I Dislike Your Favorite Team

[note: shortly after publishing this post, I realized that I had left Collier's status in doubt. As of right now, he is in critical but stable condition.]

Richard Collier was shot; that is not in dispute. According to the AP's Mark Long and Ron Word, he and his ex-teammate Kenneth Petway were sitting in a car waiting for some chicks they met at a bar to drop off their car. It was late at night/early in the morning--a bit after 2am, apparently. The AP went out of their way to mention that the locale of the shooting was a well-to-do neighborhood. (it should be noted that I think just about every contributor of this blog has done something pretty similar at some point, with the notable exception of being shot).

Police aren't releasing any details at the moment.

So we are left with some questions that we can speculate all day long about, but ESPN wants you to know that the police haven't said whether the attack was random or was sparked from something earlier in the night.

Positing that as the two choices is a false choice, of course. Jealous boyfriend, for example, doesn't necessarily figure into either of those. Angry dad, even.

My point isn't to come up with other variants, actually; my point is that ESPN shouldn't be offering up options for the motives when no motive has been ascribed, unless they have something to report. If they have something to report (like, "witnesses say Collier got in the face of some dude, who promised payback") than they should fucking report it.

Otherwise, they shouldn't make it sound like it had to be one or the other. There are a myriad of options between "totally random" and "this NFL player should have known better." Ask Sean Taylor. He was targeted because of his wealth and because he wasn't supposed to be home. We don't know what happened here yet.

Jack Del Rio isn't too happy with how this is being covered either.

To quote the AP's article again, quoting Jack:

“He was out last night, enjoying himself, having a good time, being responsible,” the coach said. “I take offense to people that insinuate and call that a lack of discipline or a lack of responsibility. There are no rules about being out on a Monday night before your day off the following day.

“Listen, a person got shot. The guy who shot the gun is the problem, not the guy who got shot. He’s the victim. He was victimized. You ought to be able to go out and have a good time and go back home and not be worried about being killed or being put in the hospital with bullet holes."

Jack was too pissed to note that you should also be able to follow some ladies home so they can drop off their car, and ya'll can continue the party elsewhere (again, something everyone has done at some point) without getting shot and without getting reamed in the media.

Let's hope the media doesn't jump to conclusions, or worse, do so whilst pretending that they aren't. ESPN has set a pretty low bar to jump over. I bet some folks manage to limbo underneath it.