Coach Saban is wrong on this issue. If a guy abuses women we don't need him in our league period.
Link: Proposal to Restrict SEC Transfers with 'Serious Misconduct' Could be Tabled
- Thread starter RTR91
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I'm not sure I want the SEC having more power to tell what athlete can go to what school.
I abhor thugs - and frankly, I disagree with Saban on this issue almost 100% - but the schools should determine if a player is ethically / morally allowed to play, not the conference.
I abhor thugs - and frankly, I disagree with Saban on this issue almost 100% - but the schools should determine if a player is ethically / morally allowed to play, not the conference.
I'm not sure you got the point...
Now, I think most of us were unhappy with Taylor coming to Alabama. And, we know this gave this issue momentum. However, that's one player, one single situation. Personally, I didn't like him coming, but the idea that his coming to Alabama somehow created a catastrophe is illogical. The justice system saw fit to let him be a part of the general public, what he did or didn't do had nothing to do with Alabama football and likely would have occurred either way, he got in trouble, he got kicked off, end of story.
If you look over the vague SEC guidelines for this rule, you see why it's a concern. Anyone who thinks this somehow "solves" a problem either doesn't get the depth of what actually goes on, or didn't look at the ambiguous rule.
A: My brother got charged with a serious crime once, for a verbal threat. Never laid a hand on his wife, said something stupid, admitted it and he ended up in jail. There was no abuse, and this is a bit like a situation earlier with an Alabama player (which some were happy to throw under the bus). These situations are not all the same and you can't treat them like they are with a rule.
B: Colleges are actually quite lax when it comes to admitting convicted criminals, heck even our criminal justice system likes to hide past indiscretions via sealing juvenile records. Add this to the fact that you actually have to get kicked off a team for any of this to matter and you get how it does nothing meaningful to control player behavior. This system polices one set of actions one way, it sounds good, but in reality it's as likely to keep a Mettengerger off campus than it is to keep a Taylor.
C: This adds to the SEC only rules that go against what the other conferences are doing. No players under MLB contract, signing limit, this rule. Individually you can say oh, this is why and this makes sense, but as a whole it becomes ridiculous. I mean if you want to curb bad behavior, if you want to get these bad seeds off the team, wouldn't you exempt any violators from counting against the signing limit? Wouldn't you say ok, if you kick anyone off for doing ___ he doesn't count against the limit? Oh wait, the SEC doesn't really care about that, they're just trying to save face.
That's my main problem with this. It's a poorly implemented rule, that dictated to teams in an insufficient and unfair manner what players they can have on their teams. As one article pointed out, this wouldn't have applied to Cam Newton, it wouldn't have even applied to Winston! So if you can have someone, who puts bruises on women and he's still playing, what the heck good is this rule? While I don't know if the SEC should be policing player behavior at all, this doesn't do it anyway... it's just another obstacle.
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My opinion on the rule is based on the fact individual schools and coaches can't be trusted to do the right thing. Some like to take jabs at the barn and Georgia when they take unsavory players and make excuses when we do the same. The SEC has had a reputation for taking such players for a reason. It's time to clean up our act. Maybe I'm naive but I believe teams can win by doing things the right way, not by compromising or looking the other way. The SEC is in a leadership position in college athletics and needs to work other leagues to follow the example.
Or, the propaganda machines run full tilt when it comes to the SEC, they get the SEC to step out on a limb and then you know the rest... see the signing limit.
Edit: I would view this rule differently if I felt it wasn't so arbitrary and might actually deal with the issue across all of football vs. handcuffing the SEC. But, we talk about college athletics and Winston was given awards, we pretend this will help, but Aaron Hernandez never had meaningful punishment at Florida, despite breaking someone's jaw in an overt violent assault. It's nice to imagine that Taylor is the problem, and that situation was bad, yes but consider the inverse, that Saban is made to compete against rapists and violent thugs and he has to do the whole choir boy routine? Sure, he went too far and he made a mistake, but if you think this fixes anything at all you're naive.
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I seriously doubt it. The attitude of the courts has been for years that the NCAA is a private organization, free to make its own rules, and this principle extends to the conferences, as well. Membership in a conference is voluntary. Any school which doesn't like a rule can get out. The courts are not going to meddle in internal affairs...
Aaron Hernandez, Jameis Winston nor the signing limit have anything to do with this rule. Somebody has to do what's right for the sport and young people, why not us?
Nick Saban would say giving some of these guys a second chance is doing what's right for young people.
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That's my point. This rule doesn't help anything at all. The real problem, the real issue, is looking the other way while players do terrible things. How does this address this in the least? Do what's right? We know what's right, and this doesn't touch that...
Let's consider what the core of the problem is, which ultimately is a societal problem. How many PSU fans boycotted Penn State after what happened? Not many if at all, but they cheered Joe Paterno didn't they? How many FSU fans boycotted FSU after what happened? Same.
That's the core of the problem and I am disgusted by it, I do find it revolting. Now, Nick Saban was accused of "winning at all costs", but that doesn't ring true does it? I mean the counter to signing Taylor was always that Nick Saban could easily have recruited other players, so how can one argue that was what happened here? However, with covering up for Sandusky, with covering up for Winston, we know what that was, there's no doubt. That's sickness, that's what's wrong.
Now, as I said before and I'll keep repeating, I think Nick Saban screwed up with Taylor, I think he went a little too far, to apparently try to give a guy a second chance. I don't think he'd have gone that far again, but then again I'm not privy to what he was told, what information was given to him, so I can't fully judge. I just know that's not the problem, that's not what's wrong. Who covered up for Taylor? I'd have been sickened to have found out months later that Taylor had assaulted a women and it was covered up for the sake of the football program, but it wasn't, no one covered up for him, no one hid his actions, no one excused his actions, he was promptly kicked off the team. That was handled properly, was it not? Nothing Alabama did helped Taylor continue to harm people, and that's relevant.
So, with this rule, the SEC doesn't actually set any standards for behavior, they don't. All they did, was set this weird arbitrary parameter, which says if you get kicked off for a specific crime, you can't play football in the SEC. That sounds good, sure, but it fixes nothing and it creates another problem.
Now, I thought it over and tried to consider what might actually address the issue. I thought perhaps an SEC committee to review all cases in which a player was kicked off the team, might make sense. That way, the facts as they are known (not merely the crime they are charged with) would be the determining factor. This way they can determine logically, if the player is a threat to others or if his actions were so bad he's nonredeemable. That's not this though, but really... if you really wanted to do something which is "right for the sport and young people", you could have an NCAA wide rule which strictly held universities accountable for their player's actions if they either covered up for them, or the players themselves were not held accountable.
What we have is in my mind almost, well perhaps it is, worse than doing nothing. Because it doesn't encourage universities to better police their players at all, if anything it does the inverse.
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Alabama is not the only place in the world to get a second chance. Why do people around here not consider Jr. college the second chance, it is in my book?
And after JUCO where does the player go?
Why couldn't a SEC school sign a player that goes to JUCO and turn things around?
Please note I'm not saying Saban is right or not. I'm just saying what he would say in response to some of the comments made by folks.
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So, why allow them to go to JUCO at all? I mean, I'm not here to defend signing Taylor, but if we're going to say you should have no university options after JUCO, why even let them do that?
I honestly believe Coach had the best of intentions. He wanted to help that young man, perhaps thinking he could reach him when nobody else could. That said, doing what is right means taking into consideration the women on campus, other players and the community as a whole.
Why does football have to be part of the equation? Go to school, get a degree and live your life like the rest of us. Not all these thugs deserve a second chance at FBS which really means a second shot at the NFL. Some times the second chance is just a chance to get your life straight without jail time. Football is not a requirement.
The problem is judging who deserves a second chance and who doesn't. Domestic violence isn't as cut and dry as some people think. It could be as simple as a loud noise complaint that the police get called. There are numerous states in the country that at any hint of domestic violence that the male has to be relocated and that in itself has his name on an official police report. At any big college the media sharks smell blood and write stories that reach and sometimes can influence an institutions decision making. I'm not saying this is always the case, or that every male involved is not a thug either. I'm just saying that it should be a case by case basis and it probably should be up to the sec to decide with the university instead of closing the door completely like the paper is worded. Because a university can totally ruin a person's life if they make a decision on a case because they jumped the gun on a decision. Now if it is obvious and physical violence was involved without self defense then that is an entirely different story all together.
And not all of them are actually thugs, and that's part of the equation. If thug=equals ever being arrested... well there's a lot of thugs wearing suits and ties, eh? I don't think Taylor deserved a second chance at Alabama, however, I can understand why Nick Saban would have wanted to try. It's not the huge crime some people are making it out to be, at my first job, I worked with people on work release. Was that some huge crime on the part of my employer? Or was it part of trying to get them on a path to being productive members of society? If their skill is football, taking that away from them could mean a life of crime.
I do think there's a problem in college football, but it isn't really signing players who have been kicked off teams, who have been turned over to the authorities, who have graduated from JUCO.
Look at Joe Mixon, he punches a female student, and doesn't even get kicked out. He gets suspended. That is far, far worse than signing Taylor in my mind. But, that's not even the real problem, the real problem was what has gone on at places like FSU and PSU. Honestly, I think some people's frustration with the really bad stuff, with the schools that hide crimes, that refuse to punish players at all, are spilling over.
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