What They’ve Done to Game Is a Crime

If you didn’t know who the defending national champion college football team was, you’d probably be able to make a pretty good guess about now.

Nebraska, right?

And how would we know? Well, for a start, one guy on the squad is charged with attempted murder and two others are charged with assaulting former girlfriends and another with carrying a weapon.

How’s that for a “Dream Team?”

But it sounds like a national champion, all right.

The year before Nebraska won it, Florida State was the reigning champion. Half a dozen players were illegally treated to a $20,000 clothing shopping spree by wanna-be agents.

Miami used to win it all with personnel such that a national writer once suggested the team photo should be taken front and side and the pictures hung in post offices instead of national magazines. Then, a rap artist and a big backer of the team insisted he be able to pick the starting quarterback--a pal of his--or he’d “blow the whistle on the whole program.”

Colorado won the title with a team that had a worse arrest record than the Mafia.

And so on.

Now, I’m sure there are thousands of fine young men playing college football. I mean, they’re nice to their mothers, eat with their hats off, even kneel in the end zone after a score (if the administrators of the game let them, that is). There are plenty of fine young men.

There are a lot of thugs too. I can never forget my first introduction to the new breed when Coach Bear Bryant at a clinic in Santa Barbara once said something like: “If you got any milk-drinking, church-going, book-learning, suit-wearing students who can throw the football, you send them to Stanford. If you got any whiskey-drinking, women-chasing, fist-fighting a-tha-letes who can knock your jock off, you send them to ol’ Beah!”

Deke Brackett, longtime assistant at UCLA once confided, “If you’ve got one kid who’s a pretty good player and his grades are all good and got no record and you got a kid who just beat up three cops in a nightclub, maybe one football coach will go see the first kid but the cop-beater’s front doorstep will be so lined with coaches they’ll have to take numbers.”

The character, or lack of it, of their football teams never seems to deter the fans who show up with their faces painted red, their hair shaved with the school letter and yelling, “Hit ‘em again--harder! harder!” They wouldn’t seem to care if it was Jack the Ripper out there playing linebacker for them. They’d love it. They’d like nothing better than to get his sweaty jersey with the bloodstains still on it to hang in their rec rooms. They don’t care what he does in his spare time.

Somebody’s got to start caring. About the university’s image, the game’s image. I thought our colleges were supposed to be educational institutions, not halfway houses.

The Nebraska back apparently had “Heisman” written all over him. Lawrence Phillips has gained more than 2,500 yards in his career. In another era, he’d be a Galloping Ghost or a Pony Express or some such.

He has been a troubled young man. His mother, unable to control him even at age 12, turned him over to a youth center in Covina.

When Phillips showed up at Lincoln, Neb., in a new Mustang convertible, the NCAA launched an investigation. They were told the group home had bought it for him as a gift.

Oh, sure.

This is the third time this year he has been hauled up on charges. In the other two, charges were dropped or fines paid.

The latest incident had Phillips breaking into an apartment at 4:30 a.m., grabbing his former girlfriend whom he is alleged to have hit and then dragged down three flights of stairs before neighbors could call 911.

Coach Tom Osborne has been making some familiar noises, dismissing Phillips from the team, then changing the punishment to an indefinite suspension.

“I’m not giving up on him yet,” the coach told the press bravely. “We will do everything we can to help him get his life back together. I’m certainly going to continue to support him in every way that I can emotionally and academically.”

English translation: You think I’m going to let go a guy who made me four touchdowns last week?! Are you outta your gourd?!

Prediction: Look for the charges to be dropped. And the apartment door to be fixed.

After all, they’ve got a national championship to defend.