'...Both [professional] teams and leagues seem to enable player misconduct even as they publicly condemn it: by recruiting players with known character problems, looking the other way when those players get into trouble, and then intervening to spare them bad publicity or legal trouble after-the-fact. In some cases, that's meant assigning team personnel to watch over players and then clean up the messes they left behind...

...It starts in college, if not before, where most schools with major sports programs now have special programs designed to facilitate athletes' easy passage through higher education. In theory, they help athletes cope with the difficulties that come with heavy practice and travel schedules, by offering tutoring and such. In practice, they frequently simply baby-sit players, doing whatever is necessary to maintain their eligibility.

"We had managers at Iowa State whose job it was to take players to class," says Paul Shirley, an NBA journeyman and author of Can I Keep My Jersey?, a newly-published memoir of his time playing basketball. "I mean physically drive to their apartment, put them in a car, drive them to class, wait for them, take them to the next class, and so on." And that may be a relatively benign example of what these support staff do. A few years ago, the University of Tennessee was rocked by scandal when a tenured professor suggested the athletic assistance department was basically doing the athletes homework--although the university, after investigating the matter, concluded the allegations were unfounded.

Sharon Stoll, a University of Idaho professor who has worked as a consultant to national sports organizations, says many college coaches don't mind such behavior. "They tell me, 'you don't know the expense and effort of recruiting them.'" As a result, even those athletes who go to college can leave with a sense that they aren't accountable for their own actions. As Stoll puts it, "If somebody is always there to make sure you don't pay a price, then what do you learn? You learn that you live by a different set of rules."


...Journalist Jeff Benedict has... written two books on the subject. Their titles speak for themselves: Out of Bounds: Inside the NBA's Culture of Rape, Violence, and Crime; and Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL. In the NFL book, published in the late 1990s while Paul Tagliabue was still the league's commissioner, Benedict and a co-author found that more than 500 players had criminal records--including guilty pleas or convictions on such charges related as assault and sexual misconduct. As Benedict and his co-author note, "With [Tagliabue's] recent strong public stance against players' off-field deviance, one might wonder how many of the players in the authors' survey were kicked out of the league? None."'