Last night another Tennessee football player was arrested. Vince Faison, the 27 year old former baseball player was charged with a DWB DUI, while cruising the strip in Knoxville. Just in case your keeping count, that brings the total of off-season arrests/citations to five.
Fulmer released a statement today regarding the punishment of Faison.
“Vince has embarrassed himself and his team. We expect all our players - scholarship or walk-on - to be good citizens. Any breaking of a law is serious. A DUI is a very serious offense. Vince will be suspended for two games and required to undergo alcohol evaluation and counseling in addition to other internal punishments.”
I don’t even know what to say at this point. Faison has not even practiced with the team, and he’s already in trouble. You can’t blame this on Fulmer, he can’t be recruiting and babysitting at the same time. On the other hand, I’m not going to sit here and judge Faison, but at some point our players have to realize the spotlight that they are under at UT. Until that day comes I guess we’ll still be called, UThug.
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What.the.hell. I don’t personally remember this much felonious behavior when I was a student at UT (10 years ago), there was some, but it was manageable to a certain degree. I don’t expect head coaches to be babysitters either, but I do expect that the RAs and dorm leaders at Gibbs to be a bit ahead of the game in watching over the athletes. As for those who live off-campus (in the Fort or wherever), it’s got to be hard to watch them day and night, but there has to be accountability somewhere. Faison is 27, shouldn’t he know better? Or does he - like others - think that because he’s an athlete that he’ll just get away with it?
The buck has to stop somewhere.
Well, Amy, all I can say is it happens everywhere, and that’s the honest to God truth. It just gets publicized at UT.
And what happened last week certainly doesn’t help. Fulmer demanded a look into the report on the Anthony Parker incident, and a report found that the police officer was in his rights. Fact of the matter is, this was supposed to be a private matter, but the News Sentinel publicized it, therefore making the KPD look like UT was trying to undermine it.
Actually, Fulmer was trying to find out why standing in the middle of an apartment parking lot, waving your arms and yelling deserved somebody going to jail. Now, it’s an out-and-out war between UT and the KPD, I’m afraid.
Oh, that, and Faison got a DUI. I’m sorry, but there’s no defense for this. Maybe we can argue that he shouldn’t have been arrested unless he killed a kid driving recklessly. Sorry, but Faison deserved to be arrested and suspended for two games. Maybe the suspensions will help matters.
I certainly hope so. Embarrassing.
For the Tennessee guys out there, does this type of thing bother you? I remember david palmer getting into some trouble when I was a kid and I was completely embarassed. I hate this type of stuff and it would bother me greatly if my school had a thug reputation (ie.Miami, Va Tech)
It hurts me to say this, but I agree with Ghost. To some degree, this stuff does happen all over the place, and I imagine in Faison’s case, it is a holdover from the pro baseball player lifestyle rather than an indictment of the program’s character. And there does seem to be some sort of strange obsession with the Knoxville police and media to make an issue out of every little incident. Again, I’m not saying the players are righteous in their pursuit of a good time, but I think the amount of scandal surrounding it is absurd.
In all fairness to the K’ville police,
it should at least be considered that they’re under a lot of pressure to get more control over the college-kid-dominated sectors of town right now. (Think the Fort.) I still maintain that they’re understaffed, something that has been reinforced by personal experience (but not really pertinent here). In absence of numbers, I imagine it’s really easy to react by raising the ThreatCon at every encounter. That does two things: it establishes the “tough” reputation that makes it a little easier to handle encounters in the future, and it creates an appearance of business - by getting in the news a lot with a lot of arrests, the police look like they’re doing their job.
I’m not saying that the police are in the right in all of this, but that the problem needs to be addressed on both sides. The players need to know better than to get involved with joints and DUI-type situations. The police could stand to be a little more forgiving of annoyances. But above all, the media could cool their jets just a bit and take time to figure out it the incident they are currently reporting on is a true felony-level, caps-lock “!!1!11!” type situation, or if it’s just a college kid who’s having fun and being checked out by the police.
I agree with you Ghost. This stuff does happen everywhere, however, a DUI is a pretty serious offense. He could kill someone or himself for that matter and that is just inexcusable.
UT does get negative pub, but so does UA. Once again, UA/UT fans will all agree on this subject.
I’m not naive enough to believe that it doesn’t happen everywhere, it just ticks me off more when it happens to MY alma mater (and shouldn’t it?). And just because it “happens everywhere” doesn’t make me any less angry about it. Saying that it “happens everywhere” diminishes the situation in a way that could make some say, “Oh well, just another college kid screwing around. Guess we don’t have to worry our pretty little heads about it because everybody does it.” Still doesn’t make it right.
As for the KNS, I’ve loathed them since my own newspaper and political activism days at UTK, so I won’t even entertain that discussion because I truly think that it’s a worthless newspaper. But that’s beside the point.