This past Tuesday morning many people woke up to the horrific news that Redskins’ superstar Sean Taylor had died at the age of twenty-four. He had been shot early Monday morning at his home in Miami while sleeping in his master bedroom along with his wife and eighteen month old daughter. The shooting suspect, perhaps attempting to rob Taylor’s home, shot at him twice, he missed once and hit him once. The phone lines in his home were not working, delaying the time it took to have him airlifted to Jackson Memorial Hospital. During this time he lost a lot of blood due to his severed femoral artery, the amount of blood he lost may have left him with brain damage and is the reason for his death following recovery from six hours of emergency surgery.
Taylor attended the University of Miami where he would help lead his team to a national championship in 2001. He was one of four freshman who started on the national championship team and would develop a reputation as one of the top defensive players in all of college football. In 2003, he was named first-team All-Big East Conference as well as Defensive Player of the Year. The Washington Redskins took notice of this and drafted him as the fifth overall pick in the 2004 NFL Draft, he was Joe Gibbs first draft pick since retiring in 1993 from the team.
After being drafted he would soon begin to draw a large amount of criticism from the media for firing two of his agents and skipping part of the NFL’s mandatory rookie symposium for which he was later fined $25,000. Taylor would take over as Washington’s starting free safety by the third game of his rookie season. Unfortunately, a few weeks later he would be arrested for (DUI) after leaving then teammate Rod Gardner’s birthday party in D.C. A month later, T.J. Houshmandzadeh accused Taylor of spitting on him, which only continued the harsh criticism by the media. Because of the way he felt he was portrayed during these events, Taylor would avoid interviews and contact with the media as much as possible, he felt no matter what he did, he would be unfairly portrayed as a person he was not.
Despite some of the trouble he would find himself involved in, he was thriving on the football field. He was beginning to draw notice from teams around the league as one of the hardest hitting safeties in all of football. Despite being a newcomer to the NFL he was drawing comparisons to Hall of Fame safety Ronnie Lott who was also known for his jaw-rattling hits on wide receivers. Once other teams started to figure out that Sean Taylor was going to shape their offensive strategy for Sunday’s game against the Redskins, he became a very popular player with the FedEx Field faithful. FedEx Field would begin to be filled with more #21 jerseys than any other player on Sundays. That’s pretty amazing considering defensive players rarely become fan favorites, usually that honor is bestowed upon quarterbacks, running backs, and wide receivers. While Taylor was a fairly private person he always appreciated the fanfare and attempted to do his part by participating at fan-related events and signing autographs.
Within the last two years, Taylor had really began to grow up and reshape the way he was living his life, the birth of his daughter helped him with that. He left many of his troublesome friends behind and became a model teammate to other players on the team. This year defensive coordinator Greg Williams has set his defensive schemes up around Taylor, the schemes encourage the opposing quarterback to throw it down field where Taylor will attack. During the history of the NFL there have not been too many players in the secondary that were so good that quarterbacks would not even try to test the area of the field that they would patrol, but Taylor had become one of them during last season, finding himself in the company of former Redskins’ great, Darrell Green. Along with a new generation of safeties like Roy Williams and Ed Reed, Sean Taylor has helped revolutionize the position into one where it looks like a linebacker is hitting you if you catch the ball or a corner if you are throwing it near them. Personally, Sean Taylor was my favorite player in all of professional sports and a hero, and I have followed his career since he began at the University of Miami. While I have enjoyed watching many of his great moments on the football field over the past years, I think my favorite would have to be how he won last year’s game against Dallas after running back a blocked Mike Vanderjagt field-goal, taking it into Dallas territory and drawing a facemask penalty which added an additional 15 yards and an extra play since time had expired, where Nick Novak would kick the game winning field goal. No one had expected the Redskins to pull the game out at this point, including myself, providing a shocking and emotional celebration for Redskins fans everywhere.
Taylor was killed Monday morning being no less of a hero off the field than he was on it, he was shot after the intruder pushed down the door, right after he had gotten a knife in order to go check out what was going on in order to make sure his wife and daughter remained safe. Taylor was on pace to become a Hall of Famer, while the Redskins will miss him as a player on the field for how great he was, he will be missed even more off the field as a man for how great a person he was.
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