Sports Illustrated and CBS News recently partnered for a disturbing look at criminals playing for some of the top college football programs in the United States. The numbers seemed shocking. Of the 2,837 player background checks conducted, 204 players (or 1 of every 14) had been charged or cited for a crime either prior to joining the program or while with the players’ respective college.
The worst offender of the 2010 preseason Top 25 ranked teams studied in this report was Pittsburgh. On their roster, they had 22 players charged with a crime. Second was a tie between Arkansas and Iowa with 18 each.
What launched this investigation was the work of one of the co-authors, Jeff Benedict. In the summer prior to the 2010 college football season, Benedict published a piece on SI.com detailing the number of reported crimes among all athletes—college and professional—over an eight month period. The group with the highest number of arrests was college football players.
Benedict already has an extensive background in studying criminal athletes. Thirteen years ago, along with Don Yaeger, he published the book Pros and Cons: The Criminal Who Play in the NFL. Benedict followed that with his own Out of Bounds: Inside the NBA’s Culture of Rape, Violence, and Crime. Both books detailed a strikingly high number of professional athletes with criminal backgrounds.
Those criminal professional athletes were once star college players. So it should have come to no surprise to Benedict that college athletes often cross paths with law enforcement.
Now, with the release of this Sports Illustrated/CBS News report, the question remains of how to combat the problem. Is the NCAA to blame? Or does responsibility fall to each individual college to do their due diligence in checking the background of their athletes as well as strictly punishing players who commit crimes while members of their respective teams?
If the solution lies with each college, will any actually do what should be mandated of them? Or will it merely remain a race to recruit the best of the best with little regard to a player’s background because big money is at stake?
College football is an incredibly profitable endeavor. According to the Associated Press, college football conferences profited $170 million from the 2010-11 Bowl Championship Series (BCS) games alone. Would that number have been greater with no criminals out on the playing field?
Without a doubt, the money generated by college football proves these major programs have both the resources and means to conduct background checks on players. But do they have the motive?
Without the NCAA—which is already more than burdened with investigating recruiting violations, gambling, and other infractions—pushing programs to stop the spread of criminal behavior among its athletes, there is little incentive for colleges to police their own.
College athletes have always been coddled by their teams. This is not to say punishments and suspensions are not doled out, but rarely is a player banished from a team. Perhaps if the NCAA instituted a “zero tolerance” policy towards crime, change would actually occur within college football.
Otherwise a one-time report like this by Sports Illustrated and CBS News may spotlight the problem, but come this fall and another college football season ramps up, will anyone remember it?
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