You’d think after the Vikings’ sex-cruise scandal, NFL players would be pretty wary of getting on sea craft, but evidently that’s not the case. The results from the latest NFL fishing foray are disturbing, with two players — and possibly an unknown third — either lost at sea or drowned after their boat never returned from a Saturday morning fishing trip.

(Corey Smith: Missing off the Florida coast.)

According to FOX NEWS (complete with horrific grammatical and possessive errors), a boat which left Clearwater Pass, Fla. on Saturday never returned after four men set out on a fishing expedition. Among those on board were Raiders linebacker Victor “Marquis” Cooper and Lions defensive end Corey Smith, and the unidentified fourth boater is also rumored to be an NFL player by a handful of blogs.

No matter what happens, this is a sad story. If a frantic Coast Guard search for the players finds them lost and stranded on the Florida coast, they’ll likely be traumatized from the incident … and lucky if they’re not seriously hurt. If they aren’t found, well, then the NFL will have lost two more players to the sea.

We’re less than two years removed from the death of Patriots defensive end Marquis Hill, who was felled by a jet ski accident when he didn’t wear a life vest. We’ll see if Cooper and Smith were smart enough to wear life vests on Saturday, but that might not have been enough to save them considering the fact that they’re still missing, more than 24 hours later.

(Marquis Cooper during his Tampa Bay days.)

There’s not really a moral to the story, except for the fact that professional athletes are just like the rest of us: They live, they make mistakes and they die. However, if we start seeing bizarre clauses in NFL contracts banning watercraft, now we know where it’s coming from.