College Football & Crime

Interesting article. Not sure it doesn't tell us what most people already expected or knew.

College Football and Crime

 

That the crime rate for top flight college football players is pretty much the same as the population as a whole?

 

Just win baby!

 

I think it probably comes in at lower than comparing it to the rest of the student body.

 

Interesting Tidbit from ESPN this morning...

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page...0503_tuesday_morning_quarterback&sportCat=nfl

Were "Criminals" Being Drafted? Recently, Sports Illustrated and CBS News drew notice for a cover story headlined "Criminal records in college football," coupled to a televised report. Any attempt to call the college sports establishment to account seems welcome: At big universities, football and men's basketball players are perceived as getting away with too much, and this perception might have a basis in fact. Sports Illustrated and CBS made good points, especially in showing that some college football programs recruit without even cursory background checks. But the story was also unfair and seemed deceptive. I sometimes teach college-level media studies, and I would have told Sports Illustrated and CBS News what they had was an interesting rough draft requiring significant improvement.

"Criminal records," the cover announced. The core contention was that 7 percent of players for the Division I 2010 preseason Top 25 had "criminal records."

But what Sports Illustrated and CBS News had found was that 7 percent of Top 25 college football players have been arrested. There is a central difference between being arrested and being a criminal. Arrest is an accusation; conviction makes a criminal. Sports Illustrated and CBS News glossed over this. This flies in the face of a core premise of American law: innocent until proven guilty.

That someone has been arrested does not, legally, establish anything. If a person is arrested but acquitted at trial or the charges are dropped, he or she does not have a "criminal record" except in the literal (and trivial) sense that a record exists showing charges were once filed. If arrest is followed by acquittal or dropped charges, the person has a clean slate. Any Sports Illustrated or CBS editor who was arrested, then cleared, would object vehemently to being described as having a "criminal record."

Police might arrest the wrong person. Complainants might make false accusations, and the truth comes out after the arrest. Presented with the circumstances of arrest, grand juries sometimes decline to issue indictments. Prosecutors sometimes decide not to pursue cases, especially when it isn't clear whether the right person was accused. Occasionally, judges find there was no crime. A few years ago, I was watching in court when my older brother, a federal appeals judge, led a panel that ordered the release of a woman who had been wrongly imprisoned. The judges found that no crime had occurred.

Yet the Sports Illustrated-CBS News package implies that anyone who has been arrested must be a criminal. Such guilt-by-association thinking worried the framers, who placed innocent-until-proven-guilty into American jurisprudence.

Sports Illustrated did offer one paragraph saying that for cases "in which the outcome was known," about 60 percent of football player arrests led to a conviction or a fine. The magazine did not add that this number shows that about 40 percent of the college football players who were arrested were later cleared. If a significant percentage of arrested players turned out to be innocent, that should have been given prominence.

B.J. Schecter, executive editor of SI.com, told TMQ, "We are very comfortable with our reporting. We went to great pains to be fair."

Now suppose the story had emphasized the difference between being arrested and being a criminal. Should we be shocked that 7 percent of football players from Top 25 programs have been arrested? This Department of Justice spreadsheet shows that in the most recent year, 16.2 percent of American males between ages 18 and 20, and 12.6 percent of American males between ages 21 and 24 -- these are the college football age cohorts -- have been arrested. Such data suggest that Top 25 football players are less likely to be arrested than similar-aged American males.

Poof, there goes the story. Sports Illustrated and CBS News claimed to have conducted an "unprecedented investigation." Half-truths and innuendo are not unprecedented.

 

SI was crazy to think folks could actually do a little math.

 

This will continue to happen until the NCAA starts coming in and firing coaches or suspending players for the entire year.

 

No bin laden threads?

I'm glad the sonovabitch is dead. And thanks to the young man/woman who pulled that trigger to make it possible!

I think Sept 11 this year, Patriot Day should be more of a holiday than it already is!