Quack

So I was doing my daily scan of sports-related websites and I found this story on si.com. It was one of their headlining pieces for the days by Michael McKnight. It has to do with Jeremiah Masoli, formerly a quarterback at the University of Oregon, and his recent run-ins with the law, all leading up to his eventual expulsion from the team. I found it very interesting to read some of the finer details of the incidents in question, both of his involvement in the robbery of some items from a frat house on campus, and when marijuana was found in his car during a routine traffic stop in Oregon. Please read it if you are interested in this sort of thing, as it was written very well, although you will catch a slight bias in favor of Masoli, deflecting blame for and justifying his actions on both occasions and one previous one from years before. While I feel that Masoli got a raw deal out of the whole thing (even though he may end up playing for Ole' Miss, another really good division-1 program), he is responsible for his own actions.

According to the story, he plead guilty to robbery when he was a teenager and served time in a juvenile detention center. He was involved in a robbery of two Macbook computers, a guitar, and a projector at that frat house on Oregon's campus, and was found by police with marijuana in the glove box of his car, both of which occurred years after the first robbery incident. In all three incidents in question, other people were associated and involved as well. This is were a lot of the blame is deflected to others in McKnight's article. It does seem that Masoli was only involved only slightly in most cases, even with a few questions still unanswered. But when there are three occasions and you have plead guilty in all three of them, you have a problem. Where there's smoke there's fire. Guilty by association. Name any other cliché legal mumbo jumbo and that describes Jeremiah Masoli. Whether you physically robbed a kid and took his wallet, grabbed a guitar or a laptop computer from a frat boy's room, or physically put that marijuana in the glove box for whatever reason, you are guilty and you now have a criminal history, a precedent of being involved in illegal happenings. If you're not guilty, don't plead guilty. If you didn't do anything wrong, don't say that you did and initially lie to the police.

McKnight recounts Masoli's kinda' sorta engagement of the robbery of another teens wallet when he was young and still living in California. This is what he says about Masoli's thoughts and feelings regarding the incident; '"Masoli appears to still harbor remorse as he describes how he failed that day. He says he should have been the leader his father had raised him to be; should have herded the guys back to the truck and told them how stupid this was; should never have gotten back in the truck with the stolen wallet and the guys who stole it." This is the part I have the biggest problem with. You were involved and you did nothing to try and stop your "friends" or whoever these other guys were. You didn't walk away. You didn't protest the actions. I was watching one of my favorite movies the other day, "The Boondock Saints." In it at the beginning, the guest Priest at the brothers' church says a great line that applies to Jeremiah Masoli and how he is portrayed by Michael McKnight. The line says this; "We must always fear the wicked. But there is another kind of evil that we must fear the most, and that is the indifference of good men." Jeremiah Masoli is guilty by association, but more importantly he is guilty of not keeping himself above the influence of people and places where he ends up in a courtroom. The University of Oregon did right by kicking him off the team. Let's hope Ole' Miss fosters an environment where he can keep himself out of trouble.