Football players should always be eligible for the NFL draft

By Grant Hughes

This will be the first and last time you'll ever read the following words, so be sure and let them sink in: Maurice Clarett has got his head screwed on perfectly straight. Leaving Ohio State early, subsequently allowing many underclassman to declare themselves eligible for the NFL draft, is the best decision Clarett has ever made. He's unwittingly leading his people (ultra-talented Division I sophomores) out of the desert of major college football and into the promised land of the NFL.

Pittsburgh sophomore Larry Fitzgerald quickly followed Clarett's lead, challenging the NFL rule that mandates a player must be at least three years removed from the completion of his high school career to turn pro. Now, USC receiver Mike Williams is testing the legal waters and will likely follow Clarett and Fitzgerald into the NFL.

Oh, but wait just a second! Shouldn't these young men continue maturing on a college campus? Shouldn't they pursue academia during the week and hone their athletic skills on Saturdays instead of Sundays? Aren't we robbing them of a safer, more nurturing environment by allowing them to rush headlong into the NFL, a grown man's league?

Absolutely not.

By now we've all heard the stories out of the University of Colorado at Boulder; stories involving everything from racy recruiting parties to rape. We also know that the 11 arrests of linebacker Willie Williams, the No. 1 high school recruit in the nation, are not hurting his stock with the University of Miami. The hypocrisy of the public's reaction to these issues is an enormous contradiction. How can we encourage athletes to spend four years in college in one breath, while in the next condemning the morally disgusting events on campus?

The behavioral standards for many Division I college football players are nonexistent. In this type of environment, in which consequences are thrown out the window or ignored entirely, how can a player be expected to become mature? When a coach does everything in his power to cover up any bad behavior on the part of his star players, how can the athletes be expected to learn to be responsible? Let's face it, the notion that a college campus is the best place for an athlete to become an upstanding citizen is an outdated one.

The one thing that college football players are taught at programs like the University of Colorado is that the bottom line is all that counts. As long as the team wins, nothing else matters. Never was this point more clearly proven than in 1990, when the Buffaloes won their only national championshipâ€"using 24 players with police records.

So, with the already shoddy reputations of many college football programs taking some major hits lately, can we finally stop all the fuss about players wanting to leave early for the NFL? My advice to any other athletes thinking about leaving their football programs early is very simple: Get Out! Get out now while you still can and once you're out, don't look back. Head for the NFL, where they at least admit that their only concerns are money and winning. Since major college football programs are basically a minor league system for the NFL anyway, why hold back the reins on players that are ready to compete at the highest level in all the land?

We're lying to ourselves when we say guys like Maurice Clarett go to college to do anything besides play football. As long as the crooked programs of schools like Colorado exist, there is absolutely no validity to any argument against players leaving early. If we were genuinely concerned with improving our student-athletes as people, we'd probably encourage them to skip college altogether.

û Contact Grant Hughes at (408) 554-4852 or ghughes@scu.edu.