The Ed Oliver story is one of the hardest things you can learn about as a football fan, especially if you have kids. In June, Ed Oliver lost his two-year-old child in a drowning accident. I don’t think there’s a way for any parent, or honestly any human being, to fully put themselves in that place. It’s crushing. It’s the kind of loss you don’t get over. And that’s exactly why the way this story was broken bothers me.
A Twitter account broke the news, and what came out alongside it was that the Buffalo Bills organization and local authorities had worked to protect Ed Oliver’s privacy during an unthinkably traumatic time, and to protect his family from having that trauma exposed publicly before they were ready. That same account has spent this year building a reputation on stories like the Diana Russini and Mike Vrabel situation, and later the Kyle Shanahan accident, positioning itself as the one pulling back the curtain on things the league or local media supposedly covered up. Now Ed Oliver is being framed the same way.
I don’t think it’s the same at all.
I graduated from Newhouse at Syracuse with a Broadcast Journalism degree. I took the ethics classes, I try to use the journalism block of my education as the underpinning for how I talk about and cover sports. I understand exactly why fans and readers get frustrated when it feels like something is being hidden from them, when the surface-level headline doesn’t match what’s actually happening behind it. And I’ll say it plainly: I understand some of the outcry in the Vrabel situation, if a reporter’s relationship with a coach was compromising coverage or the inner workings of a team. I think there was a real story in the Shanahan situation too, if people in power worked together to shield him from accountability. Those are stories about whether the public deserves the truth about decisions being made by people with real influence over the league.
This isn’t that. This is a family grieving the death of a two-year-old child. There’s no decision-making to hold accountable here, no institution manipulating facts to dodge blame. This isn’t about uncovering the truth at all costs. What there is, is basic human decency: giving a man and his family room to process something no family should ever have to go through, on their own terms and their own timeline. That’s not a cover-up. That’s privacy. Those are two completely different things, and treating them as the same story just because they both involve silence from the people around them misses what silence actually means in each case.
This is Ed Oliver’s story to tell, if and when he ever wants to tell it. Nobody else’s.
I don’t think this is just Bills Mafia circling the wagons for one of their own, either. From what I’ve seen, this reaction has been pretty widespread across the football world. People recognize the difference even if they can’t always articulate it: some stories the public has a real claim to. This isn’t one of them.
I also want to say something about how Josh Allen has handled this. When Josh stood up and defended Ed’s privacy, defended his family, simply by being present for his teammate, that told you a lot about who Josh is, about that locker room, and about this organization. It’s not surprising if you’re a teammate inside that building. You’re watching your brother grieve. You know it’s not the role of the media to “break the story.” But it still means something to hear it said out loud.
I don’t imagine peace comes quickly after something like this, if it ever fully does. I’m genuinely amazed Ed has found a way to keep showing up to do his job since June. All I hope, at the end of all of this, is that he and his family find whatever peace is possible. That’s the only story here that actually matters.
