The Meaningful Collateral

Here’s some of the best (and worst) from the sports world today:

— It could be a difficult off-season for some Miami football players, as it’s being reported by Miami Sports Blog that six football players have had their scholarships pulled by Randy Shannon, including the guy who started the season at quarterback. We’ll try to update this story from our end, too.

—  Sports Illustrated has officially ruined the BCS picture. (Missourian)

—  Jack Cobra breaks down the IU-Georgia Tech game from yesterday. You’re right, Jack — IU isn’t that good this year. They’ve got lots of good component parts, but the thing that is going to keep those parts from coalescing into an effective unit is youth, mixed with talent…young, talented players playing with other young, talented players generally take a long time to figure out how to play as a team. Heck, Michigan’s Fab 5 took until early March of their freshman year before they really got it together. (Cobra Brigade)

—  We need to chat a bit about this Sean Taylor thing. Several bloggers got rather irritated with the mainstream media coverage of Taylor’s shooting and subsequent death over the past 72 hours. And I agree with them to a large degree — ESPN and others did appear to jump on the “thug” angle of Taylor’s lifestyle (which he had supposedly left behind).  But this whip-back reaction from the blog world — that even if Taylor had a checkered past, he’d left it behind and it shouldn’t be a part of the media coverage — strikes me as a bit odd.

Let’s look at this logically. A 24-year old star athlete has his gated house in a good neighborhood broken into twice, and is then shot a week later after multiple people enter his house in the middle of the night — except those people don’t take anything from the house, they don’t stay in the house. They just shoot and leave. The description of the murder in the Miami Herald makes it seem very unlikely that this was some sort of burglary or home invasion. In fact, it raises a lot more questions about the nature and timing of the shooting.

Given the suspicious nature of the shooting, how can you NOT bring up the fact that Taylor was waving a gun at people in West Perrine just two years ago?

Unfortunately, we will probably never know what happened with Taylor, because the Miami police are on the case. Their efficiency at solving these types of crimes is pretty much zero — heck, Bryan Pata was killed execution-style in an apartment parking lot over 12 months ago, and the Miami PD doesn’t even have a lead on the case at this point.

By all accounts, Taylor had turned his life around in the past year or so. But that doesn’t mean his past was no longer in the picture, especially considering the nature of his death.  Taylor may have turned things around, but others around him might not have gotten to that point yet — which to me is what Wilbon was trying to say in his comments on Monday and Tuesday. Does pointing that out diminish Taylor as a human being? I hardly think so.