Don't Fuck Up

Doing his one job well.

During football games – yes, football, the wonderful, uber-violent sport that, unlike basketball, Oregon is actually good at – when the opposing team tries for a field goal and misses, the band heckles them pretty hard for it.* “YOU HAVE ONE JOB!” We yell. “AND YOU SUCK AT IT!”

*Of course, we heckle everyone pretty hard about basically everything. During a free throw at the last basketball game against Cal, we yelled at Cal’s shooter that he was the reason his parents got divorced. He missed the shot.

Because that’s the placekicker’s job – somebody holds a ball in front of him, and he runs up and kicks it. The circumstances of what the ball does afterwards might change, but otherwise his entire scholarship is riding on his ability to kick a ball a long distance with some degree of accuracy. The parameters for success and failure are clearly and blatantly defined, and unlike Charlie Brown, you know the person holding the ball isn’t going to psych you out and pull the ball away at the last second, causing you to fall down amidst the sound of a drumroll and a slide whistle. Kicking is your life.

I mean, hell, how sweet of a gig is that? I admit, it’s probably not easy, but you’ve got nothing to concentrate on besides honing that one skill. If I got a full ride scholarship to do one specific thing, you damn bet I’d get incredibly good at it – unless it was math or watching American Idol, in which case all bets would be off.

Like a placekicker during football season, life for college football players after the football season is pretty simple: Don’t fuck up. Pass your classes and don’t fuck up. Basically, do what pretty much every other student on campus does every day of his or her life.

Now listen to me very carefully, Oregon football:

In the off-season, you have one job, and you suck at it worse than basically anyone has ever sucked at anything before.

-Jeremiah Masoli, the quarterback whose name we were all so delighted to rhyme with ravioli and e-coli, along with wide receiver Garrett Embry, whose name doesn’t rhyme with anything, were accused by members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity of stealing two MacBooks. If these allegations are true, it would be a profoundly pointless move on their part, seeing as the athletic department already provides MacBooks to athletes. Nobody’s been charged with anything, but Embry was mysteriously kicked off the team.

-Running back LaMichael James was recently arrested for assaulting and strangling a student who police accused of being his girlfriend. He is now facing domestic violence charges and is prohibited from returning to his Springfield home or setting foot on campus because he is now not allowed within two miles of the victim. He’s currently couch surfing as the athletic department tries to figure out a way for James to pass all of his classes without being able to physically attend them – because if he fails, he’ll be ineligible for his scholarship, ineligible for spring training, and thus ineligible for football next year.

-Backup linebacker Kiko Alonso was arrested for DUII several days ago, for which he was promptly booted off the team.

-In response, wide receiver Jamere Holland posted an inflammatory update on his public Facebook profile attacking Coach Kelly (arguably the last decent man left in Oregon football at this point) for kicking Alonso off the team for “weak shit” – because apparently, driving drunk and endangering the lives of others is ‘weak shit’ in the fast-paced world of Oregon football. He concluded the update by inviting readers to quote him, which they did, all over a series of widely-read sports blogs. Perhaps as damage control, in his next update Holland expressed his desire to “block whites as friends and have only blacks,” because a little racism never hurt anything. He, too, was kicked off of the team.

-Rob Beard, a placekicker, who even during football season only has one job, was recently the recipient of a severe beat-down after he joined a late night brawl in support of a former teammate. In the course of the fighting, he reportedly attacked a 19-year-old girl, for which he has been charged with misdemeanor assault.

-In retaliation for Beard’s beating, defensive end Matt Simms sought out one of the students responsible for the attack on Beard and punched him, knocked him to the ground, and beat him. Simms, also, has been asked to leave the team.

I agree that everyone makes mistakes. I agree that there are plenty of good, responsible young men in the Oregon football program.

But at the same time, come on, guys! What are we, the University of Washington football team in 2000? I mean, thank God we’ve already got the nation’s sympathy after that asshole at Boise State punched LeGarrette Blount, because otherwise everybody would think we were all a bunch of thugs!

[Blount punch gif]

Oh, wait.

Every day, thousands of students fulfill all of their academic and extracurricular obligations without fucking up. Sure, some of them do, and they’re punished for it, and the argument will no doubt be made that student athletes make mistakes, just like everybody else.

But student athletes aren’t like everybody else – they’ve got beefy scholarships and a blinged out, Borg cube-shaped study hall on Franklin Boulevard as incentives to make them come to the University of Oregon and succeed, both on and off the field. Athletics invests all this money in them because student athletes are representatives of the University – they’re supposed to be the best of the best.

Instead, we’ve got drunk driving, domestic abuse, gang fights, and retaliatory beat downs. It’s like the entire football team is Robert Downey Jr. in the late 1990s.

When Jamere Holland publicly wished that white people couldn’t view his profile, he suggested that he was “misunderstood.” I’ve got to say, I find that the most offensive part of this whole situation – that non-athletes or the University or white people just don’t get these football players; that we should cut them some slack.

There’s no room for misunderstanding here. Like the placekicker, your job is simple:

Don’t drive drunk. Don’t choke your girlfriend. Don’t steal stuff. Don’t punch people. Don’t talk shit about Big Balls Chip. Don’t be a racist.

Don’t fuck up.

Truman Capps hopes not to be choked by an Oregon football player in the near future.