On to the Goal

Perception is reality, but to perceive something, you actually have to observe it. And often in life, we simply choose not to observe. We are content to stroll down our safe, tree-lined streets, blissfully unaware of the fact that somewhere just across town someone is smoking crack or getting robbed at gunpoint. (If you live in Washington D.C., these things are actually occurring in the alley behind your house.) We make our own perception and thus our own reality.

The defending champs return 11 starters on defense and perhaps the greatest college football player ever at quarterback. Life is good for the Florida Gators. Just so long as we don’t think about those instances in which it’s not so good.

As a fan, my initial reaction to Florida being labeled the new “Thug U” for having 23 players arrested in Urban Meyer’s four-year tenure was to recoil in defense. “Other schools have plenty of guys arrested! We’re talking about young males here, things are going to happen! Florida has had perhaps hundreds of players during that time span, and 23 guys are a small fraction of a largely law-abiding team!”

All those things are true. And it’s natural that we reach for them when faced with unwelcome news. We love the Gators and the University of Florida, and we don’t want their good names to be sullied by a handful of lowlifes. But that doesn’t mean we can declare “case closed,” dismiss the article and launch a few insults at Tennessee just for good measure. We should not ignore the issue as if it doesn’t exist.

We might not think so, or at least tell ourselves we don’t, but the media thinks otherwise. A few years ago, The Seattle Times ran an investigative series on the 2000 Washington Huskies – another team with a great defense and a bruising option quarterback. Husky fans were outraged and called the series unfair, and I can’t say I necessarily blame them. But whether the series was “fair” is irrelevant at this point. It happened and the school’s reputation suffered somewhat. It could happen again to Florida.

So with that in mind, it would help to understand what we’re really talking about here. I couldn’t find a comprehensive list of the 23 arrests, so working from memory and a number of message board leads, I set out to document as many of the arrests as I could. A few hours of Googling yielded 14.

I’m probably forgetting some obvious ones, and I couldn’t find links for some stuff that I seem to remember happening. I haven’t named any of those “unconfirmed” cases here, nor did I include anything that happened before or after a player was enrolled. This is a list only of the arrests and/or charges (post-Meyer) that I could substantiate with an actual media report. I’ve sorted them by level of severity as judged by, well, me. All suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty, etc., etc., allegedly. Any instance in which I could confirm the charges were dropped is denoted by an asterisk.

C’mon, it’s college – generally harmless stuff

• John Curits – Probation violation stemming from an alcohol charge.
• Dorian Munroe – Illegally removing a boot from his car. Stupid, yes, but more funny than anything.
• Torrey Davis – Of his many alleged problems, driving with a suspended license wasn’t all that bad.
• Tony Joiner* – The underlying charge sounded serious, but considering the fairly humorous “misunderstanding” defense and subsequent dismissal, no reason to fret.
• Brandon James – Buying weed off an undercover cop. Yes, I’m including this here, because if you smoke weed (which many college kids do) you often have to buy it. James, well, he chose… poorly when it came to dealers.

Boys bein’ boys, not condoning it, not losing our shit over it

• Dustin Doe* – Fightin’. Moving on…
• Jermaine Cunningham – Sub-chuckin’. Abusing service industry employees is not funny if you’ve ever worked in the service industry. Except when it is. But seriously, tip your waiters.

He said, she said and a whole lotta nothing

• Carl Johnson* – Violating a restraining order. Frightening but completely unsubstantiated back-story.

Troubling crimes, but not depraved or wanton

• Marquis Hannah – Felony burglary and misdemeanor assault in what sounded more like a crime of passion than cold, calculated criminality.
• Cam Newton – Stealing a laptop. And not very well.

Really, really terrible things

• Jacques Rickerson – Beating up his girlfriend. Totally unacceptable.
• Jamar Hornsby – Credit card fraud. Of a deceased woman. Who was the girlfriend of a teammate. Later, brass knucles. Giggity.
• Ronnie Wilson – Shootin’ an AK-47 behind Gator City, detailed in terrifying audio.
• Avery Atkins – Beating up his girlfriend led to a sad, tragic spiral that led to his untimely demise.

Of those 14, half are merely things that college-aged males do. None of it is to be condoned, mind you, but it’s inside the realm of mistakes that good, decent people can make before their brain is fully formed. I’m also going to throw out the Johnson matter, because of it’s high bullshit quotient and the fact that there’s no way to ever really know what actually happened. But that still leaves a minimum of six serious crimes, four of which can be accurately described as “totally messed up” offenses. Or worse. That’s an average of one per year. And my tally is missing nine arrests.

For the record, all six players who were accused of serious misconduct are no longer on the team. Most were quickly kicked off and only Newton seemed to have left of his own volition. Yes, Ron “Don’t call me Ronnie” Wilson was back last year, briefly, but is thankfully off the team once more.

In that respect, this is not Switzer’s Oklahoma or Miami circa 1980-something, as Dave Hyde suggested. I certainly don’t think it’s fair to accuse Urban Meyer of “running a loose ship.” Minor transgressions are punished, though admittedly sometimes a bit too lightly. Major issues are met with much more serious consequences, but not necessarily automatic termination. Think of it as “shades of gray” rather than “black and white.” Page two of this Sports Illustrated article by Andy Staples does a fantastic job of explaining Meyer’s philosophy on the matter, particularly his differing approach in dealing with Atkins and Marty Johhnson when he was at Utah. (I agree with many of Staples’ points, by the way, particularly the one about the “one percent of one percent” canard.)

It is fair, however, to point out that every one of those six players was either a Meyer recruit or, in Hannah’s case, a walk-on whose entire run with the team was during Meyer’s tenure. These are his guys. And Hyde is right when he says that the frequency of their heinous behavior runs the risk of damaging Meyer’s reputation and, worse, that of the team and university. A few bad apples, yes, but averaging one “totally messed up” incident a year is not good for business. Just. Not. Good.

So what’s the impact of all this? In the short term, probably not much. Our rivals will have some fun at our expense, newspaper columnists will moralize and, worst-case-scenario, Outside The Lines will launch an “OMG the horror!” investigative piece that reveals exactly zero new facts. (I don’t see anything in these arrests that the NCAA could latch onto.) But then, barring another gut-wrenching incident, silence. We’ll get back to talking about the things we like about football, entertainment, socializing and the ability to release all your pent up emotion by screaming “WOOOO” over and over again at high decibel levels.

The rest will fade into the background until the next backup lineman forgets how to hold his Natty Light. Pray it isn’t something worse.

Photo via Gainesville Sun

For more than a week, we’ve been subjected to ultra-sketchy reports (which deserve no link) indicating that several high-profile entrants into this year’s NFL Draft may have failed drug tests at the combine. One by one, these reports were denied and debunked. By the start of this week, every player’s name had been cleared to some extent. Except for one.

Today, a legitimate news-gathering organization finally went there: Percy Harvin tested positive for marijuana at the NFL Combine. The sources are still anonymous and therefore the word is still “unofficial” in the strictest sense of the word, but based on the number of quality outlets now reporting this news and the conspicuous lack of denial from anyone associated with Harvin, there seems to be little reason for doubt

Well then. There’s no positive way to spin this, as it’s pretty much bad news for everyone involved. But it does raise two questions: How does this impact Harvin’s draft stock? And what effect, if any, does it have on his legacy as a Florida Gator? To me, the answers to each could not be more different.

The NFL is a risky business. Investors (teams, owners) and their brokers (GMs, coaches) are making multi-million dollar bets on highly volatile commodities (players) whose success is dependent on dozens of uncontrollable variables (injury, chemistry and just plain old human free will). In short, past performance is very much not an indicator of future success.

But NFL teams obsess over past performance. Every little detail of a player’s life on and off the field is considered — from 40 times and college statistics to rumors about whether a player was involved in a parking-lot scuffle back in high school. Nothing is off-limits to over-analysis. Needless to say, flunking a weed test two months before the draft is, uh, not so good.

So Harvin will likely suffer from this failed test in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Once thought of as a mid-first round pick, Harvin had already slipped to No. 30 according to Mel Kiper, and that was before the FoxSports.com report. Many suspect he could slip out of the first round entirely. Comprehensive information on rookie salaries is surprisingly hard to come by, but according to USA Today, the No. 30 pick in 2007, wide receiver Craig Davis, made $3.33 million in bonuses paid out in the first year. The No. 51 overall pick from that year, wide receiver Steve Smith (the USC one) made just $1.61 million in bonus money.

Harvin’s reputation will also likely suffer long after draft day has passed. Any good he does on the field will be immediately qualified with a “Yeah, but…” from commentators, pundits, and perhaps most importantly, fans. Fairly or not, the “troubled” adjective will follow him for his first few years of pro football, at a minimum. (Side note: At least he wasn’t Brandon Tate, who also failed a mandatory piss test at the Combine. The same Combine where he didn’t work out at all due to injury and thus the same Combine that he could have just skipped entirely, drug test and all.)

For PR reasons alone, image-conscious NFL teams are well within their right to be nervous about selecting Harvin. But as a Gator fan, I don’t think this changes Harvin’s Florida legacy one bit.

Draft expert Todd McShay recently said the star receiver lives in “Percy Harvin World.” I’ll borrow from Joe Goodman here: What does that even mean? That he was arrogant and self-absorbed? This may come as a surprise, but many players, particularly the great ones, are selfish jerks. If it turns out that Percy Harvin falls into this category, he’d be just like pretty much everyone except Ray Allen. Was there behind-the-scenes drama during his Florida tenure? Message board rumors range from the mundane (posse of sketchy high school friends) to the outrageous (punched a Gator assistant coach). But remember the operative word here — rumors. To my knowledge, not one individual who was “there” has made a public utterance against Harvin’s character. (And someone who was “there” does not include a random guy who talked to the father of a walk-on placekicker while waiting in line for a urinal at the spring game)

Simply put, if Percy Harvin was off in his own world, it was never evident on the field. He played hard, he played hurt and he always seemed to save his best for the most opportune moment. In the 2006 SEC Championship game, just a week after suffering a concussion, he broke off 167 total yards and two touchdowns, including a poetic 67-yard run to paydirt. In the 2009 BCS Championship game, playing in pain on what turned out to be a broken ankle, he amassed 171 total yards and a touchdown, including several long runs when the Gators needed a spark. It may sound like a paradox, but even if he did all of that for purely selfish reasons, he’s still a team player. Harvin sacrificed for the Gators, and it’s almost certain that had he not, Florida would have two fewer national titles to its name.

So let the NFL think of Harvin as aloof and troubled, as the next prima donna likely to derail in the less-structured environment of the pros. I will always remember Harvin as one of college football’s most dynamic skill-position players of his era. And unless real evidence is presented to the contrary, I will always think of him as a great Gator.