NEWSLETTER
Sometimes, a tweet will come across my screen that stops me in my tracks.
This collection of words, which happen to include the name of former Chicago Bears cornerback Buster Skrine, did just that:
Former NFL player Buster Skrine on the run from police in Canada coming together to create a sentence that serves as a teaser for this Pro Football Talk post is pretty nutso. It’s like a weird game of Mad-Libs. But the story that accompanies the the post takes it to another level.
Former Chicago Bears cornerback Buster Skrine faces fraud charges in Canada
Here is a snippet PFT’s Charean Williams, who cites the work of Canada’s Daily Hive which shares news that Buster Skrine failed to appear for a scheduled court date on Monday and that police reported that his ankle monitor was offline and disconnected. There is a lot happening here:
Canadian police accuse Skrine of defrauding banks of more than $100,000 by using fraudulent checks to open accounts and withdraw money before the checks cleared. Skrine identified himself as a “former NFL player” to the banks.
Skrine initially faced 15 charges — four counts of fraud over $5,000, seven counts of making false statements to produce money, three counts of possession of property obtained by a crime over $5,000 and one count of possession of property obtained by a crime over $5,000.
Those are some pretty serious allegations, to say the least.
I’ll be honest, I hadn’t thought about Buster Skrine in a few years. And it’s not as if his time with the Chicago Bears was memorable. Skrine signed with Chicago during the offseason ahead of the 2019 campaign. It was a three-year deal worth up to $16.5 million with $8.5 million guaranteed to replace Bryce Callahan, the talented — yet, oft-injured — nickel cornerback who left for the Denver Broncos in free agency. But in a cruel twist of fate, a concussion caused Skrine to miss the final four games of the 2020 campaign. The Bears would go on to cut Skrine in a cap-saving move before the start of the new league year in 2021.
And in a crueler twist of fate, we’re reading about Buster Skrine facing fraud charges and evading Canadian police three years after retiring from an NFL career that OverTheCap reports paid him $40,412,097. It just feels like this is such an absurd thing to be writing. Particularly when you piece all of the individual parts of the previous sentences together. How does one even get to this point? I wish I had an answer.
