Let me be blunt, what Michael Vick did was the kind of thing you hear about seriel killers doing before moving up to human beings. I think if anything Bob understated the case about this guy, because really he wasn't torturing the animals to death for gambling profits, but because he was a sadistic jerk.
He ran a dog fighting ring, but apparently his torture was conducted for the purposes of scaring the other dogs to greater ferocity, or so he said, or to punish them for underperforming when they weren't killed in the ring.
I'm pretty much anti-PETA and animal-rights extremism myself. My position on such things is pretty much identical to Bob's, and that includes things like medical testing on animals. Yes medical testing on animals might be "torture" but it's done for a constructive purpose, and in lieu of other alternatives. Michael Vicks did his thing just because he liked to inflict pain on helpless animals with little actual gain from it.
I mean, to put things into perspective, the animal fights are bad enough, but in getting rid of an underperforming or injured animal, there is no reason to torture it to death. I mean he could have put them down humanely. Even within the context of his other crimes he was a bloody monster about this.
When it comes to celebrities, the whole issue of "did their time" becomes a tricky subject, since your looking at people being promoted as icons. It's not like some guy getting out of jail and heading back out to lead a quite life of obscurity. Vicks, shouldn't be being promoted as anyone's icon under these circumstances.
That said, EA is a business, and the thing to consider is that if enough people support Vicks to get him the cover anyway, I think that says as much, if not more, about humanity as it does about the company in question. The fact that something like this can be excused just because the guy is a good ball player.
While it was NBA as opposed to NFL, I honestly think these acts made Vicks worse than Dennis Rodman even after all his antics, and I don't even think Michael Vicks is as good a player in his sport as Rodman was in his (Rodman is like the patron saint of Rebounds). I really think it's messed up that they let him return to playing pro-ball at all knowing the kind of exposure he was going to get, and the message it was going to send.
