The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that Michael Vick is not a suspect in an incident that occurred early this morning that resulted in a man named Quanis Phillips being shot outside a nightclub in Virginia. Vick had been celebrating his 30th birthday at the restaurant/club sometime before the shooting occurred.

The police have stated that they have no interest in Vick, but that doesn’t mean he won’t face punishment from the NFL. When commissioner Roger Goodell reinstated Vick last July, part of the deal was that Vick wasn’t supposed to associate with anyone from his days as a dog fighter. And Phillips was just one of the people that Vick had a close “business relationship” with when he owned Bad Newz Kennels. Goodell also announced upon Vick’s reinstatement that the quarterback’s margin for error was “extremely limited.”

Falcons’ receiver Roddy White, who was apparently with Vick earlier in the night, said that the two of them had left the party before the shooting took place. Said White: “I don’t know what’s going to go on with that or whatever, but we didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Not many details are available right now, so we can only speculate about what transpired leading up to the shooting. Maybe Phillips was there without Vick’s knowledge or arrived to the restaurant after the quarterback had left. Who knows?

But the mere fact that Vick’s name is being brought up in relation to another off-field incident is troubling to say the least. It sounds as if he did nothing wrong and wasn’t involved in the shooting. It also isn’t a crime to celebrate your birthday with your friends, although if one of those friends is an old acquaintance that helped you set up an illegal dog-fighting ring, then that’s a problem. And if Phillips was invited to the party, then Vick’s decision-making is yet again up for criticism.

Check back for more details on this developing story.

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A former steroid dealer named David Jacobs (now deceased) has come out and said that he supplied Michael Vick with steroids when Vick was a member of the Falcons.

From the Dallas Morning News:

Authorities said Jacobs ran one of the largest doping networks in the country before he was arrested in May 2007.

The new document, which summarizes Vick’s interview with investigators, surfaced because of open records requests by media outlets.

Agents told Vick that a DEA informant said that Vick was talking about steroids and human growth hormone with someone at the Falcons party and that Vick was overheard saying he “liked his product.”
Vick immediately denied to the investigators that the conversation ever happened and said he did not use performance-enhancing drugs.

Names, other than Vick’s, were redacted from the government summary, so it’s not clear whether the DEA informant referred to was Jacobs.

But in several interviews with The News that took place in the months before authorities say Jacobs killed himself and his girlfriend in June 2008, Jacobs said that at that 2006 gathering he was with Vick and other players who used his drugs.

Baseball has long been the focal point for performance-enhancing drugs in sports, but it would be naïve to think that drugs aren’t being used in other sports. After all, steroids first gained national attention thanks to the Olympics decades again. I don’t want to make generalized claims without having hard facts, but again, it would be naïve to think that baseball players are the only ones doping to gain a competitive advantage.

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What’s great about the majority of sports fans (and maybe the American public in general) is that we have short attention spans. For weeks, a topic can be talked about and debated on sports blogs ad nauseum, then a few months later it’s almost like the situation never happened.

Take Michael Vick for example. He’s making his first trip back to Atlanta this week since tap dancing on many Falcons fans’ hearts by throwing his career away for a sick hobby and yet more people are searching for Tigers Woods’ alleged mistress than Vick’s Georgia Dome re-appearance.

This was someone who was talked about day in and day out over the offseason in regards to whether or not Roger Goodell would allow him back into the NFL. Then when he was reinstated, countless rumors circulated the web daily about where he’d end up.

But now, he’s a nobody – a backup who won’t see much playing time barring an injury to Donovan McNabb or Kevin Kolb. Vick’s been out of the public eye for so long that people forget that he’s even in the league. Considering he almost single-handedly sunk an entire franchise and used to bring 80,000 people to their feet every time he left the pocket (and many more sick to their stomach when reading what he did to those dogs in his backyard), one would think that people would be interested in his return.

But we’re not.

Consider this: Chris Redman will be more significant in Atlanta this weekend than Michael Vick, proving that if enough time passes, we’ll make anyone irrelevant.

Photo from fOTOGLIF