Before title, FSU players got special breaks

Doctoral student who raised concerns to school lost job, later died of prescription overdose

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As the Florida State University football team was marching to a national title in fall 2013, the school was investigating allegations of academic favoritism involving a half-dozen of its leading players, including one who scored the winning touchdown in the championship game.

The inquiry, previously unreported, stemmed from a complaint by a teaching assistant who said she felt pressured to give special breaks to athletes in online hospitality courses on coffee, tea and wine, where some handed in plagiarized work and disregarded assignments and quizzes. The assistant, a 47-year-old doctoral student named Christina Suggs, provided emails and other evidence in late August 2013 to the Florida State inspector general, an independent office. But her case was soon taken over by the university’s attorney.

The allegations were especially sensitive for Florida State, which had been stripped of 12 football victories four years earlier because of improper assistance to athletes in an online music course. The university was also at the time facing a scandal involving its star quarterback, Jameis Winston, who was accused of rape but never charged.

It is unclear if any of the conduct Suggs complained about resulted in athletes being improperly eligible to play. In a statement, the university said an outside consultant it hired to investigate found no wrongdoing.

Two things are certain: By the end of 2013, Florida State had tightened standards for the online hospitality courses. And Suggs had lost her job and left the school.

The story of Suggs’ experience trying to hold athletes to the same standards as other students, pieced together from emails, other documents and interviews, came to light during research for a forthcoming book, Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports. It offers a case study of how academic and legal imperatives often collide with the pressures of big-time college sports.

One of the players involved in Suggs’ complaint was James Wilder Jr., who had been arrested three times in the previous year and was on track to get, at best, a grade of D in one course. He emailed his professor as the sumNASHVILLE,

mer semester was ending to say he needed a B “to keep myself in good academic place with the school.” The professor, Mark Bonn, who ran the hospitality courses, instructed Suggs to work with Wilder and give him a chance to make up past assignments and submit missing portions of his final project, even though it had already been graded.

Suggs wrote that Wilder “should have done the work like everyone else” and objected to granting him special treatment, telling a colleague, “I am not offering this opportunity to other students.”

Friends of Suggs said she was painfully aware of the stakes involved in filing her complaint, including the possibility that athletes found in violation of academic standards might be ineligible to play under NCAA rules.

“It was a huge heartache for her,” said Barbara Davis, a fellow doctoral student and close friend of Suggs.

Plagiarized work

In June 2013, administrators at Florida State’s Dedman School of Hospitality circulated a memo to teaching assistants. The school’s online courses in “beverage management,” the memo noted, were popular with “a large number of student athletes” who needed to be tracked closely.

“Like the on-ground classes, we’re asked to review athletes’ progress on a regular basis and report how they’re doing to their academic advisers,” the memo said.

Bonn’s interactions with Suggs initially were positive; he praised her work incorporating the concept of sustainability into a course on coffee and tea, according to emails among staff members at Dedman in May 2013. Suggs, a single mother working from home so she could raise her young son, also received good reviews from Dedman’s director, Jane Ohlin, who called her “absolutely fabulous.”

By midsummer, though, Suggs was growing frustrated. She said she felt pressure “to pad grades for the football players, and I told her I thought that was common practice,” said Phil Suggs, her estranged husband.

“But she said, ‘Not with me. If they don’t make it, they don’t make it,’ ” he said.

After a defensive end on the team, Chris Casher, handed in plagiarized work, Christina Suggs alerted a program associate in the office, Aiden Sizemore, who sent an email to Bonn saying the player had “copied every portion of his project” with no citations or sources listed. Bonn allowed Casher to redo the work, explaining to him the meaning of paraphrase, that copied text needed quotation marks “before the first word and after the last word,” and that sources had to be listed at the end.

The work of other players listed sources at the end, but they contained page after page of text lifted verbatim from websites, without quotation marks or citations. Those projects — by Wilder, Timmy Jernigan, Tre’ Jackson, Nick Waisome and Kelvin Benjamin, the wide receiver who caught the winning pass in the championship game — appear to have been accepted without question.

Another player turned in writing of his own that was barely grade-school level. “Brazilian coffee is one of few places that has a carnival and the coffee place a major role just as much as the dancing and the food,” he wrote.

Several players were allowed to make up missed assignments and quizzes long past the deadlines, even though course policy said it was “unacceptable to wait until the last week of class” to request it; on a couple of occasions, Bonn deducted points for lateness.

Neither Bonn nor any of the players responded to requests for comment for this article.

Corrective measures

Although the university maintained that Suggs’ complaint was without merit, it clearly believed there were problems with the online classes at Dedman. It canceled some of them in fall 2013 and revamped the distance learning program, in the face of concern about “academic dishonesty” and other matters, according to emails among university administrators. In addition, Bonn, who had run the distance learning program since 2009, stepped aside from that role.

Under intercollegiate rules, schools can investigate academic cases themselves and decide if they warrant a report to the NCAA. The main criterion for whether a violation occurred is if any misconduct resulted in an athlete being wrongly certified to play, said Gerald Gurney, a former senior associate athletic director for academics at the University of Oklahoma.

“Clearly, there are academic integrity issues here that apply to NCAA rules, but the key is whether it affected certification of eligibility,” Gurney said, regarding the concerns raised by Suggs. “I would suspect that it is an impermissible academic assistance problem, but I’d need more information.”

As the 2013 fall semester came to a close and the Seminoles were preparing for the championship game, Suggs was informed that her job as a teaching assistant would not be renewed because she did not have enough business school credits. In an email to the inspector general, Suggs said that she believed she had lost her job “due to this unfortunate circumstance with Dr. Bonn and the investigation into the football players.”

Suggs decided to leave Florida State, after five years, with an education specialist degree — one step short of her doctorate.

In the months that followed, in deteriorating health and deeply in debt with student loans, Suggs struggled to cobble together a steady income from online teaching jobs. She had back surgery in October 2014 and returned to her tiny rented condo in Panama City Beach, Fla., to recuperate.

Not long after, Suggs lay down for a nap while her mother took her son out to eat. They returned to find her unresponsive, a trickle of blood seeping from her nose.

The medical examiner determined that she had died accidentally from a toxic combination of prescription medicines for pain, anxiety and depression.