[sportscurmudgeon]

Gmanc711:

I am NOT passing judgment on Sean Taylor. I am telling you what my opinion of him is based on HIS behaviors.

He skipped out of the Rookie Seminar. That's not in doubt. He said it was because he was going to be evicted from his apartment. Assume that's true for just a moment; a mature adult would have known that eviction procedures were underway before getting on the plane to go to the rookei seminar and a mature adult would have done something about that. A mature adult - about to sign a contract worth millions of dollars - might have had the foresight to figure a way to forestall the eviction or avoid it entirely. After the fact, Taylor said that he and his roomates/cohorts owed a couple of thousand dollars in the deal. I don't know about you, but if I am about to come into something like $5-10M in cash money, I think I'd be able to find a way to structure some kind of deal to be sure I wasn't evicted from an apartment. Could you figure a way out of that "thicket"?

This doesn't mean his character is flawed; it means he isn't near the point where he is a responsible adult.

He is NOT guilty of DUI. Thank you for acknowledging that as an pro athlete with $$$ he gets to play by a different set of ruiles than you or I would in identical circumstances. What he doemonstrated in that circumstance was self-preservation which is not exactly the same thing as responsible adulthood. If I had to guess - yes, I said GUESS - I would say that he probably had a few "pops" at Gardner's birthday party and probably had a BAC above the legal limit when he was pulled over. But we'll never KNOW that just as we won't ever KNOW who killed Nicole Brown Simpson until OJ finds the real killers.

Then there is his musical agents game. And after he fired various agents, he somehow thought it was a good idea to hire an agent/company that specializes in baseball players and not NFL players. Note Jeff Moorad who negotiated his deal is now the GM of the Arizona D-Backs. So, what is the mature and rational thought process that would lead one to do something like that? There aren't a lot of possibilities here. Either he is fundamentally stupid or he took some bad advice from someone without doing a lot of checking on that advice, Neither of these possibililties foreshadows the emergence of a mature and rational adult any time soon.

Once again, he's not a bad person and his character is not flawed; he's just not acting like an adult.

Then Joe Gibbs says he wants 100% team participation in the off-season voluntary workouts. If you want ot be a "team guy" but you know in your heart that you don't like your contract and your agent says you have to "withhold your services" to get a new one, you need to try to figure out a way to withhold your services without pissing off the coach. I can think of a couple of ways to do this, but not showing up and not leaving the coach with an explanation that keeps this out of the papers as a big brouhaha isn't one of them.

I am not attacking Sean Taylor's character; he may indeed be a wonderful human being. But he has yet to demonstrate - by HIS benaviors off the field - that he is much more than an immature 16 year old from a rich family with access to loads of $$$.

Lots of those kinds of people never reach any real adult maturity either; the jury is still out on Sean Taylor.