When I started covering the team in the middle of Hernandez’s rookie season, I was blown away by his talent and wondered why he lasted until the fourth round of the 2010 draft. It couldn’t have just been about the reported marijuana use while he was at Florida. So I called around the league and heard about the concerns some teams had about his associates from his hometown, and that there were possible gang ties. I tried to get something concrete on it, but I couldn’t get any traction with the story (Instagram photos would have been nice). There were no facts, just strong rumors. So I never wrote anything, and then the unthinkable happened. To this day I think about ways I could have dug harder and published a story that, at least, might have woken Hernandez up (and woken us all up to Hernandez) before he allegedly broke bad.