"If it's easy, it's greasy!"

One of the very first football plays I learned to recognize was the screen pass. For those of you who are not football fanatics, the screen pass is an attempt into fooling the defense into thinking that a long pass is being thrown, when in reality it's going to be a short pass. The fun part of a screen pass, if executed correctly, is that defensive players start salivating at the mouth because they have the false sense that they are about to layout the quarterback and make a great defensive play. They are sadly mistaken when right before they "light-up" the quarterback, he throws a short pass over them to his offensive player of choice. Therefore, a defensive player should live by the mantra, "if it's easy, it's greasy," meaning, that if you are getting past the offensive line untouched and you are salivating at the thought of laying out the quarterback without any effort, you need to stop in your tracks and start back peddling to break-up the infamous screen pass...if it's easy to get through, it's a greasy play. On the other hand, if you execute a screen pass well, it can earn you an excessive celebration penalty for your rockin' dance moves you performed in the end zone...which means you scored...which is a good thing.

According to the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) one of the functions of a public relations professional is "anticipating, analyzing, and interpreting public opinion, attitudes and issues that might impact, for good or ill, the operations and plans of the organization." As a public relations professional, I often find myself on both sides of the screen pass ( I prefer to be on the offensive side). However, in all reality, a great deal of my job is spent on the defensive side anticipating, analyzing and interpreting the screen pass. The screen pass can take on the appearance of a crisis (or potential crisis), a negative perception of the organization or the necessity to accurately communicate information when inaccuracies are already in circulation.

A good PR Pro will respect the "if it's easy, it's greasy" mantra and analyze the past, present and future organizational status while anticipating, analyzing and interpreting situations that have, or will, present themselves. So if you are a PR Pro (or work with a PR Pro) that is satisfied with your organizational image and you are spending a lot of time perfecting your "celebration dance," you need to sit back and say, "if it's easy, it's greasy" start back peddling and break-up the play (prevent the crisis, communicate accuracies, etc.) before you find yourself watching the other teams celebration dance!