Jamaine Winborne

An old college friend in New York called the other day, wondering what the heck was going on. All he heard was that a UVa football player had been shot and three other Cavaliers had been arrested. Which goes to show how easily — and unfairly — a program’s reputation can become tarnished.

I don’t pretend to know all the details about the incident that occurred at Hench Dormitory last Wednesday, but it doesn’t take much knowledge of the situation to conclude that the football players did not do anything egregiously wrong. Jamaine Winborne was the victim. The alleged assailant was an engineering student. And the other three players — Marques Hagans, Brandon Lee and Kenneth Tynes, understandably upset at the shooting of their friend — were arrested on misdemeanor charges for not cooperating with police trying to clear the crime scene.

That’s not to excuse their behavior, particular Tynes, who was arrested after throwing a chair through a window. But it’s clearly not as bad as it may seem to fans around the country, who, like my friend, may have learned about it from a two-paragraph blurb in the sports pages.

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