WR Braylon Edwards might not be Dustin Keller, but he still played a key role in the Jets’ 31-23 road defeat of Miami last night, despite having been busted for DUI just 5 days earlier. Noting the participation of Edwards — along with Dolphins RB Ronnie Brown, charged with DUI last spring, Midwest Sports Fans’ Jerod Morris bemoans a system that suspends PED users while taking a cavalier approach to drunk driving (“the only thing separating Brown and Edwards from an infamous and indefinite existence of regret and remorse, the kind of existence that is an unfortunate but deserved reality for Donte Stallworth and Leonard Little, is luck”)
The NFL suspends players for drug use of all kinds, which I think is fine, especially in the case of performance enhancers. So why not suspend anyone who is pulled over and blows a BAL above the legal limit? No one else is ever going to die from Brian Cushing™s decision to *ahem* overtrain, but it only takes one time and a little bad luck for someone else to make the same decision Braylon Edwards and I made for it to result in a tragedy.
Donte Stallworth and Leonard Little paid huge prices, both monetarily and in terms of suspension length, for killing people while driving drunk. Ronnie Brown and Braylon Edwards paid very little price, but only luck and happenstance really separates these four people. So why such disparate punishments for essentially the same choice?.