"Time to Die Bitch u and ur???”
With that text message, Chris Rainey re-opened the floodgates.
Just as the distinguished sandwich thrower, tow company crusader and sleepy drunken driver before him, Rainey has ensured that the tradition of memorable and stupid arrests of UF football players lives on.
It’s not as much about what Rainey did as how he did it.
This is a spat that really never should have seen the light of day. Rainey and the alleged victim have been romantic in the past, he wanted her attention, she didn’t provide it, and he flipped out.
He sent the above text along with some other less-serious threats until the police were called, and we’re off to the races.
The ex-girlfriend said in court Tuesday that she never feared Rainey would harm her and that she didn’t want charges pressed against him, another sign that this isn’t that big of a deal.
Plus, Gainesville attorney Huntley Johnson, who represents most legally-challenged UF football players and seemingly sports a winning percentage that would make Urban Meyer blush, is now handling the redshirt junior wideout’s case.
Hopefully, Rainey — who I’ve always thought of as a pretty nice, funny dude — will put this behind him and get his career back on track. And there’s no reason to think he can’t.
The bigger issue is how this looks from afar.
It doesn’t matter whether charges are dropped. What matters is public perception, and like most crimes the Gators have been accused of in recent years, this one stands out.
As this story broke Tuesday, I got plenty of text messages from friends informing me that it was “time to die.” In jest, I hope.
It made the rounds quickly, and those three (or four) words are bound to follow Rainey around like his last two quotable moments: “It’s good to be Chris Rainey” and “I’m a white girl man” (He held true to that second quote with this incident, by the way).
And when you factor in the rest of that text, it gets even worse. I’m not saying the threat is OK, but what is going on with the back half of his message? Is he asking a question?
Are the question marks an invitation to fill in the blank?
Or maybe, as one person suggested on Twitter, Rainey was trying to type “Time to dine” and auto-correct screwed him up.
It’s easy to joke about, and that’s the point.
Expect a few wisecracks if you make the trip to Knoxville this weekend (suggestion for Vols fans: print a shirt depicting a Chris Rainey-themed clock with “Die” written in place of all 12 numbers).
The more outlandish the arrest, the more it will be remembered. Here, we have a threat suited to the end of a cheesy action flick with awful spelling and grammar.
And that gives the Gators — not to mention the university — a terrible name.
Depending on whose count you go by, the football team has had between 20 and 4,000 arrests under Urban Meyer. That’s obviously an exaggeration, but this has been a problem for a while.
Two things have kept Florida’s reputation from really going in the toilet: winning and Tim Tebow. Tebow’s gone, and winning may be taking a sabbatical, so there are fewer places to hide the dirt.
It’s a crucial time for Florida to keep its nose clean.
It’s time for this trend to die.
