AJC > Sports > Blog > Archives > 2008 > February > 28
Thursday, February 28, 2008
How should college football handle bad behavior?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It is all too predictable.
The football season ends. The structure of spring practice has yet to begin.
The police blotter for college football players starts. And the bad behavior ranges from DUI, to bar fights, to the always popular and vague “violation of team rules.”
And there is frustration everywhere.
Fans and alumni get upset. Not only does this behavior have the potential to hurt their favorite team, but it also embarrasses their schools. The adults just don’t understand why, given the rare opportunity to play college football, the young men would risk losing it for one minute.
Fans of other schools get in their shots, sending doctored pictures around the internet making fun of the player or coach of the school hit by the trouble. They do this fully knowing that their time is coming.
The media, and I’m certainly guilty of this, start drawing lines in the sand. This school/coach is soft on crime. This punishment is not enough. Why don’t you just kick this guy off the team and be done with it? Why don’t you just put your foot down and say: “Okay, the next guy who steps over this line gets a one-way bus ticket home?” That will show them.
Here’s why it’s just not that simple. While the fans the media see a freshman left tackle or a sophomore running back who just violated team rules and embarrassed himself and the program, the coaches and the school see somebody’s child. At some point in the recruitment of that player, a coach sat in a living room and promised a parent or a guardian that their child would be treated fairly both on the field and off.
As tempting as it might be, you can’t use somebody else’s child in an attempt scare 100 other athletes into toeing the line.
Now I’m not naïve. There comes a point where the only way one of these guys is ever going to “get it” is to let him go so that he can start over. There comes a point where the persistent violation of rules by one or two individuals hurts the entire team. Then the head coach has to bring the hammer down.
I also know that these decisions become real complicated when it is a player who can help a program win. If a coach is making $2-3 million a year, kicking a player off the team has to give him pause. If a coach has one system of justice for star players and another for guys who sit on the bench he should be criticized. He should also be ashamed.
But remember this. All of us, the media included, have created this system that starts holding these guys up to public scrutiny and praise before they are old enough to shave. We have created a system where high school children are having signing day press conferences on ESPN. Most—the vast majority in fact—have the maturity to handle it. Some don’t.
I’m not making excuses for bad behavior. I’m just saying that dealing with that behavior is not as simple as we would like for it to be.
If you have some ideas on the subject, I’d love to hear them.
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