw emotion and passion to see and hear the what was truly being said, well then, I feel for you.  I feel for you because that means that you have either a) never experienced anything in your life worth fighting for or b) you have emotional awareness of a semi-developed cuttlefish.

Think back to any situation in your life where something was on the line, a competitive game perhaps, a big presentation, a job interview...  The very memory probably causes your heart to race just a little, doesn't it?  Now, imagine that you are competing is this moment against someone you hate and, like someone hell bent on destroying your day, they are pulling no punches in their attempt to stop you from accomplishing your dream.

How hard would you have to work to suppress your emotions?  How would it feel every time you won an individual battle?

Now, imagine that, as this moment of a lifetime wore on and the moment of truth approached, you were the one to not only shut down your foe, but did it with such flair that there was no doubting the winner?  This rival, the one who had been jawing at you, belittling you, doing everything in their power to stop you from achieving your goal was DONE, and you had landed the decisive blow.  You'd probably be more than a little amped up, you may even want to talk about it.  Lord knows Mr. Sherman did.

Now, while he probably could have chosen his words a little more carefully, Richard Sherman is still human and humans are hard wired to succumb to raw emotion and alpha/beta reactions.  Humans are meant to FEEL life.

Every human being alive, even those we see as emotionless robots, have genuine outbursts of pain, anguish and triumph.  We have all, at one time or another, felt the need to tout our superiority, or voice our beliefs.

So what is it about Sherman's rant that hit so deeply within the masses?  Sure, for some backwood idiots out there the color of his skin and tone of his voice were enough to set their racist thumbs aTwittering.  And for others, the whole scene was just a little too close, a little too uncomfortable that it made us question whether the man yelling at us from the TV was indeed actually sane.  But, if you look a little deeper you may see something unexpected staring back at you, your own ego.

You see, I believe that the main reason people had issue with this particular rant is because most of us feel that we would have done better a better job.  That somehow our lives, the ones in which a brush with being cut off in traffic or having that third shot of espresso kick in, could somehow compare to being the man that, moments earlier, had just won his team an AFC championship.

In this moment, Mr. Sherman felt finally validated and he wanted to let the world know.  He had won and, to top it off, he had played the most integral part.  You cannot blame him for his exuberance, you can only blame yourself for seeing something different.

Remove yourself from the immediate and you will be able to see the truth hidden beneath.

Here's hoping that he sent Ms. Andrews a nice apology gift.