It’s easy to read the news that University of Tennessee at Chattanooga sophomore quarterback Cole Copeland has been suspended for the upcoming season due to academic issues, recall that former quarterback Alejandro Bennifield was suspended by the NCAA for the first four games of last season for academic inadequacies, and decide that something’s not right in Mocsville.
Maybe second-year coach Tom Arth isn’t as diligent about the student half of student-athlete as he should be. Maybe the school’s academic support team – never as well-funded or well-staffed as its big brother up the road in Knoxville – is falling short of its preferred goals. Maybe there are other internal issues distracting the players, or at least the quarterbacks, from their studies.
But what if it’s far less complicated than that? What if a couple of guys manning the highest profile position on the team simply didn’t do their jobs off the field? What if they let down their coaches, their tutors, their teammates and their fans rather than the other way around?
What if somewhere along the road to FCS stardom they forgot that college football – heck, college athletics in general – is a privilege rather than a right? What if they forgot, or ignored, the responsibility that comes with being a quarterback, the supposed leader of the team? What if it was all their fault, or at least mostly their fault, rather than all those well-meaning folks around them?
This question is asked at least partly because the quick finger always points to the coach, even one as academically driven as Arth, who arrived at UTC from John Carroll, one of those Division III programs such as Sewanee which doesn’t give athletic scholarships.