Crash linked to NFL player should be a league-wide wake-up call

You would think, less than three years removed from Henry Ruggs III killing a woman and her dog, NFL players would get the message.

Yes, you are in your early 20s. No, you are not invincible.

But here we are once again.

Over the past weekend, two vehicles were clearly racing each other on the North Central Expressway and someone made a mistake.

The two vehicles collided and collected four other cars with them. The occupants of these cars were minding their own business and got caught up in someone else’s stupidity.

Fortunately, unlike the Ruggs incident in late 2021 in Las Vegas, no one paid the ultimate price.

But that was more sheer luck than anything else and there were some minor injuries.

One of the cars involved was registered to Kansas City Chiefs receiver Rashee Rice, who played at SMU before the Chiefs drafted him last year.

Facts Still Murky

It is important to note that there are few known facts.

First, there was a collision between two cars driving at high speed that collected four innocent vehicles in the wreck.

Second, one of the cars is registered to Rice, who capped off his rookie year by helping the Chiefs win a second-straight Super Bowl.

Finally, there is a video of the wreck as well as a video of four men exiting the two cars and immediately leaving the scene. Police apparently spent some time locating Rice afterward.

And one of the men in the video may or may not be Rice. That is an important distinction to keep in mind going forward.

It has not been determined with any certainty that Rice was actually in one of the cars at the time of the wreck, much less if he was even driving one of them.

Those facts will be determined in the days and weeks to come.

And no charges have been filed yet, especially against Rice. We are far removed from knowing a lot of important details.

But given what happened to Ruggs you’d think the NFL would find a way to drill some common sense into their players.

The horrible manner of death for that young woman and her dog should serve as a cautionary tale, especially to NFL players.

Just ask Philadelphia’s Jalen Carter. He was involved in a race with a teammate not long after Georgia had won a national championship.

A mistake was made, a car went off the road at 104 MPH and hit two power poles and several trees.

It left two people – including one of Carter’s teammates – dead.

Cowboys Have Had Similar Tragedies

The Cowboys organization is no stranger to such tragedies.

In 2003, Dwayne Goodrich struck and killed two men who were trying to pull a motorist from a burning car on a North Dallas freeway.

He fled the scene and was later arrested, tried, and convicted of criminally negligent homicide. He was released from prison in 2011.

But three lives were irreparably shattered.

In 2012, Josh Brent was driving a car with teammate and friend Jerry Brown as a passenger.

Brent was intoxicated and lost control of his Mercedes on a Dallas-area highway.

Brent survived the crash. Brown did not.

Two more lives were destroyed – not to mention the collateral damage caused to the families.

As recently as 2022, Sam Williams was nearly added to the list of destroyed lives. His car was side-swiped by another hard enough to deploy the airbag in Williams’ car.

It wouldn’t have taken much to have the accident end much more horribly.

Be Smarter Guys

Look, accidents happen. Sometimes everyone can be doing everything correctly and it still goes sideways.

That’s just how life works.

But there are ways to avoid some of these and it is as simple as just being smarter out there.

Don’t put yourself in these situations in the first place.

Want to race the sports car you just bought? Go for it.

Find a racetrack and rent it out for an hour or so and let’er rip.

Want to party and have a good time? By all means.

But call a taxi or Uber. You get home safe – and so does that innocent person in the other car.

No matter how the facts play out in this past weekend’s incident, hopefully, Rice will learn from it without having to pay the price Ruggs, Brent, Carter, and Goodrich did.

More importantly, the price the people who died in their accidents had to pay.

Even if it is determined Rice was not in either car, life just gave him a warning for the future.

Make better choices.

It’s a warning each and every single one of us should take to heart.