When athletes get in trouble, a university must respond

The Ohio State University isn't the first college to encounter discipline problems with some of its football players.
It's not even the first to see an upsurge in incidents leading up to and in the wake of winning a national championship. Florida State had six players arrested during and shortly after it won the championship four years ago.
Then, the spotlight was on coach Bobby Bowden, who had a 40-year career. This year, the spotlight t is on Jim Tressel, who has spent about 40 months at the helm of the Buckeyes.
During Tressel's three years and a few months at Ohio State, 14 football players have been involved in 13 incidents that resulted in arrests. Eight of those players had been recruited by former coach John Cooper, six by Tressel.
Coach Tressel isn't talking about the arrests and the man at OSU who is talking, Athletic Director Andy Geiger, is nothing if not defensive. In a recent telephone call to discuss the arrests, Geiger reacted immediately to the mention of 14 players saying that the use of that number is unfair because it lumps assault and robbery arrests with much less serious offenses, such as open-container citations.
The numbers he said, are not out of the ordinary, but he acknowledged that they are a cause of genuine concern. Other athletes, he said, get into occasional trouble with the law, but they are off the press's radar screen -- the misdeeds of football players are not only reported, but are blown out of proportion. Tressel's entire approach to working with his players is value-based and Geiger continues to have every confidence in the coach.
Geiger had an answer for almost everything, which is not surprising, since he'd been asked essentially the same questions by reporters for several days before we called.
Troubling disparity
There was one thing Geiger couldn't explain. OSU has about 120 players on its football squad. It has about 850 student athletes on campus. If the rate of arrests for all student athletes was the same as that on the football team, about 25 athletes a year would be arrested. Geiger doesn't believe that 25 OSU athletes are arrested in the course of a year, and he doesn't have a ready explanation for the disparity.
And that's the crux of the problem. Why do athletes in high-profile sports seem to get in more trouble than, say, lacrosse players?
One theory is that high-profile athletes are so accustomed to special treatment -- from junior high school on for the most gifted athletes -- that some of them develop an attitude that the rules to apply to them.
If that's the case -- and we acknowledge that our one-sentence description is a simplistic rendering of a complex issue -- neither Geiger's defensiveness nor Tressel's silence serves the best interests of the university, the football program or the student athletes.
The Youngstown area doesn't need Geiger or anyone else to tell us that Jim Tressel believes in instilling character in his players. But Tressel and Geiger owe it to the entire state to address the problem of student-athlete misbehavior in a more forthright manner.
Geiger oversees an $84 million athletic budget, with Tressel's football program providing the largest single source of revenue. If some of the very athletes who lure alumni to $50 stadium seats require more active intervention by additional coaches or counselors, it only seems fair that they get it. That could cost a few hundred thousand dollars -- which works out to about 50 cents a seat for the season.