It’s a question all of America has been asking for going on 12 years now. What would could possibly make a promising young man living a good life of wealth, fame, and adulation break so bad?

Ever since news broke that Aaron Hernandez was suspected in the murder of his friend Odin Lloyd, the world has been grasping for an answer. And the mystery only deepened when Hernandez took his own life in prison in April of 2017. Ironically – or intentionally – enough, on the very day so many of his former teammates were traveling to the White House to celebrate their victory in Super Bowl LI. 

There have been many hypotheses. It was his upbringing in a bad neighborhood in Bristol, CT. He got involved in gangs and never put that life behind him. It was mental illness. Perhaps brought on by CTE. The Apple+ series The Dynasty did everything it could to make Bill Belichick look like an unindicted conspirator. Stopping just this side of putting him at the crime scene, holding Lloyd down while Hernandez pulled the trigger. 

But thanks to the series finale of FX’s American Sports Story, we may have finally cracked this case. According to this, the guilty party is Kirk Minihane. And his partner in crime, his former WEEI cohost Gerry Callahan:

Giphy Images.

This is clearly some of Ryan Murphy’s finest work. Not since that time on Glee when New Directions was headed to Regionals only to have Mercedes come down with food poisoning and so Mr. Schuster had to have Tina and Quinn fill in for her has he ever been so tuned in to the zeitgeist. 

I mean, it’s all here. The performances are so dead-nuts accurate you find yourself wondering how Murphy got Kirk and Callahan to play themselves. The Masshole accents are the finest we’ve heard since Martin Sheen kept saying “miycrow-prahcessahs” in The Departed. And as anyone who’s every worked at WEEI (my hand is up on that one) can tell you, there’s not an hour of the day that the station isn’t on the PA system in all the prisons like The Marriage of Figaro after Andy Dufresne locked himself in Warden Norton’s office. Once Kirk and Gerry cracked those tight end/wide receiver jokes, they’d pretty much made a noose out of those bed sheets and stuck Ol’ Murdnandez’ head through the hole. 

The thing is, this dazzlingly entertaining piece of True Crime drama only gets more compelling when viewed with a live audience:

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And the fact the final involves Hernandez, obviously triggered by a morning drive sports so that he does Spice and ends his life:

… is the most climactic finale since Charlton Heston came upon the Statue of Liberty on the beach. It makes you wonder why producer Linda Pizzuti and her Boston Globe employee who wrote so glowingly about ASS wouldn’t come on to discuss what a tour de force this was:

I guess the simplest explanation is they don’t want to talk to someone who bullied a convicted murderer into taking the coward’s way out in his jail cell. Anyway, it looks like we’ve got Minihane involved in solving yet another True Crime mystery. It’s just that this time, it’s as the killer.