On Josh Gordon's letter

You can find the article here.

Typically, reading an athletes impassioned plea to accept him as a human being and forgive them for their transgressions is easy received in Cleveland. A lifetime of disappointment from the sports teams has uniquely qualified the folks on the North Coast to commiserate with men attempting to pick up the pieces.

Personally, i'm confused with the tone of the letter.

Josh Gordon deserves our empathy for having grown up in a debilitating home situation. Much like many of the families struggling to make ends meet, we can feel for having to live on government subsidies and for a child who lives in an unsafe neighborhood. His escape from being affiliated with gang members is commendable, but it feels like his dismissal from college is less about being "young and unprepared" as it is a product of the lack of guidance.

Josh deserves forgiveness for the codeine test he failed that caused him to miss two games in his sophomore campaign. It could have been an honest mistake, and his all world effort the rest of the year showed a hunger and an all-world talent that makes forgiveness easy to mete out.

Gordon uses this platform to lash out at those that pretend to affect a personal view to his life and history in the league. This letter doesn't seek forgiveness about the mistakes that he's made, it seeks to shame the sports analysts who called him a pothead. In the situation Gordon finds himself in now, I find it challenging to accept a scything retaliatory tone when humility and apology are called for.

What this letter proves to me is that Josh Gordon has excuses. The fact that he points to the .01 "over the limit" DUI bust, or the 15ng of pot in the wrong sample, or the beers that he had while the league endorses drinking responsibility, is that he feels that he's a victim of circumstances and is not responsible for his own behavior.

This letter has plenty of self recrimination and a passing shout out to how hard this experience has been to his fans and his team mates. Personally, i'm sad to see the national turn their eyes to a correcting of the media talking heads. You may not have an addiction, Josh, but you have a most remarkable chain of failures that has had you kicked off of two college football teams and cost you 2+ years of playing time. The primary issue here ISN'T the misrepresentation of the details in each screw up; it's the fact that they keep happening.

It's just one writers opinion, but today is a day for humility and apologies, not a platform for you to correct the haters.