Ten or 15 years ago, the article by Sam Alipour published this week in ESPN The Magazine on the prevalence of marijuana usage among Oregon football players might have left a crater in the program. Instead, as the smoke has cleared, we’ve found that the article has seemingly left little more than a vapor trail in the national dialogue. In fact, the perceived naivete of the article’s underlying premise – football players getting blazed is a big deal – has given the online snark peddlers plenty of fodder.
So here’s your opportunity to out yourself as a complete square. Is there fire behind all this smoke, or is this just trifling for a major football program? Should schools and coaches be more proactive about weeding out the stoners?
Ty Hildenbrandt: I was disappointed with the ESPN article, but look forward to their investigative piece on gravity’s communist rule over the forward pass.
Seriously, is it even news that college football players dabble in pot? I want to meet the one guy on planet Earth who read the piece and was like “HEAVENS TO BETSY!” I want to e-mail his Juno account and see what he does when his baud modem can’t connect to CompuServe. I want to walk in his shoes, down that slippery slope — where older, disconnected people become completely oblivious — just so I can understand it.
This article could’ve been written about any college in America. Like it or not, this is reality. This is neither a scandal, nor an outrage.
Michael Felder: Yeah, I’ve got to agree with Ty. Anyone surprised by this “revelation” must have their heads in the sand, or their ears in a Sony Walkman that’s comfortable zipped into their fannypack belted around their sweet London Fog windbreaker.
The issue, to me, isn’t about it being news, the issue is that apparently there are people who care. That somehow look at Oregon like they have a problem. That somehow this article gives rival fans a feeling of excitment to point fingers, as their team tokes up too. That somehow there’s a market for this sort of thing and there are people who do get bothered by the news.
I don’t understand it.
Aaron Torres: But guys… Smoking marijuana is illegal!!! (Except, it kinda, sorta, isn’t in Oregon, where marijuana possession was decriminalized decades ago).
To me, this speaks to the bigger picture of ESPN, and the commitment they made to try and compete with Yahoo in the investigative reporting field.
The truth is, that you can’t just jump into investigative reporting, in the same way that you can’t show up at Harvard tomorrow and say “I want to go to school here.” To get good at it like the Yahoo guys have, it takes years of networking, building contacts, and getting people to trust you. Look at the Willie Lyles situation at Oregon or Nevin Shapiro at Miami. Those guys WENT to Yahoo, because they knew that Yahoo was going to handle their story delicately and professionally.
And really to me, that’s the problem with ESPN, and this report in general. Simply put, they’re trying to force this investigative thing. Well, guess what? When you’ve got no contacts, no leads, and no one willing to talk to you, it leads to crap like this. It leads to an editor on a copy desk and bosses from above saying, “I spent all that money to send you to _____, don’t come home empty-handed.” Well, to their credit, ESPN didn’t come home empty-handed. They found out that football players smoke pot at Oregon. Of course, my 13-year-old dog probably could’ve figured that out too if I’d splurged for a ticket to Eugene for him.
Then again, I shouldn’t really blame ESPN, since this is going on at other places too. Remember that “scathing” report George Dohrmann was supposed to release on Ohio State? Well, it came out, and umm, yeah. It was well-researched, well-reported, but lacked real meat. Same with Matt Hayes’ article on Florida football.
My point: Leave the investigative reporting to the big boys. And if you do care to dabble, come up with something good. Otherwise, you’re going to end up getting the response that this Oregon article got yesterday.
Kevin McGuire: I’ll go on record and call myself a square here, if that’s the case.
Am I shocked that college football players dabble in marijuana, or other drugs? No. Am I shocked that this stuff happens on college campuses everywhere, from the big-time schools like Oregon all the way down to the small potatoes schools like Shippensburg? Of course not. Anyone who has gone to college knows that kids will make bad decisions, when it comes to drugs, alcohol, sexual interactions and so on. It happens, it is a part of growing up. For any national media outlet to sell an invetsigative story along these lines as groundbreaking or earth-shattering is nothing short of ridiculous.
That said, I see absolutely no problem with outing this kind of activity, no matter what school falls under the spotlight because of it. At what point did we decide that players, students using drugs was really not that big of a deal? At what point did we decide it was OK to look past giving kids a full scholarship, only to see some spend a portion of their time getting involved with drugs?
I’m not trying to restart the “Just Say No” campaign, but if a report like this can have any impact on changing the decisions made by some, then why not report it?
Dave Singleton: A report like this being made public isn’t necessarily going to change the decision making process of the individuals involved in making poor choices, though. I don’t see the vast majority of young men who are using pot suddenly going, “Hmm….I might wind up in a front page ESPN story, so I’m going to put this joint down.”
Might it impact some? Perhaps. But from my perspective, the vast majority aren’t going to care.
Michael Felder: Here’s the thing for me, Kevin, you say bad decision, and part of their time involved and drugs and when did we decide it wasn’t a big deal. I don’t think it is a bad decision, a poor use of their time or that it’s been a big deal within the sport. There are a lot of poor decisions made, and I don’t think smoking pot is one of them. Unprotected sex? Awful choice. Drinking and driving? Terrible move. Smoking a blunt at your house while watching a film, TV shows or just hanging out? Not so much. But that’s more or less conflicting views of the “morality” or inherent “badness” associated with marijuana.
As for time usage, as Akili Smith referenced in the article, there’s a lot of self-policing going on. Teammates showing up blazed to workouts or unable to get through film is never okay, regardless of the pervasiveness of weed in a program. The same goes for showing up drunk. Players smoking pot while their teammates get hammered drunk or when they are home on break between semesters isn’t exactly wasting the time that they “owe” the school for their precious scholarship.
The interesting thing here, and we’ve seen it in all the rise of new media, is access. People are far more willing to talk about things now than ever before, and there is a lot more information available in general. All that is going on is more people being exposed to something that’s been going on for a long time. Much like the concussion studies would leave people to believe there are more concussions now than ever, these reports and surveys are leading people to think more kids smoke weed than ever. As people who were not privy to what has been “business as usual” before get exposed to it, there comes this outcry.
Allen Kenney: I’m going to defend ESPN on this one.
Hopefully, no one harbors any illusions about athletes smoking pot or any of the other various off-the-field shenanigans that go down with any major program. ESPN didn’t break any new ground there, although I think the article did a fair job portraying the pervasiveness of weed within the culture of the Eugene community, the school and, most importantly in this case, the football team.
Are the Ducks themselves that different from any other college football team when it comes to ganja? Not at all. I know that I don’t give a damn about football players getting high, so I get the impulse to dismiss this as small potatoes or even scapegoating Oregon.
But the schools, the NCAA, the administrators, the coaches and anyone else who has a hand in running college sports have made their own beds. These rules about testing for recreational drugs exist to help them keep up appearances and sell the idea that college football is more than a business. Meanwhile, many – if not all – have no problem fudging the results and looking the other way when it comes to enforcing them.
If anecdotes about smoking up with a player is what sets tongues wagging, then the problem is us. Joe Blow would apparently rather obsess over some kid smoking pot than calling out the people who make the rules (and money). I don’t put that on ESPN.
Dave Singleton: I’m going to avoid talking about ESPN because I don’t think that has any bearing on the topic at hand. They get neither condemnation, praise, nor defense from me.
On the whole, the idea of football players (hell, college students) smoking pot is always going to get a reaction of, “Meh” from yours truly. I find it really hard to care at all about it. Maybe some of that comes from my own experiences in having tried pot a few times (it’s not for me) or from my own belief in that it probably shouldn’t be illegal to start with, but the latter point is a conversation for a different forum.
I can understand, because it is illegal, and if you are involved with college students, if they are breaking the law as it is written, then you do have to enforce policies and rules (even if you don’t agree with them). I can see the point in testing for illegal recreational drugs, and I do believe that some of them are truly harmful.
If you’re going to have rules and testing in place, then I think you have to enforce the rules and handle whatever consequences may come from that decision. Otherwise, what you’re doing, from an institutional perspective, is setting a bad precedent. “Yeah, you’re breaking the law and school policy, but you know what? It’s no big deal. Go out there and play,” is not exactly the right way to enforce a policy.
Either give up the charade or actually do what you say you’re going to do. Because otherwise you might start to head down a slope where the students are going to continue to push the edges of the envelope because, hey, they aren’t REALLY going to do anything to me.
Michael Felder: The issue there, Dave and Allen, is if they repeal these rules the they’re opening themselves up to criticism from that wide swath of people who feel as though the weed issue IS a big deal. The flack schools get on their lax drug policies speaks to that point. Five fails is somehow seen as egregious by a segment of the populous – a large segment. I’m sure part of it is because they feel as though it puts their team at an unfair advantage with a three strikes policy. However, others truly think these kids, in breaking the law, are actually bad.
That’s where the greatest disconnect is in my opinion. A story like this, which we all pretty much have viewed as meh, serves to vilify the people and schools associated. To avoid that vilification schools have these drug policies, and every now and again, they’ll throw the public a bone to say “see look at us we’re doing it right,” all the while skating over failures or not testing suspected pot users at all.
They can’t abolish the policies because there are people who would freak out. Can you imagine Cal coming out saying that they’re not testing anymore? The backlash from the national media would guilt them into saying “bad idea, we’ll change back.” Nothing short of a full scale repeal and NCAA repeal would make it okay. And that’s not gonna happen, because the NCAA has to protect the student athletes!
Dave Singleton: Michael, I get what you’re saying about how they cannot repeal these policies because the high-handed moralists will get upset. I understand that. But I tend to believe that if you have a rule, you need to enforce it consistently.
I also tend to think that some of those people who think it is a big deal would be mighty upset if the rules that their team had were actually enforced come Saturday afternoon.
