Commentary: At least college football crime list is topical

STATETMANT AND STRATEGIC

I’m not a big fan of list stories, but they seem to be very popular lately. I suppose that’s because they distill complicated, often arcane subjects into simplistic narratives easy to digest.
For instance, Sports Illustrated and CBS News recently completed a story in which the Pittsburgh and Penn State football programs were listed, respectively, as having the most and tied-for-fourth most-active police records among SI's 2010 preseason top 25 college football programs.
So, of course, this can be easily interpreted by readers to mean Penn State is tied for fourth in thugs who shouldn’t be in school and Pitt is at the top.
Is that an accurate appraisal? Hey, does it matter? It’s a list. How can a list be wrong? It has a nice, neat margin and numerals with bullets on the left.
I’m going to be honest with you. I was asked to write about this SI.com story. It’s not a subject that raises my hackles. When I saw it initially, I pretty much shrugged. I did read it. I found some of it interesting. Most of it was not surprising. But it’s topical.
So here’s what I think about it. In fact, I’m making my own little list. Mine doesn’t have any particular importance attached to the numerals, though. Just the way my mind works. I believe in the complexity of analog thought. Not all subjects can be digitized.
1. Lots of Ivy Leaguer editors at Sports Illustrated. It’s always been that way. The editor I reported to when I was a stringer for the magazine in the 1990s and early 2000s was from Dartmouth. A lot of the staff is that way. They love to be outraged and especially enjoy the narrative thread that "These types of kids shouldn’t be attending our colleges!" Good for them, I guess.
2. Sarcasm aside, I am glad someone has the time and the resources to examine exactly how many potentially harmful kids simply aren’t being screened before they’re recruited by major football programs. Violent crimes in high school should be red-flagged on a case-by-case basis. The story does delineate how that can be easily achieved.
3. I also applaud the examples of some kids from horrible backgrounds who have been given a chance in college football because coaches genuinely believed in their sincere desire to become better people. SI writers Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian make a point of acknowledging that this does happen and should happen.
4. College football is a violent, angry sport that attracts violent, angry kids. Not all, but some. These types of 18-year-olds have been attending America’s colleges for half a century or more since athletic grants began being distributed. This story will not change that unless the money machine that supports the sport demands that it change. Those are the TV networks who pay to telecast the games, including CBS. Somehow, I don’t see that happening.
4. If you have a problem with some of these types of kids being given free rides to college, maybe you should really have a problem with college football. Or about football in general, a sport whose long-lasting physical and emotional effects are just beginning to be understood by neurosurgeons. If you haven’t, do a search on "Dave Duerson" and read up.
5. Concerning the rankings: How can SI’s story be translated as apples to apples when police departments in different areas are so different? If anyone wants to make a case that the State College police and the district attorney prosecute athletes with the same zest as any other campus law enforcement, I’d be glad to listen.
6. How do we know how many first-degree felonies were committed in these crimes compared to simple assaults and petty thefts and other stuff that college kids often do? Were sexual assaults, armed robberies and felonious assaults given the same weight as shoplifting and smoking weed? It appears so. An arrest is an arrest. Another reason statistical stories often stink when they are distilled to lists.
7. The fallacy that Penn State was somehow this pristine land of only true and earnest and virtuous student-athletes who never got in beer brawls or stole things has always been just that. It was an image Joe Paterno carefully crafted through his East Coast newspaper believers who came in once or twice a year and were charmed by the master. Further, 20 and 30 and 40 years ago, Paterno had police reporting to him. Incidents were hushed up. Now it’s the opposite. I suspect it was never a Boy Scout troop to begin with.
So that’s my list. It doesn’t count anything. It doesn’t rank anything. It’s just one man’s opinions. And they’re all over the map, aren’t they?
It’ll never sell.