This probably won't be a good day for Nick Saban.
It probably hasn't been a good offseason for Saban. And to think, there's still four months before the start of the regular season. So a lot more could happen between now and then.
The latest embarrassment comes with cornerback Cyrus Jones getting arrested on harassment and mischief charges.
Last season, Alabama fans probably wanted to charge their secondary with lack of harassment of opposing receivers. But anyway...
Alabama cornerback Cyrus Jones has been arrested on two counts of third degree domestic violence.
Jones was booked into Tuscaloosa County Jail early Wednesday morning on one count of domestic violence/harassment and one count of domestic violence/criminal mischief, both Class A misdemeanors. Each count carries a $500 bond. As of 7:30 a.m. CT, Jones is still listed in the Tuscaloosa County Jail's inmate database.
Jones, a 5-foot-10 senior who played in all 14 games last season, led all cornerbacks and tied for the team lead with three interceptions. He led the team with 16 passes defended and 13 pass breakups.
Jones is the fourth Alabama player to be arrested this spring, following Geno Smith (DUI) and two players now off the UA roster, Tyren Jones (marijuana possession) and Jonathan Taylor (domestic violence).
Alabama linebacker Ryan Anderson was arrested for domestic violence/criminal mischief in January for kicking a woman's car during an argument at an off-campus residence.
A few Wednesday links:
-- Oklahoma's football team stays united through a divisive spring on campus.
Behind closed doors the Sooners gathered privately for hours, meetings that often grew heated. So many emotions bubbled to the surface that “there were times people were about to fight each other,” Darlington says. Striker recalls teammates “fussing and arguing” as black players tried to explain what it feels like to discover people devalue you because of your skin color. Some didn’t understand the severity of “what this actually meant to our black teammates,” Striker says, so he tried to paint a vivid picture of his reality.
Meetings reached a crescendo when, in a scene Striker describes as “like a movie,” a player stood and screamed, “SHUT UP!” Players knew they had to come together. Amid a time that could have torn them apart, the Sooners chose to present a united front.
On Monday, March 9, with the support of Stoops, his staff and university president David Boren (who condemned the fraternity and expelled two students identified as leading the chant), Striker, Darlington and their teammates dressed in black and walked with arms linked through campus in silent protest. Their message was simple: “This is what we deal with every day,” Striker says. And they’d had enough.
Striker and Darlington talk of late-night meetings that stretched past 1 a.m. and decisions from team leaders not to attend practice or class. “We want to play football,” Darlington says. “There was never a point when we were sitting out because we wanted time off.” What they craved was a campus that understood they weren’t going to downplay or ignore hateful, racist behavior.
One month after the protest, wearing basketball shorts and a T-shirt adorned with a photo of Muhammad Ali—a man Striker admires for his activist work outside the boxing ring more than his punishing style in it—Striker says he had no choice but to speak up. And really, it was not out of character for him to do so.
“As a black man, I am not going to stand for this,” says the political science major, who likes playing devil’s advocate in classes and thinks daily about what he can do to inspire others. As a child he told his mother he was going to change the world. This, he figures, is just the beginning.
-- Also in Oklahoma, Billy Donovan begins talks with the Thunder about their vacancy.
Donovan is the first known candidate to talk with the Thunder about the job. It was not immediately clear how many other candidates, if any, Presti plans to sit down with.
ESPN.com reported in early April that there was a growing sense among NBA executives that Donovan is more ready to make the jump to the NBA than he has ever been. He also has a very close with relationship with Presti, who has hired two members of Donovan's staff at Florida within the past 12 months to take positions with Oklahoma City -- Mark Daigneault as coach of the Thunder's D-League team and Oliver Winterbone as a data analyst.
-- A non-sports link of note: The rise and fall of the hotel mini-bar.
When German-run company Siegas invented the mini-bar in the early 1960s, it was an instant hit with luxury hoteliers. First integrated in the suites of Washington D.C.’s Madison Hotel in 1963, mini-bars became an expected perk at high-end chains — and despite high mark ups, guests indulged in the snacks and beverages inside of them.
In 1974, the Hong Kong Hilton became the first hotel to include a “liquor-stocked” mini-bar in each of its 840 rooms, and it proved to be lucrative: in-room drink sales skyrocketed 500%, and the company’s overall revenue was boosted by 5%. Riding on the coattails of this success, Hilton’s executive team integrated mini-bars into all of their locations worldwide.
By the end of the decade, most 4 and 5 star hotel rooms housed a mini-bar, and the device was at the height of its renaissance.
But hotels would soon learn that the minibar came with a number of problems: it required additional labor (usually, in the form of a dedicated “mini-bar operator”), the overstocking of goods routinely led to “spoilage,” and guests stole items — specifically the tiny bottles of vodka, which were often consumed and refilled with water.
Over time, managers have come to realize that the mini-bar is far from an idyllic cash cow. In a 2012 survey, nearly 500 hotel owners unanimously agreed that re-stocking mini-bars was a “nightmare,” and 84% reported they'd had guests dodge bills by stealing items and replacing them with inferior goods.
-- Paul Johnson is building quite the reputation on the golf course.
Bo might know long drives, but Paul knows winning golf tournaments.
Georgia Tech coach Paul Johnson proved once again he knows his way around a golf course, teaming with Jon Barry to win their second straight Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl Challenge charity golf tournament Tuesday outside Atlanta. Talk about home-course advantage.
Johnson and Barry have won the tournament four times in the last five years.
And by the looks of it, Johnson takes his golf pretty seriously. Game face is securely on, even after the playoff victory.
As for the Clemson contingent ... well ... ol' Dabo probably hasn't had much time to work on his golf game recently as he coaches one of his son's travel baseball team.
On Monday, Bo Jackson won the long drive competition in the celebrity division, while Barry finished second. But Jackson's long drives didn't help Tuesday -- Auburn finished 10th.
That was better than the Clemson team of Dabo Swinney and Steve Fuller, and the North Carolina team of Roy Williams and Larry Fedora. Clemson finished 11th at 1-under; North Carolina was last at 2-over.
-- Notre Dame's AD says a ban on satellite camps would face legal scrutiny.
The SEC and ACC want a national rule preventing college football coaches from staging satellite camps far off campus. Nick Saban is complaining that satellite camps are “ridiculous.” NCAA president Mark Emmert says the issue will be at the top of the list for the NCAA's Football Oversight Committee.
Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick offers some cautionary advice to the NCAA: Good luck defending yourself against another antitrust lawsuit.
“The NCAA does not have a very good track record of limiting, without losing an antitrust lawsuit, economic opportunities for coaches,” Swarbrick said Tuesday at the College Football Playoff meetings. “So they should be treading very lightly. The perception is these are school opportunities. A lot of these are coach opportunities purely. Imagine a rule that said, as was introduced years ago, coaches couldn't do national televised advertising because it created a recruiting advantage. … I wouldn't want to defend those lawsuits.”
In 2005, there was talk of an NCAA rule to address Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski appearing on television commercials, especially his starring role in an American Express ad. The complaint: It was an unfair recruiting pitch to recruits and parents. As then-NCAA president Myles Brand said at the time about Krzyzewski's appearances, “Even if we had rules, they might be illegal under antitrust issues.”
-- In Newport News, David Teel says Jim Delany and the Big Ten are curious agents for radical temperance in college sports.
The collective academic shortcomings of football and basketball athletes are best discussed at length in a sociology thesis exploring economics, race, secondary public education and a culture that rewards its entertainers with excessive money and status. But the basic fact is, football and basketball players are far less-prepared than their counterparts in other sports, let alone the student population at large, for college's academic rigors.
Back in the Dark Ages, the NCAA used to print annual Graduation Rates reports of 600-plus pages. And for many of those years, until 1998, the data included average standardized test scores and high school core grade-point averages for incoming athletes, broken down by sport.
Football and men's basketball always lagged behind, often by wide margins. The 1998 report, for example, charted more than 27,000 scholarship athletes who entered Football Bowl Subdivision schools from 1994-97, and the average GPAs were 2.84 for basketball, 2.85 football and 3.29 all others. The average SAT scores were 936 basketball, 948 football, 1,035 others.
-- And finally, for today's musical offering we present John Legend and The Roots covering a protest song by Bill Withers:
