If you’re a wake-and-bake football player who really enjoys the higher things in life, you should strongly consider Florida, Illinois, Purdue and UCLA as a place to ply your talents. By the same token (see what I did there?), players shouldn’t be too high on Utah, Duke, Mississippi State and North Carolina.
So says an expansive -- and outstanding -- report from ace AOL Fanhouse writer Brett McMurphy.
In the report, McMurphy obtained the substance abuse policies of 60 of the 68 BcS schools and, not surprisingly, found there were striking differences in how individual schools deal with recreational drug use by their athletes.
Utah is by far the school with the strictest policy based on Fanhouse’s research. The Salt Lake City institution is the only one to suspend a student-athlete for a year after a second positive test. Duke, Mississippi State and North Carolina suspend players for 50 percent of their games following a second drug test, making them one of the toughest in the nation.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are Florida, Illinois, Purdue and UCLA. Those four schools allow up to five positive tests before a player is up for dismissal. Fully half of the 60 schools call for dismissal of players that test positive three times; at Purdue and UCLA, a third positive results in a one-game suspension.
In the hyper-competitive SEC, a third positive test at Auburn, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee triggers a dismissal. The same number of positives at Alabama, LSU and Mississippi State is worth a one-year suspension. At Florida, a third positive nets a player a suspension of 20 percent of the games in that sport’s regular season, with dismissal not in the equation until a fifth test comes up positive.
As noted by Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe, that’s a fairly significant competitive advantage for the schools with very lenient policies toward drug use. Former Texas Tech -- and possibly future Maryland -- head coach Mike Leach agreed, saying during a radio show last week that three strikes are too many, let alone five.
The vast discrepancies from institution to institution are certainly eye-opening but not unexpected as it’s up to the individual school to set policy, not the NCAA. The governing body of collegiate athletes is only responsible for meting out punishment for performance-enhancing drugs.
Based on the competitive advantages some schools obtain because of their policy, however, it might behoove everyone involved to find a way to come up with a more uniform way of dealing with the punishments doled out for recreational drug use.
