Rooting for the bad guys.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - Alex Rodriguez, Johnny Manziel & Dan Snyder

As a child who preferred comics to sunlight, my favorite book was a thick Marvel Comics compilation called Bring on the Bad Guys. It contained the origin stories for such devious fiends as Doctor Doom, Mephisto, and Loki. I loved that book because each story rejected the idea of the genetically bad supervillain and looked instead at what drove each of them down the evil path.

In the world of comics, when you start talking about what makes the bad guys so bad, the next thing you know you're actually learning something about the world as it is, not as a cartoon.

In 2013, the sports world has been defined by the rise of people and organizations draped in media-bestowed garlands of evil. It helps no one, however, to have a bunch of sports columnists and yipping heads tell us how much these people and teams give off a bad odor.

We know they stink. We need to talk about why.

Unfortunately, the only way the sports world ever takes the time to ask why is when those labeled "bad" actually succeed and advance deep into the playoffs when other teams fall away.

So I want the bad guys to prosper. That way, we can stop with the charade of calling out individuals and start looking at the systemic problems at play.

I wanted Alex Rodriguez to lead the New York Yankees to the World Series. The thirty-eight-year-old A-Rod is appealing what would be a career-ending 212-game suspension for basically using every performance enhancer short of chewing on stem cells in between at bats. If the Yankees hadn't fallen out of contention, maybe we could have discussed just how deep the rot of baseball's PED denialism goes. We need to talk about how to save players from having to resort to dangerous anti-aging clinics, fake doctors, and masking agents to get their fix.

I want Johnny Manziel to win another Heisman Trophy. The entitled, obnoxious, bicep-kissing, rainmaking Texas A&M quarterback represents for many sports writers "everything that's wrong about college football." That should be flipped around. College football represents everything that we think is wrong about...