Posted by bambi2godzilla on 2/28/2008, 3:25 pm
63.249.102.18
The SEC also has a well-deserved rep for the most NCAA regulation unabiding conference in the United States. Now it looks like the SEC is going for the gold in another category.
Are coaches running teams or rehab units?
Ray Melick
The Birmingham News
Thursday, February 28, 2008
It's not just at the University of Alabama.
But then, if you're a sports fan, you knew that.
You knew Nick Saban's emotional rant Tuesday would resonate at Tennessee and LSU, Kansas State and Iowa, Washington and any other school where football coaches are trying to figure out how to limit players' pictures to game action shots instead of police mug shot.
It's not like athletes aren't warned. The litany of services Saban rattled off that Alabama provides its players - "peer intervention, sports psychologists, people who come in and talk about drugs and alcohol and how to treat members of the opposite sex" - is repeated on just about every campus in Division I. Add that to the Southeastern Conference's mandated "MVP" (Mentors in Violence Prevention) program and it makes the average Division I athletic department sound more like a rehab and recovery unit than a sports program.
And still the problems continue.
I've heard those who defend the Tide suggest the Tuscaloosa police targets blacks. But the Tuscaloosa police incident report for The Strip for 2007 lists 581 total arrests, 91 percent white and 8 percent black, according to information from the Tuscaloosa Police Department Media Office.
So clearly, something isn't connecting with some of these athletes. Saban talks about the "system" failing, and certainly the coaches who court and flatter them and do all they can to persuade these kids to choose their team have an obligation to look out for them once they're on campus.
On the other hand, could it be that these kids are such objects of infatuation while in high school, they then come to college feeling the school is fortunate to have them, not the other way around?
How else do you explain the apparent lack of respect at least some of Alabama's football players seem to have for Saban, who went on this same tirade in a press conference last November about bad behavior being unacceptable, only to have to say it again Tuesday? How else do you explain how a player can go out and put himself in the position to be arrested just days after seeing a teammate arrested, no doubt with Saban's last stern warning still ringing in his ears?
Why doesn't the message get through? Why do these athletes continue to risk throwing away the opportunity they've been given?
Next week, the SEC athletics directors will meet and discuss this black eye the league's reputation is getting from so many arrests and suspensions.
"The conference," said SEC Commissioner Mike Slive, "is going to encourage discussion about these issues and maybe develop a `best practices' for schools ... And if our ADs want us to do things that traditionally we haven't, if our league says there is a positive role we can play and expand what we're doing now, we certainly want to do that."
There is a clear conflict of interest at work when a head coach whose multimillion dollar salary that depends on certain players being on the field is also charged with discipline of those players. It has gotten to the point that such discipline needs to be taken over by someone else, be it the athletic department, the university, or a conference-wide policy that takes it out of the coaches' hands.
Clearly, coaches are saying the right things.
Unfortunately, not enough of their players seem to be listening.
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