In the National Spotlight

Peter E.

February 26, 2010 - 8:51 PM

Unless it's signing day for new recruits, your football program usually wants to keep a low profile during the off season. This has not been the case recently with the Ducks football team. We've got a record building that trumps the one on the field: violations of team rules, theft, assault, domestic abuse, and DUI. It sure makes me proud that the nation sees my fellow Ducks representing our school so well.

This is an embarrassment. These players are faced with tremendous expectations to win, play with pain, practice and train every day, and constantly perform under media scrutiny. However, that doesn't mean one's outlet for stress or frustration is beating women or DUI. Now granted some of these cases are still pending, but one should not even put themselves in a position to be scrutinized to begin with.

Eugene is a fairly sleepy town when it comes to problems with the law, so this recent string of arrests has been quite a rude awakening to the community. As my friend Ted commented, "these are violent crimes." Beating women, assault, and driving a car, a deadly weapon, drunk. Ted, an avid cyclist, put it in perspective, "This is a threat to the community. As a cyclist, it's dangerous to have people driving drunk because he could have easily hit someone, like me. They should take away his scholarship and get bike lights for the entire student body with the money they'd save."

Ted's assessment may be radical, but it does raise some interesting dilemmas with scholarship athletics. Eugene is a tight community, and, frankly, there's no need to drive in this town. In fact, many students don't own cars and bike everywhere (myself included). However, many students, as Ted suggested, do not own bike lights, and that's dangerous when biking at night (especially if idiots are driving drunk). Thus, there's a valid argument for reprioritizing allocation of university monies. If the University was to revoke scholarships for athletes that could not be decent members of the community or University, we'd easily have a pot of several hundred thousand dollars right now. Just think of the projects, scholarships to deserving individuals, and/or deferred upgrades to this campus could be realized! Unfortunately, this will most likely not happen because UO's budget and the UO Athletics budgets are separate entities. The UO's Athletic program is one of the few self-sufficient NCAA athletic departments (which is not entirely bad), but it would be nice to see more reciprocity between athletics and academics. To reiterate concerns I've emphasized, this is just another reason for donors to invest more in academics and student life.

As I've discussed before, athletic scholarships are a great way to allow many students to gain higher education that would not normally have the opportunity. Furthermore, it's an unfortunate business that college athletics bring in big money that exciting research or quality academics often can't match. Thus, the U of O works to find a balance between the two. As a student though, it's becoming increasingly difficult to accept that balance when the football team is rewarded with exclusive, beautiful facilities to train and study when they can't achieve the simplest task of being decent human beings.

I condemn their actions without question, but I also want to see them redeem themselves and represent this school positively. Chip Kelly is again faced with a difficult scenario dealing with discipline. I feel for him because it is not his job to babysit players on the weekends, they are [immature] grown men. However, he can instill values and life lessons that prevent this behavior in the first place. Nonetheless, I have learned through my experiences in Inside-Out (a class I took with inmates in the Oregon State Penitentiary) that people deserve a second chance. That said, there should be high expectations and a quick learning curve established from the outset so this behavior is minimized and remedied immediately.

The University is a pristine utopia of sorts with intellectual academia, diverse population, peaceful people, and beautiful grounds; let's maintain that dynamic. Absent from that equation is violence 359 days of the year (only 6 Saturday afternoons a year we permit it in Autzen Stadium). At the very least, let's keep the violence between the hash marks, and I suppose I should also specify within the 60 minutes of play (i.e. LeGarrette Blount).