We’ve mentioned once or twice the connection between the lockout and players being locked up. Though we’re not excusing bad behavior, the fact remains that the arrest rate for NFL players tends to go down when they have the structure that comes from being with their teams.
Sure, arrests still happen during OTAs and training camp and the preseason and the regular season and even the postseason (including the night before the Super Bowl), but they are fewer and farther between than when the players are left to their own devices.
In the lockout, the players indefinitely have been left to their own devices. And the father of the NFL player most recently arrested wishes that wasn’t the case.
Jack Britt believes that his son, Titans receiver Kenny Britt, needs to be out of his hometown of Bayonne, New Jersey and back in Nashville.
“I’m worried about him all the time,” Jack Britt told Conor Orr and Matthew Stanmyre of the Newark Star-Ledger in an article that takes a thorough look at Britt’s history of off-field issues. “But my concern is not with Kenny, per se, it’s more with Kenny’s friends, and he knows that. He has too many friends with too much free time.
“He needs to be around more positive people.”
One of those friends is Albert Robinson of Jersey City. Britt posted bond earlier this year for Robinson after he was accused of shooting a teenager and throwing him into the Hudson River. The teenager drowned.
Ideally, Britt wouldn’t be hanging out in Bayonne right now but training at the Titans’ facility and thereafter hanging out with teammates who have a vested interest in keeping him out of trouble. That won’t happen until the lockout ends.
Lockout or not, Kenny Britt soon will be returning to Nashville, with one of his brothers. Still, even if Kenny Britt is out of Bayonne, he’ll still have too much free time of his own. And he has shown that he’s capable of finding trouble in Nashville, as evidenced by his involvement last season in a nightclub brawl.
Meanwhile, the Titans can do nothing for Britt, thanks to the lockout. They can’t check on him, and they can’t help him in any way.
It’s not a reason for either side to cave at the bargaining table, but it’s another reason for both sides to quit treating August as the 11th hour and start realizing that the 11th hour has already come and gone.