Is Iowa's Program Still "Lawless?"

by Oops Pow Surprise on Jun 21, 2008 6:16 PM CDT Comment 5 comments

Much consternation has been caused, and rightly so, by the spate of legal troubles the Hawkeye football team has incurred recently. The infamous list now stands at 17 players, or ostensibly 20% of the scholarship athletes on a I-A football team, since last April.

But let's take a closer look.

First, here's the P-C's list of Hawkeyes in trouble with the law since April 2007. Take a look, there's lots of names. Seems scary. Doesn't even include Satterfield and Everson, who (if the allegations are to believed) deserve to be thrown into a volcano. Is there something you notice about the list, though?

Would it help to cross-reference it with this list? I'll bet it would. That would be the Hawkeye's current roster, and there aren't many names on both.

That's the thing. If you want to talk about a bunch of criminals, you can talk about the 2006 Hawkeyes and the 2007 Hawkeyes, and there'll be no disagreement from us. Trust us on that one. But here's all the guys on both lists, and the crimes for which they were cited/arrested:

Ben Evans, walk-on WR, Underaged possession of alcohol (PAULA);
Tyler Gerstandt, walk-on TE, two PAULAs since January 2006, turned 21 last September;
Bradley Fletcher, CB, DUI;
Ricky Stanzi, QB, PAULA;
Lance Tillison, DB, DUI;
Ryan Donahue, P, PAULA;
Brandon Myers, TE, public intox and interference with official acts (in other words, ran away from a fight when po-po showed up).

And that's all. Seven guys, not 17, two of them walk-ons, and only three of them actually ever being under arrest; PAULAs are citations.

Now, there's a pretty strange thread of alcohol being a factor in every single incident for these guys that are still on the team, but that's because the real perps, the ones who fuck up sober, are already gone. And really, though DUI is stupider than hell, it doesn't automatically make the offender a bad person or one who deserves to be off the team immediately (or did you forget Bob Sanders had one in 2000? Hmmm?) Elsewhere, PAULAs are a rite of passage in Iowa City, and you can't seriously think that Ferentz needs to get rid of those guys too. This isn't Nazi Germany.

Another thing: it's worth noting that only Donahue's a starter. There are no Lawrence Phillips's on this team. There's nobody who's got a roster spot only because "he's so good."

And last, it's tempting to say, "sure, it's nice to cite those numbers now, after the seniors have graduated and the freshmen haven't shown up." And sure, this is about the time when the numbers would be lowest on a roster. But the seniors bear absolutely no relevancy to this discussion. Why? Because none of them were arrested/cited during the time frame in question. And this goes back to the question of senior leadership and providing a real framework of support and accountability on a football program. You can't do it when your seniors tell your freshmen most of them won't be around in four years. You can't do it when you only graduate nine kids in a year. You can do it by recruiting good guys with good work ethics and letting the S&C staff do their job. It's not like Bob Gallery, Bob Sanders, or Bob "Dallas" Clark were high-risk recruits, and they only turned out to be All-Americans in the Ferentz regime.

But I digress. We freely encourage people to wring hands over the recent history of misconduct in the program. We warn not to assume these sorts of things will happen again, because one look at the roster shows you that the bad guys, well, just aren't there anymore. To continue to point an accusatory finger toward the law-abiding Hawkeyes is both illogical and unfair.

0 recs | Comment 5 comments

Story-email Email Printer Print

Comments

Facts are guud.

It’s always good to have facts to back up one’s opinions. Thanks OPS for doing the leg work to support my position.

Now, can you help me put cover sheets on my TPS reports?

by SavagePoop on Jun 22, 2008 2:22 AM CDT reply actions 0 recs

PAULAs are here until the drinking age is lowered...

or we drop football. With luck, option number one is closer to reality.

It’s not even public intoxication, it’s holding an Old Style while checking out the action, during a sweep.

My father delights in telling the story of his underage drinking while a 17 year-old ensign in WWII, home on leave in Storm Lake, from his V-12 unit at Oberlin. Drinking age then was 21. Later, during Fleet Week in New York, just off the Missouri, he couldn’t buy a drink if he tried.

If you were in uniform you were served. Period. The adults knew what the 17 year-olds didn’t: people get killed in war, and that made 17 year-old ensigns men. In small town Storm Lake the concession to the local bluenoses was you had to enter the tavern from the side door, and if the sheriff dropped by, you left.

Football players are not military, and that’s not my point. My point is that the current drinking age infantilizes young men and women, which is the opposite of what it’s supposed to do.

In regard to the Satterfield/Everson circle of hell, Fake Kirk Ferentz expects to be deposed in the run-up to a very public trial, and possibly called as a witness. Drinking a few lawn-mower beers at 10 p.m. starts to look, appropriately, trivial and pleasantly diversionary.

by Bellanca on Jun 22, 2008 8:17 AM CDT reply actions 0 recs

Agreed

Freshmen are going to drink, no matter what the powers that be try to do about it. So there are really two choices: allow them to do it legally, where there’s at least the possibility of supervision (although I’m sure frat parties and binge drinking won’t totally disappear), or force them to do it where there’s no bartender to cut them off once they’re completely wasted. Naturally, the idiots in charge have chosen the latter, because they have apparently forgotten that Prohibition never worked.

by SpartanDan on Jun 22, 2008 2:05 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

Prison Colony!

Yes, we recently went through the same exercise. Lots of drinking with the occasional fight, and plenty of attempts from anti-PSU folks to pin the crimes of former players onto the program.

-- Run Up The Score http://runupthescore.wordpress.com

by Run Up The Score on Jun 22, 2008 5:33 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

Ducks the thrown rocks

Look’it, being an Alabama alumn (and a subsequent transplanted Iowan), I have nooooo stones to cast at Ferentz’s program. Ok. Maybe a few. So, we have what -to we outside observers- an endemic of sexual assualt, etc. And, those guys are gone: Good (I’m looking at you OU, Nebraska). Likewise at UA we’ve had the Elder robbery and the Jimmy Johns “Coke is It” campaign. The rest, like Iowa’s have been largely disorderlies, Fight in da’ Club (if those exist here), PAULA’s, etc.

Still, the question remains: You say in the first paragraph how enough is enough. And, like I scream at my alma mater: Cut that shit out! But, you can’t subsequently minimize the other things that are occurring. Just as I can’t say, “Aww, it’s a fight”, or “Awww, the cops on the Strip harass black guys/UA players.”

There remains, does it not, a time when alumni/fan pressure gets great enough to say, collectively, “cut the head-cases, you asshole (Ferentz or Saban)”? I say this only because, while the vast majority of offenses are the same, it is akin to viewing an empire in descendency (Iowa=Ferentz=less and less tolerance) ascendency Alabama=Saban=honeymoon). Shouldn’t the equanimity, or lack thereof, be proportionate? I promise you, Saban can have three more 7-6’s and survive and Ferentz won’t (in fact, he might be gone before the Google spiders clear this thread).

That’s all. No rock throwing…except for the ones mutually lobbed.

by Stuck in the Plains on Jun 29, 2008 8:11 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs