Nice week so far for SEC football.
LSU has its starting quarterback suspended indefinitely. South Carolina has a starting wide receiver suspended. Alabama suspends a defensive lineman who allegedly robbed two people at gunpoint. And Tennessee suspends its starting punter after his fifth alcoholic incident.
It’s enough to make Michael Slive embarrassed.
But probably not the coaches.
Nobody should be more embarrassed than Tennessee fans. Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist John Adams was so outraged at the softness of Phil Fulmer’s discipline of Britton Colquitt, he wrote that time should be up for the dean of SEC coaches.
Adams, who is a friend of mine, is dead right. Colquitt had four alcohol-related offenses in his past and still got behind the wheel and crashed into a parked car. If that’s not enough to get you kicked off the team, well, you probably can’t get kicked off the team.
I’ve said it before and I’ll reiterate that I believe part of the problem for Tennessee, which hasn’t won an SEC title since 1998, is Fulmer’s insistence to look the other way. It’s a pattern that eventually caught up with Florida State and it caught up with Tennessee.
Take a stand, man. And Les Miles should as well. If he lets Ryan Perilloux back as his quarterback, Miles is setting a tone for behavior.
We always talk about coaches being leaders of men. It’s time they acted like it.
