SI/CBS Report on College Football and Crime

Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict investigated the Top 25 schools and ran background checks on all the players, looking for police records and criminal activity. A 6-month investigation, an interesting read. Nice to see SI doing this kind of work, although you have to be a subscriber and/or watch the CBS portion of the report to get the whole picture.



http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/the_bonus/02/27/cfb.crime/index.html?eref=sihp

 

I want to know how the criminals in Gainesville only ended up 11th. Did they count the ones during the season?

 

They conveniently forget that a prospects juvenile records won't show up on a background check if a state has a law protecting that. Also, can colleges afford background checks on every athlete. And woe be to them in they do it only for football or basketball. They've got to do it for tennis and golf also, or someone will scream discrimination.

Also, the stats actually don't look all that bad. When the Big Lead crunched the numbers and looked at just the serious crimes (http://thebiglead.com/index.php/2011/03/02/sports-illustrated-is-overstating-claims-about-college-football-crime/) it appears that football players are right about the national average for kids of that age group.

The non-serious crimes: duis, pot possession, etc. Bet football players don't get nailed for that any more than the average male college demographic group.

 

Hondo, you took the words out of my mouth. These numbers mean nothing to me unless compared to other kids and college students in that age group. Also, I covered an athlete who I actually gained respect for after he was arrested for DUI. He was forthright, contrite, articulate, etc., etc. Adversity clearly revealed character in that case. Obviously that isn't everybody, but I hate dividing my world this easily into good guys and bad guys based on this metric.

Here is something that would be interesting to me: How does their recidivism rate compare to the general population? It could turn out that the structure of college football and college in general creates productive, mature citizens where ones would not otherwise have emerged.

 

So what's your point? The study would've indicated more players with criminal records on college rosters if those records had been publicly available. To me, this was a fairly solid attempt to quantify what has been a topic of discussion in and around college football for years. You can take the numbers to mean whatever you want, but at least now you have the numbers.

 

Honestly, if you take arrests for underage drinking, drunken bar fights, public urination -- in other words, stupid shit most of us all did when we were were in college - and put them in a separate category, then we'd have some true analysis here because we could see how many real crimes these guys have committed.

If you want to tell me Boise State has 18 guys who have been arrested for selling drugs, sexually assaulting women (or men for that matter), robbing and stealing, killing animals --- OK, that is a story.

But if Boise State has 16 guys who have been arrested for minor acohol-related offenses, most of which were dropped to summary cases or less, well, and two guys who were arrested for real crimes, well, who gives a shit?

 

As a Pennsylvaina native, can I say I was proud to see Pitt and Penn State so high?

 

There are plenty of pretenders in the general student body, as well.

Again, the structure of sports might actually turn fuck-ups into student-athletes. To me, it's tough to decide which is which at age 18.

 

The only way this could paint an accurate picture is if you had juvenile records.

 

Really?

Again, what kind of crimes are relevant here?

Do we give a shit that some kid got a citation for underage drinking?

 

SI and CBS spent all that money, time, and resources to find out that 7 percent of the athletes involved in the study had criminal backgrounds? Wow. Earth-shattering news.

That number is actually stunningly low compared to what I expected.