- Admin
- #1
The NFL is full of stories featuring players who grew out of their young-and-dumb pasts to become reasonably responsible citizens. And then, there are those guys who will just never get it. It's safe to assume that former Detroit Lions receiver Titus Young is one of the guys who will never get it. Young, who was jettisoned from the Lions on Feb. 4 for a litany of transgressions we'll detail later, was picked up and waived soon thereafter by the St. Louis Rams, whose head coach, Jeff Fisher, has a colorful history when it comes to taking chances on players with dubious off-field histories. We should have known that a guy who didn't pass the smell test with the Lions or Fisher was headed for a weird future, and we would have been very correct.
According to a report from Paula Pasche of the Oakland (Mich.) Press, Young was arrested twice in a 15-hour period last Sunday. He was pulled over at 12:01 a.m. by the Moreno Valley police in Southern California for suspicion of drunk driving, and subsequently arrested for driving under the influence. He was booked at a local detention center, was issued a citation, and was released from custody.
Ah, but we're not done yet. At 2:22 p.m. that very same day, police responded to a tow yard, where Young had been seen jumping over the fence. He was trying to find his black Mustang, which had been impounded upon his first arrest of the day. Young was taken to the same detention center and booked for trying to steal his own car.
Young, selected in the second round of the 2011 NFL draft out of Boise State, started his career with some promise, but things quickly unraveled. During the 2012 season, he (deep breath here): Sucker-punched teammate Louis Delmas in practice, lined up in the wrong place during a game to protest his lack of playing time, been sent home on three different occasions for insubordination, and let loose some bizarre stuff on Twitter that showed, above all else, that he's in this for himself and nobody else. Oh, and there was the time he claimed to be better than Calvin Johnson.
Lions general manager Martin Mayhew later said that he didn't even try to trade Young, because he knew there was no trade value. Young had burned his bridges, and there was little chance any other team was going to take a chance on him before Sunday's incidents were reported. Now, Titus Young has bigger problems to deal with, and unless he finds some sort of galvanic awareness out of this whole thing, one can only assume that things will get worse for him before they ever get better.