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Ohio State’s Backup Quarterback Will Now Be Roundly Criticized For Saying What Everyone Probably Thinks

Cardale Jones is a college freshman. Like many college freshmen, he recently did something regrettable on a social media platform. Unlike many college freshmen, he plays football for Ohio State, so when he does something regrettable on a social media platform, a whole lot of people find out about it, and quickly. Here is Jones’ misfire:

If you go looking for that tweet, don’t bother: his account’s protected, and according to those who’d be able to see, the tweet’s been deleted. And it’s easy to see why: obviously this stuff never sounds good, and even if you think it you shouldn’t say it in a place where anyone would be able to see and disseminate it, you want kids who are in college to care about school, etc. All that is true.

But here’s what’s also true: Jones spoke for a whole lot of college football players there. Did he speak for all of them? Of course not. But despite what the NCAA would love for you to think, even though most student-athletes are going pro in something other than sports, a lot of those kids – especially in the revenue sports that drive the NCAA’s existence – are in school because they’re good at basketball or football or whatever sport it is they’re good at. Ohio State relaxes its normal academic standards for football players. You know who else does? Harvard and Princeton, and everywhere else on down the line. And when you do that, some kids you’ll get won’t be real serious students.

And hell, beyond speaking for many college athletes, Jones spoke for a whole lot of college students, period. How many college students feel like classes are pointless enough that they can just blow them off and not go? At least half the kids in every meeting (except maybe the first one, so they could get the syllabus) of at least one class you took in college, we’d bet.

We’re not saying it wouldn’t be great if every major college football player were also a biomedical engineering major and/or MacArthur-fellowship-receiving prodigy… or even just really, genuinely cared about focusing on their degree. That would be the ideal world. It’s also not the world we live in. In the world we live in, schools admit kids because they’re good at a sport and then place them in no-show classes to keep them eligible to play that sport. Hey, if the school doesn’t care about the kid’s actual education, why should they?

So if you root for an Ohio State rival, before you go feeling too smug about the superiority of your program’s integrity, remember the only difference between Jones and a whole lot of guys on whatever team you root for is that Jones let the world know what he thought. His tweet will change nothing, except that maybe this time Urban Meyer really will ban his players from using Twitter. Major college sports will keep attracting huge crowds and tons of attention, so schools will keep on bringing in kids who’d just as soon scrap the “college” part of college sports entirely. The system is still the system. To change that, it would take a whole lot more than one person being honest about it.

Photo by John Kuntz for the Plain Dealer, via

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