Some choose to play dumb with their troubled players

Hearing the cries for the NFL to clean up player behavior and the NBA to straighten out All-Star weekend reminds one of the words of former Temple Coach John Chaney: “You can never end stupidity. Never.”

You sure can’t end it with rules and regulations. If the threat of punishment were enough of a deterrent, you’d never hear the phrase “prison overcrowding.”

The compilation of Tank Johnson’s arrest on weapons allegations, the biweekly Cincinnati Bengals arrests and the latest reports of misdoings by Adam “Pacman” Jones even had fed-up players requesting more stringent penalties for player misbehavior at a recent meeting with NFL and union officials. A union spokesman who was present said that, contrary to reports, there was not a proposed “three-strikes rule.”

The thing is, NFL teams already have all the power they need to ditch the bad character guys. The second paragraph of the standard NFL contract requires the player to “conduct himself on and off the field with appropriate recognition of the fact that the success of professional football depends largely on public respect for and approval of those associated with the game.” Later, the team is granted this authority: “If Player has engaged in personal conduct reasonably judged by Club to adversely affect or reflect on Club, then Club may terminate this contract.”

The reason it rarely is enforced is that teams get stupid too. Crazy-in-love stupid. They get smitten with talent and will find a way to rationalize any kind of behavior as long as a guy can run a 4.4-second 40. Players will continue to act up, and teams will continue to tolerate it.

The Tennessee Titans knew what they were getting when they drafted Jones. He’d been arrested once for a bar fight while he went to school at West Virginia. That didn’t keep them from taking him with the No. 6 pick. Jones was questioned but not arrested after a fight at a strip club after the draft. He was arrested again the summer before his rookie season on suspicion of assault and felony vandalism after another nightclub altercation.

These things can happen to young men. But they don’t keep happening again and again to people of good character. You don’t see a single story such as this about Donovan McNabb or LaDainian Tomlinson, let alone multiple. Jones has been involved in 10 incidents that attracted police attention since joining the NFL in 2005.

The latest is his alleged connection to a shooting outside a Las Vegas strip club in the early hours of Feb. 19. Here’s the NFL’s quandary: Police have not arrested Jones or named him as a suspect. Jones, through his attorney, denies any involvement. So far we’ve heard only the account of the strip club owner. He says there’s video of Jones assaulting a dancer inside the club. No one I know has seen it.

Even a man with Jones’ checkered past is entitled to a presumption of innocence. Remember when a woman accused members of the Dallas Cowboys of sexual assault and everyone said, “Those crazy Cowboys are out of control again” -- until it turned out she fabricated the whole story and wound up being kicked out of the country? The NFL can’t be so image-conscious that it tramples on people’s legal rights.

Jones is unique in that he has managed to sully the reputations of two leagues at once.

Because the strip club shootings occurred at the end of All-Star weekend, they have been lumped into the criticism of the crowd the NBA attracted to Las Vegas. As if the NBA has any control over who shows up in conjunction with its events, or is accountable for the actions of people who play in other leagues.

The reported mayhem even had NBA Players Assn. President Billy Hunter doubting New Orleans’ capability of handling the All-Star game next year.

NBA players didn’t cause any problems in Vegas, and they weren’t in jeopardy. You didn’t hear about incidents at league events or player-affiliated parties.

The players will be even safer in New Orleans, where the hotels don’t need to keep access open to the casinos and the players’ hotel will return to its usual fortress mode.

That said, if anything can bring Bourbon Street to a halt, it’s All-Star weekend. In the last four years, it has managed to close down the Lenox Square mall in Atlanta, the Sunset Strip in L.A. and the Las Vegas Strip. That’s an unprecedented trifecta.

Nevertheless, I never felt unsafe in Las Vegas. I didn’t witness scary behavior, just a lot of ignorance. Unfortunately, there’s still a segment of the African American population that thinks the All-Star game is an acceptable time and place to smoke weed wherever and whenever, walk around drinking Patron out of bottles with two-foot straws, pick up women by demeaning them, and set a franchise record for use of the n-word.

That’s not an NBA problem. It’s an issue that swerves into the area of education, not discipline. Start with implementing a little knowledge and maybe the stupidity can be reduced -- even if, Chaney would tell you, it can never be eradicated.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.