SOCIAL MISFITS
Bilas makes misguided claim that athletes benefit from campus life
ESPN’S Jay Bilas, who plays a college sports expert on TV, once said a most remarkable thing.
Given to lecturing, Bilas declared that even if recruited student-athletes don’t attend classes — in other words, if academic fraud is committed — athletes still benefit from the socialization process they undergo by being in a college environment.
He sounded serious. He always does.
Even if such a pathetic rationalization were true occasionally, there is a growing preponderance of evidence to the contrary. Full scholarship recruits are leaving college in far worse social condition than when they arrived.
Aaron Hernandez, now dead by prison-cell suicide, was recruited from his home in Connecticut by a full scholarship to the University of Florida, a tough school for non-athlete out-of-staters to be admitted. He then left Florida for the NFL — and to become a gunfiring murderer.
What did that mean to Florida? Nothing. Not even a dead-serious cautionary tale or even a modicum of shame and an active desire to do better.
Many, and perhaps most, bigtime basketball and football colleges, long before Hernandez and well after him, remain institutions of higher learning that will recruit — beg — anyone who can help win a ballgame to roam their campuses.
Hernandez left Florida for the NFL after the 2010 season. He was indicted for murder in 2013, convicted in 2015 — while Florida football and basketball remained a warehouse for criminals-on-the-grow.
A 2015 ESPN “Outside the Lines” investigation found that Florida’s football and men’s basketball programs had 80 players named as suspects in more than 100 crimes from 2009-14.
Recently and locally, Janoris Jenkins, with the Giants, was arrested three times while at Florida. His Florida socialization process was on display last season when he tweeted put-down obscenities to and about Browns receiver Terrelle Pryor.
Will Hill played defensive back for Florida but went undrafted as a bad-behavior risk. He played for the Giants and Ravens, but fi- nally was dumped after three drug suspensions and two arrests for failure to pay child support.
Jermaine Cunningham was a Florida linebacker, and briefly was on the Jets. At Florida he was arrested for a hassle in a restaurant then suspended by the NFL for drug use. In 2015, as part of a plea deal, he admitted in court to posting pornographic pictures of his girlfriend on Instagram.
Florida is a member of the SEC, which two years ago instituted mandatory seminars to discourage football recruits from assaulting women, given that previous recruits arrived on campus with no idea.
Such seminars are too late for Baylor football, one of it its fullscholarship recruits already con- victed of rape in 2014, with 52 more rape accusations to go.
And in the same week Hernandez reportedly offed himself, Adam “Pacman” Jones again made news as a recidivist, irreversible creep who impossibly remains in the employ of a pro team, the Cincinnati Bailbonds of the Nero Fiddles League
From the day he left West Virginia — another top producer of criminal student-athletes — Jones has served the NFL as a parole model.
Soon the NFL will have a team in Las Vegas. It was there, while attending NBA All-Star weekend, that Jones’ crew left three people shot, including a strip club bouncer who was paralyzed. Identified as the instigator, Jones was ordered by a court to pay $12 million in damages and was suspended from the NFL for a season.
At West Virginia, Jones underwent his socialization process with teammate Chris Henry — who, as a receiver with the Bengals, was arrested six times before he was killed, falling from a truck following an argument with his girlfriend.
So the no-school-needed, justbeing-on campus socialization process Bilas preached as plenty good enough, should provide all with continuing encouragement and comfort.