Well Done Sports Media

After I learned that the Sean Taylor death was probably accidental, (a botched robbery) by four kids who tried to rob a vacant home I became even more enraged with the sports media. Every sports writer claimed that they didn't want to "jump to conclusions" in one paragraph and littered the next with "its not shocking" or "he led a checkered past." It would seem to me at this juncture in the story that Mr. Taylor passed away because he was wealthy, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm sure these kids new they were robbing Sean Taylor’s house, but not because they had some beef with him lingering from his past. In actuality, if you were going to rob a house, picking a professional football players home probably makes a lot of sense because their salaries are large and published everywhere.


Leonard Shapiro, Washington Post:

"Still, could anyone honestly say they never saw this coming? You'd have to be blind not to consider Taylor's checkered past. It was only a few months after he was drafted, when we got something of an inkling of what sort of young man the Redskins were selecting out of the University of Miami with the fifth overall selection in 2004.

For one, Taylor brazenly skipped the rookie symposium he was required to attend his first year, and was fined accordingly by the NFL. You also can look at the timeline of his professional life printed on this web site or in the newspaper and draw your own preliminary conclusions.

Over the first few years Taylor was in the league, he bounced from one scrape to another, blowing off the symposium, disrespecting Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs by not showing up for mandatory offseason workouts and never calling to explain why, running afoul of the law in a widely reported shooting incident in South Florida and very nearly going to jail.

On the field, Taylor often was a thoroughly undisciplined player who loved to make bold statements with vicious and often dangerous hits that occasionally got him tossed from games. Clearly, he seemed to embrace the thug image on and off the field, and the fact that he rarely spoke to members of the media only enhanced his reputation as a moody, enigmatic athlete we hardly ever got to know.

"

From this drivel, it would seem that the primary suspect in the case is Joe Gibbs. Lets sum up his "Checkered past."

1. Blew off a Rookie NFL Symposium
2. Didn't show up for practices
3. Was tossed out of games occasionally for vicious hits (this seems to be 100% fake. Tossed from games occasionally for vicious hits? Occasionally means 1 or more right? Not zero times)

Mike Wilbon, Washington Post>

"Taylor grew up in a violent world, embraced it, claimed it, loved to run in it and refused to divorce himself from it. He ain't the first and won't be the last. We have no idea what happened, or if what we know now will be revised later. It's sad, yes, but hardly surprising."

This was a tragedy, and Media speculation has only made it worse. That’s all I will say about this topic.