Making sense of Mike McNeil and the Auburn Tigers
What the hell, if anything, is going on at Auburn University? It’s some kind of mess and in the end, Mike McNeil will have pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery and will serve three years in jail.
But if that’s how it ends, it’s sure tough to know exactly what happened that lead to this. McNeil is an ex-football player, a member of the 2010 National Championship team of the Auburn Tigers. He played safety and contributed 14 tackles in the school’s win over the Oregon Ducks in the 2011 BCS Championship game. It’s games like these that had some people think that McNeil could perhaps be an NFL player too some day. But he’s not an NFL safety.
He’ll be in jail for three years, then on a strict probation for another three and will need to pay $2,000 in restitution too. All because of a prank – that’s what McNeil’s attorney said when he entered his plea, and that’s also what the officer first told McNeil’s parents when the young man was arrested in March 2011. A prank? It sure turned sour somewhere.
The details of Mike McNeil’s predicament come from Selena Roberts, once a reporter for The New York Times and for Sports Illustrated and now the woman behind the Roopstigo website.
The story of Mike McNeil is one of a young man who finds himself abandoned when he gets arrested and who discovers that when a school recruits him by saying that he’ll be part of a family, it really doesn’t mean much. Essentially, that’s what this supposed story is about – that Auburn University chose to distance itself from McNeil, Antonio Goodwin, Dakota Mosley and Shaun Kitchens once they were charged with armed robbery. It’s one of the usual NCAA scandals. They should have been innocent until proven guilty, but were quickly dismissed from the football team and then told not to set foot on the university campus. Really, this is all that this story is about and if that were all that Roberts tried to write, then all would be well.
Only, Roberts tries to hammer home the point that maybe Auburn didn’t defend McNeil because he was privy to other scandals. You know, the typical NCAA scandals that are academic fraud, recruiting violations and payments to players. It’s shaky, at best. Though all three are actual NCAA infractions, I won’t be the one throwing the first stone to the Auburn administration. Academic fraud? Well, the players aren’t on campus to study to begin with, so really what’s the big harm? There’s nothing wrong with payment to players either, not with the absurd sums of cash going to schools and that come from the players themselves. Coaches earn millions because they can teach a team of 12 how to play zone defense, but these same players don’t get any piece of the pie?
Then, there’s an E:60 investigation, which also refers to that college-prank-turned-robbery. The focus isn’t so much on Mike McNeil, but rather on what was apparently rampant drug use at Auburn at the time. Cocaine? No, marijuana… Wait, college players and students were smoking weed at Auburn? To be fair, let’s note that this was a synthetic marijuana strain known as spice, one that has been documented as possibly leading to psychotic effects such as extreme anxiety, paranoia and hallucinations according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Spice is what the kids call weed, and in this case it looks like the kids at Auburn University smoked weed a little too often. The investigation seems to suggest that spice might have been responsible for whatever it is that unfolded on that night that ultimately led to the conviction of Goodwin, McNeil and potentially that of Mosley and Kitchens too. Hmm, well again, college kids tend to smoke and they tend to do unfortunate things when they do.
Beyond, could the university have been complicit to this abuse? Could Auburn have been aware of this drug use, but withhold any actions in order to save what was fast becoming a memorable football season? Possibly, but it’s tough to gauge just how much Auburn did or didn’t do, says SB Nation’s Jason Kirk.
What is clear, however, is that the NCAA informed its schools about spice only on Dec. 13, 2010, that the Auburn Tigers won the 2011 National Championship on Jan. 10, 2011, that the school started testing for the drug 17 days later and, finally, that the NCAA banned the drug in August 2011. Just how quickly should have Auburn reacted once it knew that spice existed and was a problem? Again, its football team was preparing for a national championship game when it heard about spice in December 2010, a game that would be played less than a month later. Whether right or wrong, this is the NCAA. It’s the place where there is an official ladder to cut the net at the 2013 NCAA men’s basketball national championship, because that’s another way to make a quick buck. Not only that, but spice was only permanently banned in July 2012 by the American government. So really, what did Auburn need to do?
(For a good overview of how tenuous this two-part scandal may be, see the good folks at SB Nation. And here’s Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs addressing some of the same points.)
If you believe the reporters, then, that’s that. But please know that some of the players interviewed have now backtracked and said that their words were taken out of context. It’s akin to the modern “my Twitter account has been hacked.” Bo Jackson has quickly dismissed the allegations and so have Gene Chizik and Gus Malzahn, who were both on the Auburn coaching staff in 2010.
But of course, they would say that. Perhaps this remains in line with everything that the university has shown up to that point in the sense that the school would reach out to those players and pressure them into withdrawing their comments.
Regardless, it’s a special kind of mess that’s unfolding at Auburn right now. It’s not quite as maddening as that Mike Rice/Rutgers scandal – and yet, Mike McNeil will serve three years while ex-teammates Mosley and Kitchens await their own trial. Goodwin, another ex-teammate, received a 15-year sentence last year. What happens next is so difficult to know, in part because it’s so difficult to see what happened before.
The irony, of course, is that the NCAA will likely only bother if the allegations for payments to players prove to be true. There’s a lot of money to be made in college athletics, and none of it should go to the players.
War Damn Eagle. One way or another.
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