Wow, that didn’t take long. I thought he’d at least have to score a touchdown or lead the Eagles to victory or supplant Kevin Kolb or Donovan McNabb as the Eagles starting quarterback. But, despite what the “swoosh people” say, the endorsement spigot has apparently been turned back on for Michael Vick.

Nike’s suits in PR put out the damage control statement Thursday that they do not have a “contractual relationship” with Vick, but that they “agreed to supply product to Vick as we do a number of athletes who are not under contract with Nike.”

Yeah, right. I’d bet the farm Vick will be used to sell Nike products in the coming 12-18 months. That Eagles No. 7 jersey is selling quite well, and it’s not because of Ron Jaworski.

The story Wednesday was that Nike signed the dog guy to an endorsement deal, two years after deciding they didn’t want a canine killer pimping their product, calling his dog ring-leading actions “inhumane, abhorrent, and unacceptable.”

Time heals all endorsement wounds.

“Mike has a long-standing, great relationship with Nike, and he looks forward to continuing that relationship,” his agent, Joel Segal, said Wednesday.

Yeah, he never killed any of their dogs.

Segal also said, “The player and company had agreed not to release terms of the deal.”

And to think, all it took to get this deal was an 0-for-2 passing performance with one run for seven yards.

Maybe they got him on the cheap.

Maybe they plan on using him in an ad-campaign in dog eating countries.

I thought he’d have to sit down with the president and a pit bull (not Sarah Palin) and share a beer or a dog bone or something.

This is almost too easy.

But thinking back on it, the fervor died down pretty quickly after the Philadelphia Eagles signed Bad Newz Kennels personified.

The court of perceived public opinion has moved on.

Yes, he served his debt to society and all that, but shouldn’t some sort of on-field accomplishment be achieved before rewarding this guy with endorsement dollars?

That’s the question of the naive idealist.

What this proves is that the majority of society has moved on. They’re no longer as outraged by Vick’s actions. Memories are short.

Don’t underestimate the suits in research and marketing. Nike doesn’t invest in entities they don’t think will make them cash.

Sign him now so he’s under contract when the public’s emotion subsides.

The “swoosh people” have no trouble removing emotion from the equation.

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How much insight is too much insight?

Michael Vick is an infamous quarterback. He’s also a popular talking point. In the wake of Vick’s return with the Philadelphia Eagles, the blogosphere is brimming with polemics and apologies—which would be happier news if quantity were even loosely correlated to quality.

Curiosity means learning as much as you can.

Intelligence, on the other hand, means learning as much as you should.

I’m not suggesting that the Vick story is unimportant. We read because we care, and the demand for nonstop Vick coverage speaks volumes about our collective values. But more commentary isn’t necessarily better commentary. In a media market where the consumer is always right, there’s no critic who gets paid to tell us when we’ve all got it wrong.

Knowledge is power.

Discretion is virtue.

If you want the real scoop on Vick, you have to tune out every voice that promises to deliver it.

Sports fans thrive on opinion. From experts, from amateurs, from the guy sitting next to us at the bar—we collect viewpoints like trading cards, as if enlightenment were merely the sum of all sound bites. The catch, alas, is that no one else can teach you how to think. Google addicts will argue that the final revelation about Vick is out there waiting to be found. I’d counter that one more Web search is exceptionally unlikely to show us whatever it is we’re looking for.

It’s smart to get the facts.

It’s smarter to get the truth.

Vick may deserve scorn, sympathy, or every s-word in between, but the only sentiment worth sharing is the one you select for yourself.

The human mind is nature’s most potent content filter. To aggregate is the limit of machines; to scrutinize is the labor of mankind. Michael Vick’s darkest secret is for you to discover on your own, after the Yahoo! Buzz has subsided and the Digg voters have drifted away. Every student is enriched by the resources on his desk. The one with a high-speed modem should be careful not to invest too heavily in the data at his fingertips.

*

T.S. Eliot never had a Twitter account, but he did glimpse the perils of free online publishing services:  

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Which are apt questions in this age of cheap and instant communication.

Because babble is the mother tongue of cyberspace, and anyone who professes boundless faith in a user-generated gospel is either preaching on the Open Source Sports Network or only just saying, is all…

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What has Michael Vick done in a little more than two months of freedom to re-sign an endorsement deal?

NEW YORK – Michael Vick is back with Nike two years after the company severed ties over the quarterback's involvement in a dogfighting ring.

Michael Vick killed dogs. Michael Vick tortured and killed dogs. Michael Vick endorsed the torture and killing of dogs. Michael Vick is a despicable human being for having done all of the above…Period.

Today, Nike showed that character means nothing where the business model is concerned by resigning him to an endorsement deal. It is for this reason that there is new uproar over the Eagles quarterback and his right to prosper post-incarceration.

Here’s the issue that most who support Vick’s right to return to the NFL don’t seem to understand: Not everyone embraces or believes that Vick is worthy of a second chance. Some actually feel that he should have been banned from the NFL for life.

They don’t care that he “served his time”. It doesn’t matter that he “apologized”. It makes no difference that he “is just trying to make a living”. All they see is a man who used his money to support the torture, maiming, and killing of innocent animals.

In my opinion, it is their right to believe that and no one should have any cause to berate them for doing so.

Furthermore, the reason so many people are able to expatiate the idea of “he deserves a second chance” is because most of them don’t hold animals in very high regard in the first place. They don’t see dogs as having anything close to human value and therefore don’t understand why Vick’s crime was such a big deal in the first place.

Honestly, though, the majority of the public’s inability to empathize with the animal lover’s point of view on this is not really the animal lover’s problem. That’s a Y-O-U, the public’s, problem and Y-O-U, the public, don’t have to get it because T-H-E-Y, the animal lover, don’t get Y-O-U either.

People have a right to their opinion and there exists a large contingency of people who don’t buy into the apology tour that Vick gave prior to signing on with the Eagles. They don’t wish him well in all his endeavors and they don’t feel he deserved a second chance.

He’s scum as far as they are concerned and he always will be. They have a right to that opinion. Just like you have the right to yours.

Michael Vick killed dogs. For some people that’s the beginning and the end of the story and it’s enough to condemn him and anyone who supports him for the rest of their life.

Y-O-U don’t have to get it; sometimes it just is what it is.

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WASHINGTON – Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick has agreed to repay at least US$416,000 that he is accused of illegally withdrawing from a pension plan.

WASHINGTON – Michael Vick told a sparse crowd at a Washington church on Tuesday that dogfighting is pointless and he doesn't know why he risked his career for it.