UM Football Player Killed...
This article was written by Greg Cote of the Miami Herald and sums it all up:

Tragedy reduces football issues to instant insignificanceBY GREG COTE gcote@MiamiHerald.com Greg Cote's weblog The Bryan Pata tragedy The unacceptable ignominy of the University of Miami football team's 5-4 record stopped mattering Tuesday night as surely as a heart stopped beating. The tenuous future of unpopular coach Larry Coker ceased to be the least bit important, at least for a little while. The injury to quarterback Kyle Wright's thumb retreated to instant insignificance.

Hopefully, too, an agitated, jeering, dissatisfied Hurricanes Nation will pause and demand of itself today a moment of silence, or at least perspective, in this rancorous season. Just a moment, please?

Bryan Pata died.

Violently, by a bullet, inside his apartment in Kendall.

He was a UM defensive tackle, a senior, down to his last few college games, before somebody took even those away.

He was not a star. He was nobody's All-American. Nobody's future first-round draft pick. He was a solid pass-rusher who had led the team in quarterback pressures last year. He was a solid run-stopper who had selflessly switched positions from end to tackle before this season because the coaches asked him to. He had 11 career sacks, including two this year.

He was not a star, but he was tough, liked, admired. He was a leader. Just two weeks ago, late in a teetering game at Georgia Tech, the defender ran onto the field into UM's offensive huddle to exhort his teammates. He cared that much.

A SENSELESS DEATH

Pata died senselessly Tuesday night, for no good reason, as a disproportionate number of young African-American males seem to in Miami and other big cities. You might not even have heard about a death such as his, except he happened to be a college football player. He wore No. 95. Sometime he wore dreadlocks. He loved to tinker with and restore old cars. He had seven older siblings. He was a Miami kid who grew up at Central High.

He was going to get around to figuring out something to do with his life after football, until somebody with a gun decided none of that mattered all that much.
He was 22, too young to die under every circumstance imaginable.
Police had no motives, details or explanation for the crime Tuesday night. Pata, described as a Christian who didn't drink or party, deserves every assumption of his being an innocent victim.

The shame of this is that too many people nationwide are going to add this to the generic parade of ''UM football controversies.'' They will place this neatly in line right behind last month's brawl during the FIU game under the broad subhed, Hurricanes in the Headlines for the Wrong Reasons.

As if Pata brought it on himself.

As if Coker should have stopped it.

As if anyone but the man with the gun in his hand was to blame.

The tragic news broke across Miami Tuesday night, broke like hearts break, and it had to remind many of 10 years earlier, to April 13, 1996, when UM linebacker Marlin Barnes and his friend, Timwanika Lumpkins, were murdered in a campus apartment by her former boyfriend.

FOOTBALL INCIDENTAL

Football was peripheral then, too; incidental, as it was Tuesday night.
Death is never choosy. Doesn't play favorites. Doesn't care who you are. It will take John F. Kennedy Jr. in a small plane, Dale Earnhardt Sr. in a fast car, a homeless man beaten by bats, Sonny Bono on a ski slope, Bryan Pata in a Kendall apartment, or someone you will never hear of who just slipped in his bathtub and hasn't even been missed yet.

Death, though, overwhelms everything, every time, at least in the time when we force ourselves to bow heads, for just a moment, between the regular beat of life, between the cheering or the resumption of complaint.

In that moment, in a fleeting spasm of clarity, we understand that a 5-4 record is just what it is and not anything more: a disappointment.

We understand then that this UM football season didn't become a tragedy until a bullet erased Bryan Pata for no good reason at all.