Boston Globe Spotlight team coming with the Aaron Hernandez story

Cheese McNair

Cheese McNair

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DaKidFromNoWhere said:
Making him a victim, wonder how much this would have came out of he never got caught?
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I don’t think it’s making him a victim. I think it’s just trying to make sense of it. It’s one thing if dude was a benchwarmer doing this but he was an all star. Easily one of the most interesting pro football players.


And if it would’ve came out, it would’ve been on some “overcame the odds” type shyt
 
DaKidFromNoWhere

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Cheese McNair said:
I don’t think it’s making him a victim. I think it’s just trying to make sense of it. It’s one thing if dude was a benchwarmer doing this but he was an all star. Easily one of the most interesting pro football players.


And if it would’ve came out, it would’ve been on some “overcame the odds” type shyt
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Fair point but mine still stands.
 
mastermind

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Immaturity, in fact, was all but baked into Florida coach Urban Meyer’s plan for Hernandez. He wanted his best freshman players young, and he wanted them on the field early.

Hernandez had just turned 17 when he arrived on campus. Six months ahead of his high school’s graduation, he was suddenly a college kid, buzzing down Stadium Road on a silver scooter, working out with the team, hanging out at bars, and finding trouble. Hernandez would quickly learn here that consequences and moral norms — even when a human life hung in the balance — did not necessarily apply to football players.

There was no way, except physically, he was ready for this. The young man who came to Gainesville wasn’t academically prepared or emotionally grounded for college life, according to previously undisclosed college records and recordings of phone calls Hernandez later made from jail. He had graduated high school more than a semester early — not because he was a great student but because he was a great football player.

Maybe. But Siegmann succumbed, as many have, to the persuasive powers of Urban Meyer.

The hard-charging coach had traveled to Bristol. Siegmann said they met alone in the principal’s office. He recalled Meyer telling him that Hernandez “has to graduate” six months ahead of the rest of his class.

Meyer was at the forefront of a growing but controversial trend to have elite recruits take summer school classes and finish high school early — a practice that he defended to the Globe in an interview last week. The goal was to start college in January so Hernandez could learn the offense and play spring football.

Siegmann and others at Bristol Central had been worried about Hernandez’s mental state since his father’s sudden death earlier in 2006. But the pressure was intense. Meyer had help from one of his Florida assistants, Steve Addazio, a Connecticut native who had initially recruited Hernandez. The two coaches, Siegmann said, told Hernandez how much they loved his talent and his potential to play in the NFL.

“They were pushing pretty hard,” Siegmann said. “To hear that not just from Urban, but from a local guy, Steve Addazio… . It was pretty daunting on Aaron.”

Meyer and Addazio may not have known all they were getting in Hernandez. The athletic gifts were obvious, but behind them was an angry teenager struggling with an abusive upbringing, a growing dependence on drugs, and questions about his own sexual identity. And this vulnerable young man was entering a realm where the sport had grown into a billion-dollar business that prioritized on-field performance above all else.
The classroom, certainly, was a distant second.

His early high school diploma couldn’t change certain facts: Hernandez wasn’t fully academically ready for college. His verbal SAT score of 420 was below the minimum required at Florida, where the majority of freshmen scored 600 or above, records obtained by the Globe show. While Hernandez’s overall SAT score did barely make the grade, a college administrator wrote in the admission paperwork that he needed “reading [and] writing remediation.”

And he got it. In Gainesville, Hernandez took rudimentary reading and writing courses at a community college, courses that may have helped him but did not count for college credit. Records obtained by the Globe show that many Florida football players who graduated high school early — especially under coach Meyer — took classes their first semester at that same institution, Santa Fe Community College.
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Urban Meyer being human scum :banderas:
 
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