Patrick James Bates (born November 27, 1970) is a former

safety Safety is the state of being "safe", the condition of being protected from harm or other danger. Safety can also refer to risk management, the control of recognized hazards in order to achieve an acceptable level of risk. Meanings There are ...

in the

National Football League The National Football League (NFL) is a professional American football league that consists of 32 teams, divided equally between the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). The NFL is one of the ...

. He was drafted in the first round of the

1993 NFL Draft The 1993 NFL draft was the procedure by which National Football League teams selected amateur college football players. It is officially known as the NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting. The draft was held April 25–26, 1993, at the Marriot Ma ...

by the

Los Angeles Raiders The Los Angeles Raiders were a professional American football team that played in Los Angeles from 1982 to 1994 before relocating back to Oakland, California, where the team played from its inaugural 1960 season to the 1981 season and then agai ...

and later played for the

Atlanta Falcons The Atlanta Falcons are a professional American football team based in Atlanta. The Falcons compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) South division. The Falcons joined th ...

after being traded by the Raiders in exchange for the Falcons' second-round selection in the

1996 NFL Draft The 1996 NFL draft was the procedure by which National Football League teams selected amateur college football players. It is officially known as the NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting. The draft was held April 20–21, 1996, at the Paramount ...

. Out of high school, Patrick Bates signed with

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

, but transferred to

Texas A&M Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

in 1991. Soon, Bates would become one of the best players of the A&M's famed "Wrecking Crew" of the early 1990s. In 1993, Bates was a first-round draft pick by the Los Angeles Raiders. After several off-field mishaps, he never realized his full potential, which is why

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...

named him the 37th of the top 50 busts in

NFL draft The National Football League Draft, also called the NFL Draft or (officially) the Player Selection Meeting, is an annual event which serves as the league's most common source of player recruitment. Each team is given a position in the drafting o ...

history.

Personal life

As a child, Bates' mother Jean was an alcoholic, and Bates' older brother Jarvis was shot dead when he was 22 and Patrick was still a junior in high school. Bates, Jarvis, and their younger sister Sonia Nicole had spent time under foster care. During his freshman year at UCLA, Bates' mother and grandmother Isabel Singleton died within a month of each other. Recently in 2019 he “remarried “ and had another child by Whitney S. in Galveston Texas where he now resides.

References

Patrick Bates on Pro Football Reference

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

, Thomas George, May 21, 1996. 1970 births Living people Players of American football from Galveston, Texas American football safeties UCLA Bruins football players Texas A&M Aggies football players Los Angeles Raiders players Oakland Raiders players Atlanta Falcons players {{defensiveback-1970s-stub