Brent Celek Is Calling All Captains

I really need to start paying extra attention to all of the details in Eagles games, don't I? Then again, so apparently does all of America as I'm pretty sure that everyone outside of the NFL completely missed one of the greatest touchdown celebrations in Eagles history.

I don't know how much detail you were paying to the Eagles game Sunday night, more importantly, the touchdown celebration by Brent Celek, but if you were, you would have noticed something quite epic. Damn NFL.com for being like MLB.com and not having an embed code to their video, but regardless, click on the link to watch the Celek touchdown and ensuing celebration below.

Brent Celek TD Celebration

Aside from the fact that Jason Avant came in and earned the team a 15-yard penalty, did you notice anything? Did Celek's pose look familiar at all? Maybe this will jog your memory.



It was none other than the pose of the great Captain Morgan himself!

There is more to this though than being a fan of rum and promoting Captain Morgan during a football game. And sadly, because of this, the NFL is going to put the banhammer down on what would have been a great campaign for charity, promote Morgan, and send the NFL into a massive meltdown that would have most likely ended up with suspensions galore. Charles Robinson of Yahoo! Sports has the details.

“A company can’t pay a player to somehow promote it’s product on the field,” NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told Yahoo! Sports this week. “Every league has the same rule. … It’s come up before, companies trying to use our games and then players for ambush marketing purposes.”

[...]

In hopes of raising brand awareness, Captain Morgan intended to offer lucrative charity contributions in exchange for each instance a player was caught on camera doing its pose during a game. The contributions were earmarked for the Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund – a non-profit which helps retired NFL players with various hardships after leaving the game.

“The [ad campaign] has been going around internally for a while and [Celek] learned of the program through his contact at Diageo [Captain Morgan’s parent company],” said Glenn Lehrman, an account director at Rogers & Cowan, the Los Angeles-based firm that handles Captain Morgan promotions. “Brent said, ‘You know what, if I get the opportunity, I’m going to go ahead and do it.’ He sort of beat us to the punch, but we’re certainly not going to complain.”

The campaign was set to be unveiled next week and was fairly simple: For every time a player was caught on camera striking the “Captain Morgan” during a regular season game, $10,000 would be donated to Gridiron Greats. For each instance in the playoffs, the donation would elevate to $25,000. And for instances in the Super Bowl, the bounty was slated to hit $100,000 per pose.

But when the NFL caught wind of the plan this week, it promptly put the brakes on the promotion, notifying Gridiron Greats and Captain Morgan that it wouldn’t tolerate the pose during NFL games. And while Celek won’t be fined for doing it Sunday, a league source also told Yahoo! Sports that striking the pose in future games will result in a “significant” penalty.

It’s not the first time the league has taken a hard-line stance against “guerilla” marketing tactics. Indeed, the NFL fined Chicago Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher(notes) $100,000 simply for wearing a hat promoting vitaminwater during the league’s media day prior to Super Bowl XLI. And in another incident, former commissioner Pete Rozelle fined Bears quarterback Jim McMahon $5,000 for wearing a headband with “adidas” on it during a playoff game in 1985. McMahon then famously responded in the NFC Championship game with a headband that read “rozelle.”

The NFL will likely be a little more sensitive with this latest promotion, since it would have benefitted Gridiron Greats, and the post-career struggles of players has been a paramount hot-button topic. While the league welcomes charitable donations to Gridiron Greats, it doesn’t want those contributions to be used as a carrot to influence the on-field antics of players – particularly when the antics center on selling a product.

“The issue is that players are specifically prohibited under our policies from wearing, displaying, promoting or otherwise conveying their support of a commercially identified product during a game while they’re on the field,” Aiello said. “Whether it’s rum or soft drinks or any other commercial product, that type of promotion is prohibited.”

So that stance has killed the idea of striking a “Captain Morgan,” and left the brand and Gridiron greats looking for an alternative that would benefit both.

Damn! Seeing everyone do the Captain this Sunday would have been the most awesome thing ever! At the same time, though, if no one caught it, it would have been making the headlines as it did with Celek this week. After all, this was Sunday Night Football and not only that, it was an SNF game seen by 21.9 million people (sidenote: can't you just feel the impact of those Eagles-Michael Vick boycotts; that team sure is scrambling for viewers and ratings now...) and it took for Thursday for this to become a story (for once, I'm not late to the party on a story). Imagine if a bunch of random people did it on the regional games seen by only 8% of the country? Damn, they may have been able to pull one heck of a fast one to the NFL.

Regardless, kudos to Brent Celek for the attempt. Maybe in honor of this, he just earned himself a night with the old Captain himself.