Safety Sean Taylor died in November 2007, shot and killed by intruders in his home. In nearly 14 years since his passing, the Washington Football Team had not retired his number.
Now, with three days’ notice, the retirement of No. 21 will happen.
The announcement comes at a time when the organization is under siege for the investigation that the league conducted and then buried, but for a handful of documents selectively culled from 650,000 in order to get Jon Gruden out of the game for good. The efforts to compel the league to release all information about the investigation have intensified, and they show no signs of relenting.
Maybe Washington planned to retire Taylor’s number well before the events of the past six days. If so, why wasn’t it announced before today?
And since it wasn’t announced before today, why not postpone it until the email issue subsides? It looks like a bright, shiny object aimed at getting people to leave the team alone over the email issue. The team should have had the awareness to realize that it would create this impression, and the team should have pressed pause.
So either it’s a flimsy and obvious effort to obscure the email problem, or it’s a failure to recognize that it would seem to be a diversion. Either way, it’s not fair to Taylor and his family to have this overdue honor caught in the crossfire of a problem created by, on one hand, an obvious desire by the league to protect Daniel Snyder and, on the other hand, a willingness to use some of the materials for the sole purpose of ending the employment of someone who was never employed by the Washington Football Team.
