These are the kind of things we fans love to hear that Rams players are doing off the field:
* Robert Quinn and Will Witherspoon went to Kenya and I believe Uganda last month with the Starkey Hearing Foundation on a mission to provide hearing aids for the hearing impaired.
* James Laurinaitis and Jake McQuaide visited child cancer patients at a local hospital.
* Austin Pettis hosted a charity basketball game and football camp for kids in Orange, California, as a benefit for his charitable foundation. Trumaine Johnson, T.J. McDonald and Brian Quick all took part in the festivities.
* Jared Cook will host a golf tournament in May to raise money for military families. Before coming to the Rams, he was the Titans Community Man of the Year.
Here, on the other hand, is the type of off-field activity we're not so thrilled about:
* Within a week of signing with the Rams as a free agent, cornerback Greg Reid was thrown in jail in Georgia for violating the terms of his probation. He was riding in a car that got pulled over for a seatbelt violation, and was arrested because there was a warrant out on him, reportedly for failing to check in with his probation officer. I'd hardly call Reid a thug for allowing this to happen, but it's at best a MAJOR oversight on his part. You're an NFL player, you have to take enough responsibility for yourself not to let this kind of thing happen. This should give the Rams plenty of reason, as if there wasn't enough already, not to put themselves in a position of relying on Reid, but instead, they scrambled as fast as they could at Rams Park to say the arrest wouldn't affect his status with the team. Lovely.
2009: (rookie year) 42 receptions, 701 yards, 3 TDs.
2010: 42 receptions, 775 yards, 9 TDs, arrested twice, in New Jersey and Tennessee, for at least five different moving violations.
2011: 17 receptions, 289 yards, 3 TDs, torn MCL and ACL, and FOUR arrests. One because he didn't pay a friend's bail as promised. One for causing a police chase in April. That was pled down to careless driving, which he pled guilty to in June. THE NEXT DAY New Jersey narcotics officers arrested him for resisting arrest for allegedly trying to hide a joint from them. In July he turned himself in to Tennessee authorities for lying on his driver's license application.
2012: 45 receptions, 589 yards, 4 TDs, and a DUI arrest in Kentucky, marking the eighth time he'd been arrested since being drafted. Suspended by the league for the first week of the season.
2013: 11 catches, 96 yards, no TDs. Eventually benched by Titans coaches for dropped passes and dumb penalties. Also had an incident in January where he didn't cooperate with police after taking a friend who'd been involved in a stabbing to the hospital.
Wonder if the was the same friend whose bail he was supposed to pay in 2011.
The Rams are so bad at wide receiver that I get why they signed Britt. His first two seasons were very promising. They are in awful need of the big-receiver and deep-ball skills Britt showed those first two seasons. Maybe if you get him away from that one friend, and don't let him drive himself ANYWHERE, maybe Jeff Fisher gives him what appears to be needed tough-love surrogate parenting, maybe Ray Sherman remembers how to coach up big WRs again, maybe you have a big redemption story.
Maybe it's the guys in the first part of this letter that even make it possible to think that hopefully of a career idiot like Kenny Britt. I'd encourage Britt to prove me wrong by staying clean and playing his butt off.
But I'd encourage the Rams to do more to give us players we can root for because of what they do instead of being fed more and more players we're asked to root for despite themselves. At least try. Signing numbskulls like Britt and Reid isn't even trying.
Thanks, and go Rams,
Mike
No comments:
Post a Comment