One week from tomorrow, the 2006 college football season commences, and the bright lights of television will fall upon the sleepy college town of Starkville, Mississippi for the first game of the season. Per the usual, college football has stayed in the headlines this past off-season due to a string of incidents and nefarious doings. Old-timers are fond of pointing out how awash college football has always been with stories of impropriety, conniving, and generally abysmal behavior. Not that we should embrace such a state of affairs, but their perspective is one of been-there-seen-that, and the current spate of off-season ugliness is nothing more than par for the course.
Whether our general unshockability is more a comment on us than on college football is an open question, but this off-season has seen more than its share of the goofy and the gaudy. It’s been a veritable buffet of depravity leading up to the 2006 season. So, in honor of jaded old-timers everywhere, here’s a preview (or is it review?) of the 2006 football season, brought to you by truly ancient voices, those of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Lust
Among the usual sordid stories of young coeds enticing star recruits on campus and team keg parties with adult entertainers gone awry, we have the story of Dennis Godfrey, who had signed a letter of intent to play football for Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Godfrey, however, has been indicted for rape and kidnapping a 16-year-old, according to a June Associated Press news report. As the report had it, “The accuser says the crimes happened around Oct. 1. Godfrey’s father, Dennis Godfrey Sr., said his son and the accuser interacted at a family cookout.” Never in the history of newscopy has the word interacted been freighted with so much weight.
Wrath
What is it about being a defensive back that gets one shot in the ass? First, there was the 2003 shooting of Joey Porter, who at the time was playing in the NFL, and then last month, University of Miami safety Willie Cooper was likewise shot in the butt by an unknown assailant. But it gets better.
Roommate and fellow Hurricane Brandon Merriweather then pulled out his handgun and returned fire as the attacker fled the scene; the police judged that Merriweather had acted in self-defense with a legally-owned firearm.
Avarice
Ah, the joys of college life, slumming around town with no money, eating cold pizza for breakfast, taking laundry home to mom. Well, it seems former Oklahoma University quarterback Rhett Bomar had had enough of that. Bomar was dismissed from the football team earlier this month for accepting money which he did not earn from a local car dealership. With Bomar, the Sooners were on the short list of teams expected to compete for a national championship; without him, they more resemble the team upset at home by Texas Christian, 17-10, in last season’s opener.
Gluttony
Small-college teams getting the stuffing kicked out of them by powerhouse opponents is a time-honored tradition in college football, and according to an article in today’s New York Times, being a glutton for punishment has never been so rewarding. College football schedules will include a twelfth regular-season game this year, and good teams have been scrambling to fill the extra game with teams of lesser talent. Take, for instance, the University of Buffalo. The Bulls have been one of the worst teams in the NCAA since making the jump to Division I in 1999, compiling a record of 10 wins and 69 losses. But Buffalo will take on some serious competition this season, traveling to Auburn, Boston College, and Wisconsin. In sum, the Bulls will receive over $1.5 million for their troubles. Looks like another double-digit-loss season on the shores of Lake Erie.
Vanity
It was fashionable a few years back to suggest that Florida State’s Bobby Bowden and Penn State’s Joe Paterno retire, as their powerhouse football programs had seemingly slipped a notch. But 2006 will see both coaches return for their 41st years as a college head coach. Both men have long surpassed Paul “Bear” Bryant’s major-college record for wins and are now competing with age and each other for the record. Entering the season, Bowden leads Paterno, 359 to 354. Will 2006 be the year one these gentlemen stumble on the path to glory?
Envy
What school wouldn’t enjoy having its own television deal with a major network, such as the kind Notre Dame enjoys with NBC? For its part, NBC signed a contract extension with the school in 2003 that extends the current contract to 2010, so the Irish look set through the end of the decade, awash with the peacock’s cash, enabling the school to maintain its status as the last major-college Independent. The Big Ten, Big East, and Atlantic Coast Conference, as prospective suitors, will have to wait. But what will happen in a few years when the current BCS system of determining a national champion morphs into a full-fledged playoff for conference champions? Will Notre Dame be able to cut a sweetheart deal with its competitors as easily as it did with NBC?
Sloth
Nothing says college football quite like faked transcripts and courses in basket weaving. Last month, The New York Times reported how Auburn University’s football players had managed to enroll in do-nothing courses sponsored by the school’s Sociology Department. The article began in classic fashion:
A graphic popped up on James Gundlach’s television during an Auburn football game in the fall of 2004, and he could not believe his eyes.
One of the university’s prominent football players was being honored as a scholar athlete for his work as a sociology major. Professor Gundlach, the director of the Auburn sociology department, had never had the player in class. He asked two other full-time sociology professors about the player, and they could not recall having taught him, either.
So Professor Gundlach looked at the player's academic files, which led him to the discovery that many Auburn athletes were receiving high grades from the same professor for sociology and criminology courses that required no attendance and little work.
Eighteen members of the 2004 Auburn football team, which went undefeated and finished No. 2 in the nation, took a combined 97 hours of the courses during their careers. The offerings, known as directed-reading courses, resemble independent study and include core subjects like statistics, theory and methods, which normally require class instruction.
To add insult to injury, thanks in part to such academic shenanigans, Auburn’s football team ranked fourth in the nation according to the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate, right between Stanford and Boston College. Perhaps the value of such an index needs fine tuning.
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