Few things can overshadow the positivity of Easter weekend in the sports world.
With the Masters, the start of baseball, the wrapping up of the regular season in the NHL and the continuation of the NBA, Easter weekend was filled with lots of great entertainment.
Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino delivers the polar opposite of the optimism that this spring has brought about in the world of athletics.
Petrino, a married man and father of four at age 51, lied about being alone when he got into a motorcycle accident two weekends ago. It turns out the woman who was involved in the crash was his mistress, 25-year-old football department employee Jessica Dorrell.
The situation at Arkansas is yet another example of how egregious major collegiate athletics can be. It’s bad enough when a student-athlete embarrasses his program off the field. The immorality becomes more significantly widespread when the individual who is supposed to provide leadership in order to properly mold young men is clearly caught red-handed.
Although I’m not suggesting that the NCAA automatically revert to paying its collegiate athletes because it would reward some of the rule-breakers themselves, it is time for Division 1 college athletics to reevaluate their priorities as a whole.
At what point will people stop pretending and masking what major collegiate athletics really are, and that it is a moneymaking business?
An example of college sports’ academic deficiencies is LSU’s Morris Claiborne, an NFL draft prospect who had three years of “college education,” scoring a 4 out of 50 on his Wonderlic Test at the NFL Combine in February. An individual is considered illiterate with a score below 10.
At this point, the “student” in student-athlete is nonexistent, as winning culture overshadows and covers up for wrongdoings and immoral actions.
Petrino was caught in the act of lying and covering up his misdeed, but one can only wonder how long his inappropriate relations would have carried on if the automobile accident had not brought them to light.
Everyone makes mistakes at some point in life, but nowadays it is nearly impossible to feel any sympathy for the countless fallen figures in college sports due to the continued negligence of basic rules. Petrino is the latest coach to get caught as Jim Tressel, Joe Paterno, John Calipari and even Missouri’s own Frank Haith and Gary Pinkel have not been fully absolved of their recent misdeeds.
A misconception exists within college sports that if you aren’t cheating you aren’t trying hard enough. Coaches do not have to succumb to this pattern, but when their peers are committing the same offenses, often times it is easier to fall into the trap of breaking the rules to win.
Until someone within the NCAA has the courage to stand up against major infractions, both from a moral and rule-based standpoint, college sports will continue to be a glorified auction of who can get the top athletes by any means possible.
Character is the course of action an individual takes when no one is watching, and in no other distinguished profession can people get away with the misconduct that currently rules NCAA sports.
It’s time to set precedence for defining what college athletics should be-a means to provide a student-athlete with a first-class education. The way Arkansas chooses to handle Bobby Petrino’s inexplicable actions will be the first step to returning college sports to what they were intended to be in the first place.