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Corey Ballentine’s Father Rips Mike Francesa After Host Says Shooting a Bad Look for Giants
Giants draft pick Corey Ballentine's father ripped into New York radio host Mike Francesa after he said Ballentine being shot hours after he was selected in the sixth round reflected poorly on the franchise.
"This is the kid that that guy [Francesa] wished he had as his son," Ballentine’s dad, Karl Vaughn, told the New York Post.
Ballentine, a cornerback out of Washburn University, suffered a "non-life threatening" gunshot wound in an off-campus shooting in Topeka, Kan., early Sunday morning. Bellentine's friend and Washburn junior defensive back Dwane Simmons was killed in the shooting. Simmons was 23.
But Francesa criticized the incident as another bad look for the Giants.
"When you finish your draft and stress how you went out of your way to take the right kind of guys, guys that you want on the team, guys that are going to be great character guys and you stress that as strongly as the Giants did, it looks pretty bad when one of them gets shot on a Saturday night," Francesa said, the WFAN host said Monday morning in a broadcast on his personal app. "It does not look good. It’s just more of the same for the Giants, who just can’t get out of their own way, no matter what they say."
Vaughn said this was unfair, noting the shooting took place two blocks from his home and that "It was just wrong place, wrong time." He called it "senseless violence."
"My son is a grown man. He can go out and celebrate a little bit. Who doesn’t go and celebrate with their friends?"
"I tell you what. You can pick up every stone and every rock on the ground, and you won’t find a smidge of dirt tied to that boy," Vaughn said.
Fellow WFAN hosts Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti were also critical of Francesa’s comments on Ballentine. Francesa called in to their “Boomer & Gio” show on Tuesday morning to rebut their critiques, a call that was highly contentious, according to the Post.
