As everyone knows, we are just two days from the Kentucky/Florida matchup down in the Swamp and optimism springs eternal for Joker’s Wildcats. The Gator’s actually come into this game with a couple of clouds swirling around their reptilian heads. One of course, has been the so called diminished play as Urban’s charges actually *gasp* trailed mighty Miami of Ohio after one quarter. That will be resolved on the field soon enough. The other cloud? Well, its going to take some sorting out as the arrest of Chris Rainey made a whopping 30 arrests from the UF football squad since Urbs unpacked his bags from Utah a little more than five years ago.
Of course, a lot of this has been clouded by the national media by a couple of things. First, Florida had Saint Tebow as the face of their program for the last three years and the over-coverage of Timmy overshadowed the other aspects of the program. Secondly, the Gators have won and won big, collecting two national titles in the past four seasons. Winning covers a lot of blemishes on a team. Just ask the Miami Hurricanes, the original “Thug U” who racked up national titles and rap sheets during the 80’s and 90’s. And to this day, Gator fans love to deride “the U” as “Thug U” but the fact is, the Hurricanes have had just one arrests in the last four years under Randy Shannon and that was Robert Marve who was cited for tearing a rear view mirror off a car.
To be fair, all programs have had to deal with player arrests at one point or another. Even our beloved Kentucky Wildcats During the 70’s Fran Curci and his Kentucky Wildcats reached new heights as the Cats went 10-1. With success came other problems. I found the following antidote from John Clay, who commented on how the Curci program regarded the run ins with the law.
And even in the past few years, Wildcats have found themselves on the wrong side of the law as players like Will Fidler, Jules Camara, JP Blevins, and grad assistant Matt McCutchan have found themselves on the wrong side of the law. But the number of Cat infractions are nowhere near other schools even in the SEC. So to be fair, all programs have their blemishes in this regard. But my question is … do the fans of the schools actually care about the player arrests … or do we just care about how many players the other team have arrested?
"Take former UK football coach Fran Curci. When Curci recruited questionable characters and Kentucky went 10-1 in 1977, no one cared. When the Cats started losing, people started caring about the questionable characters, especially when so many of them ended up on the police blotter. Curci was finally fired.My favorite story from that time: I had just started working at the Herald-Leader when a Kentucky player was arrested for shooting a gun at bottles in a public park. I was given the job of tracking down some school comment. This was on a Sunday. I finally reached then defensive coordinator Charlie Bailey. I explained what the police report said. Bailey replied, “You have got to be kidding me!”"
It’s a tricky question. I am an alumni of UK and I have tremendous pride in my program. But I have to admit, that for a while, I was praying for a healthy dose of “boys will be boys” punishment when John Wall was arrested for a charge last fall. Luckily, Walls arrest turned out to be something that was handled through probation and John Calipari did not have to make a hard decision concerning the fate of his stud freshman. But say Wall’s arrest would have been more serious? How would Kentucky fans react if a top 10 basketball player was suspended for a length of time or even kicked off the team due to a criminal event? I am sure most of us would applaud the decision to boot a player with criminal offenses off the team, but how would we react when the losses started mounting?
Even no nonsense coaches like Rich Brooks gave Curtis Pulley a second chance before booting the starting QB off the team. And Wildcat fans were supportive of his decision. And I love my football Wildcats with a passion, but that was not the same as Calipari having to boot a star player if the circumstances dictated. And this is where more than ever, the Florida comparison comes into play. Florida football is the Kentucky basketball to Florida fans.
To his credit, Urban Meyer is speaking out on the situation, but not nearly as harsh a tone as having the equivalent of an entire recruiting class and then some all being arrested. I would think the “enough is enough” comments should come at maybe arrest number 10 or even number 20 but here is what Urbs had to say::
"“I try to evaluate everything about our program. I’m real upset about that. After a while, enough’s enough. If there’s something that we can improve on, we’re certainly looking into that. It’s like if our graduation rate stinks then we gotta improve that. If there’s other issues in a program, that’s our job to get it better. It’s people making stupid mistakes, that’s something we gotta correct.”"
I would say that for most Gator fans I know, they are at the “mildly concerned” level. They don’t like the arrests, but they like the bad press about it even less. They are still more concerned about Kentucky or the lack of institutuinal control program currently residing in Knoxville. And for their credit, the Gators have a pretty good system for dealing with the arrests so they do not linger in the news for weeks and months. Gainesville lawyer Huntley Johnson is a veritable crinimal clearing house for the Gator’s athletic program as he has gotten most of the arrested Gators off with probation or the pleas dropped all together. Should Gator fans be wary that they have a lawyer that does all the work “pro bono” for the arrested Gators? It does seem a bit fishy on the surface, but maybe free legal aid is part of the Gator scholarship package, along with room, board, and tuition. Huntley has a picture in his office autographed by Urban, calling him “part of the team”. That just seems to be a rather glib comment on the situation.
The Gators are easy Io single out because of the sheer numbers but every school battles this problem at one time or another. And until there is a massive outcry from the boosters and alumni and a shutting off of the checkbooks, this probably will go unchecked. The NCAA does not consider a program with 7 arrests a year a “dirty program”. Neither do the fans. Unless it is a rival school that is racking up the arrests.
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