“For when the One Great Scorer comes,
To write against your name,
He marks — not that you won or lost —
But how you played the game.”
— Grantland Rice
Never in the history of sports has a writer so succinctly and poetically summed up the essence of sports on a higher plane than that of the playing field. He’s the same man who penned “The Four Horsemen” as the moniker for Notre Dame’s 1924 backfield and a journalist Al Groh should look up.
We’ve gone from distasteful to embarrassing. I’ve written about it before and hoped to never have to write about it again, but what once were discipline “issues” have now become a full-blown epidemic.
Rashawn Jackson’s arrest on charges of breaking and entering and, even better, grand larceny, makes him the sixth Cavalier football player arrested since the end of the 2007 season. He follows in the ignoble footsteps of Mike Brown, J’Courtney Williams, Dave Roberts, Will Barker and Peter Lalich.
While the charges against Barker were later dismissed and Jackson still does have a court date Nov. 20 to prove his innocence, this chain of fools is downright disgusting. That stench that’s turning my stomach no longer wafts up from Tallahassee, Fla., Miami, Fla. or Blacksburg, Va., but rather from right under our own noses. Ultimately, the buck has to stop somewhere, and I have a good idea which sweatshirt to pin it on.
One of the distinguishing features between the NFL and college football is the amount of control coaches have over the players who enter their programs. In the pros, an owner or general manager can make a personnel decision over a coach’s head and bring in a Pacman Jones. But in the college ranks, the head coach targets, recruits and signs every last player to come through the door, either directly or through his assistants.
So when one of those players screws up, some of the blame can shift onto the coach. Certainly he can’t be with every player, everywhere, all the time, but we do expect the coach to instill enough of either respect or fear to keep his players on the straight and narrow.
But when it’s as many as six players, or 10 in Groh’s case if you count academic suspensions and dismissals, almost all of the blame comes back to the top of the pile. Double-digit screw-ups in a single season aren’t a bad apple or two. It’s indicative of a culture of complacency, in which character is seen as a vice, not a virtue.
On top of the actions themselves is the attitude of this coach, these players and this athletic department as a whole. After this paper broke the story of Lalich’s probation violation, I received a highly passive-aggressive message from Lalich himself, “congratulating” me on the story while continuously asserting a lack of any wrongdoing. When we asked why Lalich played that week in the postgame press conference, Groh bristled at the audacity of our reporter to question why someone who voluntarily admitted to violating his probation still got to represent the Orange and Blue and then said those reporting on the matter should “examine themselves.”
Days later, the athletic department trotted Lalich in front of the assembled media to express their solidarity with him and let him, again, assert his innocence. Within 48 hours, they announced he wouldn’t travel to Storrs for the UConn game; within the week following the game, he was off the team. In his court hearing, Lalich admitted verbally what he’d admitted in writing: that he’d been drinking on probation, in clear and direct violation of the terms he’d signed.
At the end of the day, the criticisms of Lalich and his actions were correct and had been from the start. But Groh and the athletic department’s brusque treatment of the media’s inquiries into the matter show one of two things: either a complete and utter lack of control and knowledge or a willingness to support a young man’s repeated public lies. Either one is entirely unacceptable.
Being the football coach at the University of Virginia is about much more than wins or losses, bowl games or conference championships. An institution of this caliber, with the rich history and tradition of honor that sets it apart from all others, deserves a coach that doesn’t embarrass it at every turn. It deserves a coach that, win or lose, does things the right way.
We had one for almost 20 years in George Welsh, a man who single-handedly built this program into national prominence, who led us to what remains our only three weeks atop the national polls and whose 1989 and 1995 teams were ACC co-champions. His play-calling may have been conservative, and he may have picked his nose a bit on national TV, but for all his faults, Welsh never, ever, would have allowed the shenanigans that have now become the vile legacy of the Groh era at the University.
It’s time to turn the page. In fact, it’s time to burn the whole dang book. Fire Groh, and fire him now.
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