Football and the WOD

Lawrence Tynes, who after missing two field goals in the final minutes of regulation last week was very nearly told to make his own travel plans home, only to be redeemed in overtime, has bigger things on his mind.

May 5, 2003, was Tynes’s 25th birthday. With plans to celebrate that night, he drove toward Mark’s house. He did not see his brother.

“There were Suburbans and bags and vans and people in and out of his place,” Tynes said. “And I said, ‘Oh, wow.’ I turned around and went home.”

He was not entirely surprised. Federal agents had simultaneously raided three homes. Among those arrested were Mark Tynes and four of Lawrence Tynes’s best friends — friends from the neighborhood “that I grew up with,” Tynes said.

Mark Tynes was pinned as the leader of an extensive operation that authorities said moved 3,600 pounds of marijuana from Texas to Florida over several years.

“If they would have said 10 years,” Lawrence Tynes said of his brother’s sentence, “I would have said, You know what? You deserve it. It’s tough love. I mean, you do the crime, you do the time.”

But Mark Tynes had a record, including felony convictions for possession. And he “paid a heavy penalty for refusing to cooperate,” a managing assistant United States attorney told The Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal after sentencing. The others cooperated fully. They became government witnesses. Lawrence Tynes watched as each testified against his brother.

“To me, they were all just as guilty as one another, because they were all doing it,” Tynes said.

Tynes should reserve his outrage for prosecutors who gave his brother 10 years for a non-violent crime, not the friends who were given a choice -- his brother or their life.