Dan Shaughnessy blames me for fans in Kansas City cheering when Matt Cassel was knocked out with a head injury last Sunday.

Knowing this, you might conclude I was among the 68,803 in attendance at Arrowhead Stadium, fist raised in triumph as Cassel was taken off the field. That would be a logical assumption, right?

I was not. I have never been to Arrowhead Stadium and have been in Kansas City exactly twice in my life. But, believe me, it's still my fault. 

To my knowledge, I don't know a single person in the stands at that game. And I'm just like you in this belief -- it's absurd to cheer when a guy gets hurt. It goes past what we all know is OK at these games. Lots of times we don't know what right or wrong is, but lots of times we do, and this is one. I understand that Chiefs fans are pissed about having to pay thousands of dollars to watch a team going absolutely nowhere, PSL's and parking and season tickets and emotional investment, all that stuff, and were looking for an outlet. They have the right to do what they did to Cassel, I suppose, but still it was disgraceful.

And all my fault, according to Shaughnessy. His column in The Boston Globe on Tuesday was in praise of Eric Winston, who blasted the fans for celebrating the injury. Shaughnessy feels that this isn't a Kansas City issue, or a New York or Boston issue, but rather a societal issue. 

The real reason for the cheering wasn't the environment the fans grew up in, wasn't misplaced anger at the embarrassing state of the franchise, wasn't economical frustration, wasn't alcohol and sure has nothing to do with lack of personal accountability.

Nope. Dan Shaughnessy -- who was about 565 miles from Kansas City on Sunday afternoon -- has the answer.

And the answer is bloggers. It was our fault. Ready?

It’s an issue about civility in America today. It’s about accountability. ... It is about fanboy bloggers who kill everyone and everything under the brave cloak of anonymity. It’s about instant tweets fired from the safety of your basement. It is about anonymous bullying with the World Wide Web serving as the new bathroom wall.

Oh, wait a minute -- he blames you, too.

It is about angry fantasy football players who do not know how to look someone in the eye, or hold a face-to-face conversation.

This is a generational divide, plain and simple. So screamingly obvious. Shaughnessy missed the train and has no idea how to cope with it. Nothing new, it's parents not understanding why their kids listen to rap music even though it's the same reason their parents didn't understand Bob Dylan and the Beatles and long hair and Jim Morrison and Robert Altman movies. It's the way it'll always go -- this is the first generation of "rap parents" and I've already heard complaints about Justin Bieber and Flo Rida. I'm the same way -- I see commercials for video games and movies that seem amazingly moronic. But if I was 20 years younger I'd be first in line for both (let's be fair -- can I really be too critical of today's cinema when "Cobra" is one of my all-time favorite movies?)

Shaughnessy doesn't hate the Internet, he hates change. He'd give anything for it to be 1986 all over again, a world in which newspapers were king and no one else had a platform to question, a world in which the readers could do nothing but write a letter to the editor as a form of protest or opinion. He can't believe someone can sit in their house or at some Starbucks and basically come to the same conclusion as he does on a topic and have a forum to express that thought. He's been a sports critic, really, in his life as a columnist -- and, when's he focused, a terrific one -- and he can't comprehend that he has to share some of the stage with the commoners. He thinks he knows more than you do about sports because he's sat in a press box for 30 years, because he's talked to players before and after games. I've covered games in press boxes and watched them on TV, and guess what? There's almost no difference. You know just as much as some of them do, and now there's a place to express that. One day some people realized this, and it drives guys like Shaughnessy crazy. It's called insecurity. And, yeah, some bloggers are lousy and petty and out of touch, and some newspaper columnists are great and thoughful and even avoid "Animal House" references at all costs, but that's not really the point.

I don't believe Shaughnessy truly thinks blogging and fantasy football is the reason fans cheered when Cassel went down. He's too smart for that nonsense to be rooted in reality. That rant probably was written months ago, he was just looking for a reason to squeeze it in somewhere. On Oct. 12, 1999, fans in Philadelphia cheered when Michael Irvin injured his neck during an Eagles-Cowboys game. Irvin was down on the field for 20 minutes, motionless, and the fans cheered. You think all those fans were Internet-savvy? You think they knew about blogging? You think they were all playing against Irvin in fantasy football?

In 1993, fans in New Orleans cheered when Wade Wilson had to leave a Monday night game with an injury. 

"Those are some sick, sick, sick people," Jim Mora said after the game. "Mentally sick."

So when was there this overwhelming civility that Shaughnessy wants returned to sporting events? How far back do we have to go, exactly? A hundred years ago men wore ties to games and there was no JumboTron and maybe even no cheering when a player was injured. Was that a more civilized time, even though black people weren't allowed on the field or in certain sections of the stands? Or do we just have to go back to, say, 1976? Does that work? OK, how civilized were the fans at Schaefer Stadium during a Monday night game against the Jets when there were hundreds of arrests of drunken fans? If we've regressed as society, why hasn't that repeated itself at any of the night games at Gillette Stadium? 

Some people want to believe their generation is right and the next one is wrong. It's a coping mechanism, a way to resist change. The only reason Dan Shaughnessy wasn't tweeting "from his basement" 40 years ago is because Twitter didn't exist. And please stop with the fantasy football stuff, OK? Professional athletes are in fantasy leagues, 95 percent of the media plays fantasy sports, doctors and lawyers and pro sports owners and plenty of other people who can make eye contact with you and have face-to-face conversations. This isn't 1982, Dan. There's no rogue element, sorry. 

The world changed while you were emptying the desk drawer, and that has nothing to do with what happened in Kansas City on Sunday. Regrettably, that was just human nature. It happened 50 years ago and it'll happen 50 years from now. And, 50 years from now, someone will be writing about the good old days of 2012, when civility governed us all. I nominate Shaughnessy for the assignment. He'll be 109 years old -- think he'll have come around on bloggers and fantasy football?