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.
Because of Bennifield's suspension at the start of last season, Arth's first in charge, the knee-jerk reaction upon finding out Copeland - who started down the stretch of the 2017 season as a true freshman - is also academically ineligible is to blame the head coach.
But check out the football team's academic stats from this past season:
A) Its four-year APR score of 972 is better than the national average of 961.
B) Football tied a program record with five players posting a 4.0 GPA last fall.
C) Twenty-eight members of the football team made the Dean's List in the fall (3.2 GPA), the second-most in one term in program history. Beyond that, 37 football players made the athletic director's honor roll (3.0 GPA) in the fall.
As for the spring term, 26 football players made the Dean's List and 39 football players made the A.D. honor roll.
So there are more than one or two players doing something right. In fact, the academic success rate on campus goes much further than football only. Until this past spring - when the overall GPA for all UTC student-athletes came in at 2.954 - the entire department had posted cumulative GPAs of 3.0 or better for eight straight semesters. Fifteen percent of all UTC student-athletes - 46 total - posted a perfect 4.0 for the spring term. Athletic graduation rates climbed to 81 percent in 2017, which was up from 48 percent in 2010.
A final point: Austin Peay coach Will Healy just hired academic advisor Lisa Tarr away from UTC. If she wasn't doing her job, why would one of the hottest coaching names in FCS football - and someone who knows the Mocs program as well as anyone from his years on staff - want her?
So despite the struggles of Bennifield and Copeland, most of their fellow student-athletes seemed to do a pretty fair job of keeping their eyes and ears and brains on the real prize - a college degree.
But reality checks don't hit everyone at the same time. And there are far easier scenarios to adjust to than being the starting quarterback in the first semester of your freshman collegiate season.
You're suddenly, unexpectedly, the star of stars, especially when you're playing 30 miles from your hometown, as the Bradley Central High School product Copeland was last season. That would be too much adulation and temptation for most freshmen to handle, even one who grew up in a family filled with all the successful athletes the Copelands have produced.
Mocs Nation will surely hope that Copeland learns a valuable lesson from this. It must also hope that the remaining two quarterbacks supposedly in the hunt to start - junior Nick Tiano and junior college transfer Chris James - will perform as well as they reportedly have in summer workouts.
Said Arth of his decision: "At the end of the day, this is an incredible opportunity to be a part of this program and you either do what's asked and expected of you, or you don't. And if you don't, you don't deserve to be a part of it, and the players who are doing what's expected of them, they don't want guys around that aren't willing to do it the right way."
Put another way, a sports writer once asked former Alabama basketball coach Wimp Sanderson how many of his players graduated, knowing the answer was not many.
Said Sanderson without missing a beat, "All who want to."
And when they don't want to, it's hard to argue when the head coach doesn't want them around those who do, whether that separation winds up being for a season or far longer. Those who embrace the privilege of being a student-athlete rather than merely an athlete always seem to understand that.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com