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(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Nothing to See Here!

'...[Q]uestioning persist[s] about the third arrest of a Washington football player in 10 months...

... Murchison, a junior-college transfer, spent a night in jail after turning himself to police for missing a court date last month on his assault charge. Murchison was also arrested in June on misdemeanor charges of domestic violence assault and harassment. He has a Sept. 24 date to review his progress fulfilling a stipulated order of continuance - essentially probation - on those charges.

In October, Seattle police arrested running back Michael Houston, a transfer from Texas, for circumstances surrounding the theft of a taxi cab. Willingham immediately suspended Houston and then kicked him off the team. Houston never played in a game for UW.

Are the arrests undermining [the new coach's] rebuilding progress?'



So far so dull. A university's team begins to slip; good reliable players aren't interested; in desperation, the coach recruits the dread transfers, who are often fuckups; they fuck up...

But UD's always interested in the damage control language the athletic staff comes up with... Here's how it sounds at the University of Washington:


'"I don't know that it necessarily undermines [our efforts]," said Todd Turner, Willingham's boss as Huskies athletic director. "It serves as a further reminder that even the best-intended, diligent efforts to avoid these sorts of things are difficult to sustain. [I wouldn't call recruiting criminals a diligent effort to avoid the effects of recruiting criminals... And sure, none of this undermines your efforts... Everything's fine...]

"At the end of the day, you can't control what kids do. What you can control is how you respond." [Apparently you can't control that either, since you continue to recruit criminals.]

The arrests highlight a change in how Willingham has had to do business while at Washington. Years of losses, coaching changes and turmoil have kept blue-chip recruits away from the UW. ...

That's left Willingham to try to transform Washington partly through the crapshoot of signing junior-college transfers.

"Usually athletes in junior colleges who aspire to play at Division 1 have issues," Turner said. "Either academically they weren't prepared, physically they aren't talented enough, or they are there because of a character issue that someone else didn't want to deal with."

"We've created this. But if we had a different situation to start with (not at rock bottom), we might not find ourselves in the situation that we're in now." Murchison - who transferred from City College of San Francisco - would be the sixth of nine such Huskies transfers to fail to contribute as expected during Willingham's tenure. Does that discourage him from seeking more junior-college players?'




Nah! Everything's fine. Students look forward to their yearly athletics fee going toward this new project of ours...