Former Las Vegas Raiders wide receiver Henry Ruggs is potentially facing 50 years in prison for killing a young woman and her dog in a brutal drunk driving crash, but all the sports media seems to be able to talk about is still Aaron Rodgers’ personal medical decisions.
Last week, the 22-year-old Ruggs allegedly got drunk and drove his car recklessly, violently smashing into the back of a Toyota carrying 23-year-old Tina Tintor and her golden retriever. Ruggs’ Corvette reportedly reached 156 miles per hour before striking the other car in a crash so brutal it started a fire that killed the young woman and dog inside.
One judge said he’d never seen a case with someone accused of driving so fast. Prosecutors said Ruggs’ bloodwork revealed a blood alcohol content of .161, more than double the legal limit of .08.
On Wednesday, those prosecutors levied five charges against Ruggs, who was dropped last week by the Raiders, including four felonies and a misdemeanor. If he’s convicted on all counts, prosecutors say he could spend more than 50 years behind bars.
A quick search reveals a number of aggregated news stories from corporate media outlining the charges, but the sports media and blue-check Twitter elitists are still so obsessed with Aaron Rodgers’ vaccination status, “selfishness,” and ways of avoiding invasive questions from the press that they don’t have any bandwidth left to weigh in on Ruggs’ actually deadly behavior.
In the sports world, the big story today isn’t how a 22-year-old wide receiver’s life is practically over after he killed a young woman and her dog. No, today the big news is how Rodgers’ fines from the NFL for breaking COVID protocols pale in comparison to brave activist Colin Kaepernick’s career being over when he took a self-aggrandizing knee.
"What Colin Kaepernick did was make a peaceful protest at the beginning of an NFL game. He did not endanger anyone's life," Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says.
"What Aaron Rodgers has done is totally beyond the pale … It's shameful what he did." https://t.co/nzCeygPIBH
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 10, 2021
Aaron Rodgers lied, violated NFL COVID protocols and endangered other people.
Rodgers was fined $14,650. That is 0.00010933% of his 4-year, $134 million deal with @packers, not counting endorsements.
Colin Kaepernick took a knee in protest for a cause, and lost his NFL career.
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) November 10, 2021
Aaron Rodgers was fined $14,650.
Colin Kaepernick lost his career.
How very WHITE of the @NFL.
— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) November 10, 2021
Meanwhile, other talking media heads are suggesting Rodgers’ so-called selfishness could be criminal, with Geraldo Rivera saying, “You sneeze on my grandchildren, you know, that is, that could be a crime.”
Geraldo Rivera on Aaron Rodgers revealing he's unvaccinated:
"You sneeze on my grandchildren, you know, that is, that could be a crime” pic.twitter.com/8zksAMLpPp
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 10, 2021
And of course, we’re still getting a daily double dose of hyperbolic articles and tweets about how Rodgers’ actions “endangered” the lives of a bunch of already-vaccinated people.
https://twitter.com/MaxBoot/status/1458409233637064710
https://twitter.com/CuomoPrimeTime/status/1458267442409529344
This endless Rodgers news cycle has nothing to do with the media’s concern for lives or freedom of expression. If it did, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would have moved on from the Green Bay Packers quarterback and would instead be talking about the fiery footage of an intoxicated Ruggs who demonstrated a deadly disregard for human life when he allegedly drunkenly killed a woman. And the media would instead be applauding Rodgers’ comparatively low fines for going about his personal business, rather than comparing him to a mediocre quarterback-turned-self-serious Netflix documentary subject.
Sports media don’t care about the insane Ruggs story because it doesn’t help them perpetuate their COVID vaccine lecture circuit, it doesn’t let them pontificate about systemic racial injustice, and it doesn’t let them cloak blatant political talking points in football lingo.
The most damning thing for the media in their ambivalence toward the Ruggs story is that it doesn’t invoke the same kind of outrage in them that Rodgers’ private medical decisions do. And we should ask why that is.
Henry Ruggs killed a women I’ve seen 5 minutes of it on sports networks. Aaron Rodgers is unvaccinated the world is ending
— Gary Sheffield Jr. (@GarysheffieldJr) November 3, 2021
If the sports analysts and other media pundits go on for a full week lamenting an athlete’s selfishness and so-called deadly personal decisions regarding a hot-button political issue, but then effectively ignore a different player’s selfishness and deadly personal decisions when they actually leave a woman and her pet burning to death in a car, don’t believe their hand-wringing.
Rodgers “lied,” Rodgers is “selfish,” Rodgers “put lives at risk” — this is all a ruse. Sports media can’t peel themselves away from the Aaron Rodgers non-story because they think it helps them. Ruggs doesn’t.
