leashyourkids wrote:
I don't have strong feelings either way, but it seems disingenuous when pro sports teams act all moral.
Vegan - about time with the avatar!

Yeah not knowing how to resize an image is just pretty much computer dumb on my part. Finally figured it out after three or so months.
I think disingenuous is the right word here. Read an article on Yahoo that didn't sit well with me. I'll paste an excerpt here:
Quote:
It's pretty clear that Hernandez wasn't thought of very well in the New England organization. The Ravens decided to support Ray Lewis when he was charged with murder in 2000 because they believed in Lewis as a person. As the news of Odin Lloyd's death kept coming in last week, the Patriots made the decision that they would dump Hernandez when he was arrested. The charges didn't even matter. Neither did the fact that an immediate release could keep the Patriots from recouping a lot of money, that Hernandez is a fantastically talented player or that New England's offense has lost other key players this offseason.
The way the Patriots have aggressively disassociated themselves with Hernandez is pretty unusual. It reflects on Hernandez and on how the Patriots' organization wants to be perceived. Maybe the way the Patriots dealt with Hernandez will provide a template for other NFL teams and how they deal with players who get in trouble.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutd ... 24424.htmlI don't know if I'm convinced about the Patriots readiness to drop him based on an obstruction charge alone. After all, they did drop him once he was arrested and charged with murder, but I guess the official stance is they did not know the exact charge at the time of his release and dropped him anyway based on his involvement alone, however large or small.
In any case, I don't know how much praise we can throw the Patriots' way. Dropping Hernandez and completely disassociating themselves from him is an obvious move to make after an arrest like this. Anything less would have been utterly stupid and just begging for a PR fiasco. Also, this article and others with a similar slant give me the impression that Hernandez's swift dismissal reflects well on the Patriots' intolerance for distractions, lack of character, etc. But that couldn't be further from the truth in this case. Not only did they take a risk on a troubled but talented player (not unheard of in any league), they trusted him enough to give him 16 million as part of the second largest contract extension for a TE in league history (
http://www.boston.com/sports/football/p ... locke.html)
So all this stuff about distractions, character, good guys, is crap. Hernandez was none of those things, but yet the Patriots thought enough of him to give him one of the richest TE contracts in the league. I'm in no way trying to suggest that the Patriots should have anticipated something as massive as the murder charge, and I don't fault the Patriots for trying to manage the fallout from the arrest in [misleading?] ways that make them look good. I just don't appreciate ostensibly impartial writers sipping the Patriots' kool-aid and trying to tell me that the Pats dropped Hernandez so quickly because he wasn't highly regarded within the organization anyway. That's crap, and I can think of 16 million reasons why.