Steve McNair, renowned quarterback, died from a gunshot wound to the head this past weekend. And as the investigation into his death intensifies, it brought an oft-discussed issue to the forefront: why do guys from the NFL always seem to get into trouble?
And it happens everywhere. Locally, Seahawks star Lofa Tatupu was busted for a DUI last year, right about the time former Hawks star Koren Robinson had finished drinking and driving himself out of the league. Seahawks announcer and record-setting QB Warren Moon had already managed to get himself arrested on his own set of DUI charges near Christmas 2007. By the way, I'm going to leave out the rest of the Hawks' trouble, for space reasons. Away from Seattle, Hall of Famer Bruce Smith joined that same stupid club earlier this year. The capper: in March, Cleveland receiver Donte Stallworth killed a guy while driving drunk.
And then there's Michael Vick. Ugh... I don't even want to link to him anymore, I'd rather just forget he existed.
Wait... didn't O.J. play a down of football here or there?
So what kind of animal house is the NFL running anyway?
Not a very efficient one, I'd say, if the goal is to get guys into heaps of trouble. Pro football players are FAR LESS LIKELY to be arrested than the general population. No typo. Proof:
"We find two striking observations. First, we note that the NFL rates [of arrest] are less than half the general population rates for both whites and blacks. Second, we find that the NFL fraction is strikingly close for the two racial groups. Thus, even though our initial assessment was that the NFL rates looked very high, we find them well below the rates for the general population."
(Got that from a study published at Duke University in 2007. Done by scientist-type humans.)
LESS THAN HALF!
Well, that's just one study... except another one done by an intrepid reporter last year duplicated the results. 1 in 45 NFL players arrested in his research, compared with 1 of 23 of the rest of us.
So I'm hoping you'll forgive the caps, and twice at that, but I get really sick of people dumping on athletes who don't deserve it. Especially with the stickiness of racial stereotypes right beneath the surface of the conversation. (USA Today put 41 arrested NFL players on its covers throughout 2007. Care to guess how many were black? No, more. Higher. Almost there. Yep, bingo, 39.)
Can you be pissed at Tatupu for making an idiotic choice? Sure. Can you lament that McNair associated with the wrong people? Your call. Can you opine that oft-convicted cornerback Adam "Pac-Man" Jones is a complete waste of human cell tissue and all his talent should be transferred to someone who won't throw it away? Please do.
But cool the stereotypes, already.
(I'm really, really, really ready for some football.)
Really it just follows our obsession with celebrities and when they screw up. Must make the 1 in 23 feel better that they are not alone.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes this seem so bad is that these are people who generally seem to have everything going for them. While the rest of us look at our lives and think "gosh if I could just have XXXXXX, everything would be grand", the athletes have XXXXXX, YYYYYY and ZZZZZZ. Makes us wonder how they could do something so dumb. And they tend to do it on a scale that matches the rest of their lives, big. Of those 1 in 23 how many are DUIs versus smaller less damaging crimes.
In the end, they are under the scrutiny of the public eye. The love that the good public giveth, the good public can taketh away.