In the midst of the slightly over-hyped run-up to the inevitable Kobe-Lebron NBA Finals over the last couple of weeks you may have missed a news item about a cornerback at UF getting arrested.
My immediate reaction to this was obviously: ‘HA! Stupid, cheating Gators’.
My second reaction was ‘wow, the Gainesville police really like to tase people’.
But the more I stewed on this (and I stewed, oh believe me I stewed), I started to think about the correlation between championship caliber teams and illegal activities.
When I think about it, I struggle to find any consistent championship contending team that didn’t have run-ins with the law and/or the NCAA. What does that tell us?
Maybe you have to have players get in trouble to dream of a college football dynasty.
Look at the teams that have been in the championship hunt for a sustained period:
2000’s
- Florida Gators – Sure, Urban Meyer has returned Alachua County to the national championship race as well as bringing Jesus Christ’s younger brother Tim to town, but he has also brought in players that have now been arrested 23 times. In their defense , if I were surrounded by that many people with mullets and wearing jorts I would be tempted to commit a felony or two myself
- USC Trojans – Other than that whole ‘agents-buying-Reggie-Bush’s-parents-a-house’ thing the USC program has been remarkably clean for a top-tier program. Oh wait, Mark Sanchez got arrested. And Rey Maualuga got arrested. And All Pac-10 DT Fili Moala got arrested. And some recruit before he even got on campus got arrested. How have we not heard more about this? I blame that damn east-coast media bias.
- Texas Longhorns – While his teams have regularly fallen short of the national championship game (other than when VY led them), off the field the Longhorns have tried their best to get themselves in the conversation. However, single digit incidents which barely make the backpage of the sports section outside of the Lone Star state? Just like on the field, it seem like Mack Brown can’t quite keep up with the big boys.
- Oklahoma Sooners – A return to national relevance also aligned with a return to off-the-field problems. I wish I could mock the Sooners. But after all of their BCS game problems, pointing out that half of their team received illegal benefits from local boosters (estimated), might be too much for Turner to handle. Plus, after all of the jokes I have made regarding car dealers and/or Rhett Bomar and/or Adrian Peterson, I should be a little more thankful for the Sooner problems.
- OSU Buckeyes – Yes, there have been arrests and academic problems for OSU players, which wouldn’t be that remarkable. What is remarkable is that they have played in 3 national title games since 2000 and won only one of those, when they were led by future one-man crime spree Maurice Clarett. Clarett looks at those 23 arrests in Gainesville and laughs. 23 arrests? That is a slow month for him.
1990’s
- FSU Seminoles – Wish I could pretend that FSU was the exception that proved the rule, but I still remember the whole ‘Free Shoes University’ thing my freshman year (i.e. the 1993 National Championship year). There was also when we kicked Randy Moss off the team for smoking the chronic, kicked Laveranues Coles off the team and suspended Peter Warrick for getting a 90% discount at Dillard’s and the time I watched Chris Weinke try to beat up a guy that was about 5’3” at Yianni’s before turning on a friend of mine who called him on it. Of course, as penance we had to suffer through the Jeff Bowden and Chris Rix era, two Gator National titles but this year produced one of the all-time, all-around great guys in college football history, so I think our karmic slates are clean.
- Nebraska Cornhuskers – While the Cornhuskers may have had a cleaner program than a lot of National championship teams, they won their first title in 20 some years thanks to Lawrence Phillips. Lawrence was so talented he reminded a lot of people of O.J. Simpson. Unfortunately, that was both on and off the field.
1980’s – 1990’s
- Miami Cornhuskers – It isn’t really a question of which Canes got in trouble. It is more of a question of which players were only convicted of misdemeanors – you know the goody-goodys. Remember this is a team that included Ray Lewis, who may have killed a man in a fight at the Super Bowl in 2000 when things escalated rather quickly. I think he him in the chest with a trident.
1980’s
- Oklahoma Sooners – The grandfather of the troubled program is Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma Sooners. Pick a problem and the Sooners had it. Steroids? See: Bosworth, Brian. Coaches cheating? Read Bootlegger’s Boy by Barry Switzer. Out of control players? Charles Thompson was dealing cocaine out of the football dorm! Wow, you know all of those old sports writers are right. Players today just don’t have the dedication that they used to.
It is sort of sad that when you look back over the last 20-30 years, it is almost a pre-requisite that a team with aspirations of being a consistent national championship contender needs run-ins with the law. Yet, that doesn’t change the inevitable response when another gets in trouble.
When news comes out of another college football player getting arrested, you can always expect a holier-than-thou soapbox article from some writer complaining about out-of-control players. But it is pretty obvious that if you take a step back, players getting in trouble are not something new to the game.
Look, I am not condoning illegal activities, but enough with all the hand-wringing. Only the myopic, naïve or stupid is surprised at this point when football players get in trouble.
Think about football players. To succeed in this game, you have to be a little unhinged. You have to be able to channel aggression toward others and an ability to turn off any self-preservation thoughts to be a great football player. Add that to being the center of attention everywhere you go, the freedom of being on your own for the first time and some alcohol-based fuel and it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are regularly players getting in trouble.
While players have always got in trouble, have things changed? Are more players getting in trouble today than they used to? Probably not.
In my mind, there are really two changes to the game that only make it appear that there are more kids getting arrested:
1 – Media – With the internet, blogosphere, cable television and sports radio; any incident is going to get completely blown out of proportion (see: career of Alex Rodriguez). Twenty years ago, a bar fight involving a football player might make the local papers. Now it will be a headline on espn.com and 43 bloggers will chime in with a comment in the span of a couple of hours (NOTE: I don’t include myself here. I am way too lazy to comment in less than 24 hours). Then if that player is a big enough name we will get sports radio rants, editorials in the paper and speeches on Around The Horn. Whether something is news or not, if you hear about it incessantly for a day or two you start to think it is news.
2 – Parity – While media members complaining about the role of the media is nothing new (and getting as commonplace as football players getting arrested), I think a less discussed and equally important reason for the seeming rise in college football players getting in trouble is the increased parity in college football. Look at that list again. For the most part in the 1980’s and 1990’s there were really only a couple teams that year-in and year-out were always national title contenders. Now, you could say there are 7 or 8 teams, at least, that have been in the conversation each year since Y2k. With more teams having a (perceived) shot at the national title, there are more players that are worthy of becoming a news story when they get in trouble.
Would anyone have cared if a USC player got arrested in 1997 when they went 6-5?
So, while you might have expected that I would take this opportunity to rip Urban Meyer for bringing a win-at-all costs attitude to Gainesville that looks the other way when his players get in trouble in search of more wins. I am not.
I know, I am shocked too.
It comes with the territory. To win titles, you need some players that will get in trouble. That is the deal with the devil that every team has to make to try and hold up that Crystal ball.
Because if you don’t make that deal, you are destined to just be a run-of-the-mill, average team. Maybe you have an occasional year where you do well but for the most part will never field a consistent winner.
In other words, you will be Notre Dame.
