Burress will serve two years in prison and have two years of supervised release.  Nobody else, including Antonio Pierce, who was there and drove Burress to the hospital along with delivering the gun to him, the hospital staff who didn’t inform the authorities Burress had been shot, etc., was indicted.

Burress is talented and will likely live to play again–another disciplinary action for Roger Goodell!  As far as we’re concerned, shooting himself in the thigh is probably pretty painful…and clearly accidental.  Dangerous to have a loaded gun in a nightclub? Yes. Silly not to reregister the gun when Burress moved and his permit expired? Clearly.  But in our mind, community service irresponsible, not serious jailtime irresponsible.  This is entirely ridiculous.

That bed Burress is taking up–not to mention the taxpayer dollars–could go toward punitive housing for someone who actually hurt or negatively affected the life of someone other than himself.  Stallworth (whose done a good job of owning up to his crime, don’t get us wrong) got 26 DAYS for a drunk driving incident that KILLED SOMEONE.  A little consistentcy, please!

That’s our take, and we’re sticking to it.

(Actually, we just agree with this nugget o’ wisdom…)

shawnemerriman:  Forget the gun…forget shooting yourself…you had on sweat pants in the CLUB man thats tough

We know this because we follow him on Twitter.  Twitter’s great for us, and for funny people like Simmons, because it helps us pick up post ideas and follow breaking news–which today has clearly been key–and sound off accordingly.

But we’re still not sure it’s so good for athletes.  First off, some athlete twitters are fake: Kevin Youkilis recently pointed out that no social media that says its him actually is, and the account we all thought was his is now suspended.  Big Baby Davis’ account seemed to admit to being a fake and go dark that day we wrote that post about him…

…but some accounts are verified: that is, they definitely belong the athletes they claim to belong to.  And some of those are revealing some interesting perspectives on this whole Favre thing.  Everything here is directly quoted from UPH’s twitter feed:

Shawn Merriman: i think by him coming back this late puts pressure on the team. No i mean seriously if U were the starting QB & ur 3 weeks away from the start of  the season & “BRETT FARVE”say im coming back wut wud U do.

We see his point–team chemistry is really important, especially for a team that often sort of hovers on being good year after year like the Vikings.

Chad OchoCinco: Why don’t they fine Brett for retiring and coming back and stop worrying about me having fun on Sundays

Wow, bitter much?  Even if he’s joking, this kind of immediate reaction is pretty interesting.  Chad got fined for wearing an OchoCinco nameplate on his jersey to the tune of 5k.  He hasn’t always had a great relationship with the NFL powers that be, but it seems like he’s making the same point as Merriman is, here: Favre’s indecisiveness costs the the teams and the sport.

That he’s saying that to the world may not be the best choice….but it sure makes our job easier.