Congrats ESPN, you’re officially every dumb frat guy ever
11 people were injured in Monday’s attack, but ESPN is more worried about the football team
A mere day after the attack at Ohio State carried out by former student and Somalian refugee Abdul Razak Ali Artan, ESPN thought it would be a good idea to write an article about it. You might be wondering why a sports media outlet would be concerned with something like that, but the title of the article says it all, “Ohio State football players safe, accounted for after on-campus attack.”
You never think that your school is going to be the next one on T.V. being covered by every news outlet in the country because someone has decided to carry out a premeditated attack. The Ohio State community is vulnerable, and we have only just begun trying to heal after the traumatizing events that occurred Monday.
At Ohio State we take pride in the success of our athletic program, especially when it comes to the football team, but ESPN’s article was poorly timed and flat out insensitive. Feel free to talk about our talented athletes the other 364 days out of the year, but yesterday was not the day.
The short article briefly glosses over the fact that 11 students and faculty members were hospitalized with injuries as a result. ESPN rehashes the same few details about the attack that every other news outlet has provided the world with, but quickly shifts to a discussion about the Buckeye football players. To make a long story short, the article is pointless.
Newsflash: we are more than just a football team. What does the football team have to do with what happened Monday? When people put college athletes on a pedestal like this it takes the focus away from what really matters. They are not gods among men, they are students just like the rest of us. Even if Buckeye football players were injured in the attack, this is still not about the football team, it’s about the Ohio State community as a whole as we try to move forward.
Some students went back to class today glancing over their shoulders hundreds of times, anxious that something might happen again. Some students skipped class all together. We are real people and we are afraid. We are glad that the situation wasn’t worse than it turned out.
So ESPN, why don’t you just stick to updating us on things we don’t care about—like the newest dumb ass decision Johnny Manziel made? Don’t jump on the reporting bandwagon again so you can loosely tie a tragedy to a sports team.