Sports

Ryan Perrilloux will no longer be able to defend the national championship title. The prominent face of the 2008 LSU team will never take a snap for the Tigers after getting dismissed by Les Miles. He had numerous run-ins with the law in 2007 that included a nightclub fight and trying to use his brother’s ID to go riverboat gambling, but he didn’t make amends this Spring by missing team meetings and practices. Failing a drug test was the last straw and now LSU needs a new quarterback.

Jamar Hornsby, a Junior safety at Florida, has just been dismissed by Urban Meyer for using the gas credit card for 6 months of a woman who had been killed in a motorcycle accident.

In other Gator news, Florida defensive lineman Matt Patchan was shot in the shoulder in Tampa last Friday. No details have been released yet, but when you have a bullet in your arm it doesn’t usually mean you were just “at the wrong place at the wrong time” in a library or at a church function.

Two Mississippi State players, Michael Brown and Quinton Wesley, have just been given suspended sentences for firing guns into the air on campus back in March and were dismissed from the team and kicked out of school.

In Nick Saban land, Freshman defensive tackle Jeremy Elder was kicked off the team following his arrest for allegedly robbing two other students at gunpoint a couple of months ago. At least eight players have been arrested from the Crimson Tide since Saban was hired.

I’m sure we can all agree the Southeastern Conference is the pinnacle of collegiate football, but boy, there have been several “personnel problems” recently that make the SEC look bush league off the field. We hear the college presidents get on their soap boxes and push sportsmanship rules on players and fans alike, and anointed the conference as the “Standard of Excellence”. Sure the SEC has excellent teams in every sport available to our amateur athletes, but that excellence hasn’t exactly been evident in newspapers and websites lately.

To be fair, the media loves to share negative stories more than they do heartwarming ones, so we fans don’t get to hear about the generous and altruistic Kelin Johnson’s of the world often enough. So for argument’s sake, I am basing all of this negative attention on SEC football relative to the number of “big sports stories” lately. And I know SEC football players aren’t the only troublemakers in the world of college football, but when you have this much bad press lately, it makes the conference look a Michael Vick prison league.