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Cal U should keep football

By Richard "dick'' Majernik 3 min read

I strongly disagree with Mike Ciarochi, a sportswriter for the Herald-Standard, and his recent column, calling for Cal U to drop football for one year.

He stated that 80 percent of the players are good kids who want nothing more than a college education for the privilege of playing football. I agree with that assessment. He goes on to say that the number isn’t high enough. I disagree with him on that statement. What number is high enough?

Do the recruiting coaches know everything about the past of every possible “keeper.” Will the young kid confess to the coach ever run-in he has with the law? I think not. Most coaches will examine the kids high school record and determine if the boy will be able to do the classroom work and make passing grades. Transfers from other schools should also have their academic record inspected. Bad behavior would probably also be recorded on the transcript.

Comparing the Penn State problem to the Cal U problem might be like comparing apples to oranges, but it does involve football at both schools. It comes down to comparing players at Cal U with administrators at Penn State. Did the Penn State scandal a few years ago warrant the NCAA to drop the football program? No, it didn’t. It did punish the university and the team, but the school was not forced to drop football.

Has anyone interviewed the head coach at Cal U to get his side of the issue? Is he culpable in every case of past behavior by his recruits? I’m pretty sure the coaches would turn down a possible recruit because of a felony arrest and conviction. Could probation and misdemeanors get a student/athlete into a school? The head coach could answer that question if he knew that to be the case.

I would like to close my case against dropping the Cal U football program for one year with this quote from George Von Benko’s “Memory Lane” column in your paper in the same edition with Ciarochi’s column. George quoted Tom Ebbert as saying, “Without football I don’t know what I would be doing now.”

Without Cal U football, what would those 80 percent of players be doing? Would they still be in school? Would they be on the unemployment line or on welfare? Who knows?

Richard “Dick” Majernik is a resident of Brownsville.

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