Scorecard

NFL Rap Sheet
Crime and Banishment

Lock the doors. Hide the women and children. Here comes the NFL.

That's the message of the book Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL, which has persuaded some fans and pundits that pro football players are a menace to society. Authors Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger (an SI associate editor) ran background checks on 509 of the 1,650 men who played in the NFL during the 1996-97 season. They found that 21% had been arrested or indicted for what the authors call serious crimes. Benedict and Yaeger tell hellish tales of rapes and assaults committed by convicted NFL perps and call on the league to ban players who have been arrested repeatedly. "Sunday's heroes," they write, "can no longer be Tuesday's wife beaters or Wednesday's rapists."

Recent headlines have added to the drumbeat. St. Louis Rams linebacker Leonard Little, allegedly driving drunk, crashed into another driver, killing her. Rookie defensive end Jeff Danish sues the New Orleans Saints after teammates allegedly beat him in a hazing incident. Saints quarterback Keny Collins, the poster boy for vapor lock, gets jailed for drunken driving hours after assuring coach Mike Ditka that he has cleaned up his act.

So who do you like this week, the Stealers? The Dol-felons?

Before we throw the playbook at NFL players, however, it's worth noting that the charges might not stick. Start with the numbers. Benedict and Yaeger asked the league for data on players' criminal records, but got no response. So they gathered their own information. Of the 264 arrests they document—many of which occurred before the players joined the NFL—about a third were for drunken driving, resisting arrest, carrying a weapon without a permit or possession of marijuana. These are serious matters, but nowhere near the red zone of crimes such as rape and assault, which provide the book's most disturbing accounts. In any case, as the authors state, the data in Pros and Cons pertain to arrests, not convictions. As Richard Jewell and even Michael Irvin can tell you, being accused isn't the same as being guilty.

Further, while "21 percent arrested or indicted" may sound like a crime wave, there's no such thing as a crime-free profession. How many young men outside the NFL have had brushes with the law? Roughly 15%, according to the latest FBI statistics. That means the stat that counts isn't really 21%, it is 6%, the gap between arrests of NFL players and of men who don't play football.

Finally, Pros and Cons relies on a naive view of pro sports. The authors applaud William Bennett, the archconservative author of The Book of Virtues, who told them that NFL stars "are role models for young people...boys, in particular," and should be held to higher standards than the rest of us. Pros and Cons contends that jocks who demonstrate "a pattern of run-ins with the law related to violence or drugs," even those who haven't been convicted, "should not be permitted to...carry the mantle of role model."

Wrong. It's absurd to ask the NFL to police the off-field activities of more than 2,500 players, exonerating the innocent and expelling the guilty. We have police, judges and juries for that. As for the "role model" argument, most of us realized long ago that jocks are no more or less virtuous than anybody else. Looking to the NFL for moral guidance is like asking the Vatican when to blitz.

The Waterboy
No Splash Hit