There was a time when baseball was called America's pastime. Ah, those innocent bygone days of lazy Saturday afternoons in Mayberry ...

The America we live in today is a little bit different. Our national pastime is probably video games, and our national sport is without question the grand obsession that is the National Football League. Football is America writ large: aggressive, competitive, passionate.

It is where merit is rewarded (see Tom Brady) and incompetence ruthlessly punished (see Washington Redskins). It is a game of really intricate, detailed and hard-to-understand rules.

Because football is America, and because America is undergoing a social revolution of sorts thanks to social media, we have an incredibly important lesson that comes to us from the annals of the NFL.

Larry Johnson, the star running back of the woeful Kansas City Chiefs, reportedly posted messages on Twitter in which he pumped up his father's college football coaching credentials and playing experience while poking holes in the credentials of pro coaches, including his own coach (you can read an account by NBCSports.com here).

In the unusually macho and authoritarian society of the NFL locker room, this sort of rebellion against Todd Haley, the head coach of the Chiefs, may be tantamount to nailing The 95 Theses on the doors of Schlosskirche, even if spelling and punctuation aren't strong points for Johnson, a graduate of Penn State University.

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