Jacksonville State Looks to UF for Answers, Inspiration

And who better to look to? The Florida Gators are the in crowd. They've won two championships in three years and are led by an angelic quarterback who makes the rest of us look like puppy eating sinners. How did they get to this point? Jacksonville State is looking all the way back to 1984 to find out.
The St. Petersburg Times, in their September 14, 1989 edition, recalled that

"the university's football program channeled money and gifts to players, spied on opponents' practices and maintained slush funds."

As a result, the NCAA banned Florida from appearing on national television and banned them from the postseason. They were also docked scholarships. In total, the Gators were deemed guilty of 107 major NCAA violations.

Jacksonville State has followed suit, albeit not entirely. Just as Florida was banned from appearing in the postseason in the mid-eighties, Jacksonville State has been banned from the postseason in 2009. Unlike the Gators of the mid-eighties, though, Jacksonville State has not committed any NCAA infractions. Instead, their punishment stems from the program's failure to meet the standards set by the NCAA's Academic Progress Report for three consecutive seasons. A national television ban was deemed unnecessary.

Still, JSU may be infatuated with the bad boy tactics that have led some of our nation's top programs to glory, fortune and dominance.

The list is overwhelming.

Several Miami Hurricanes of the early nineties are said to have been paid by a local rapper for scoring touchdowns and making big hits. A couple of Seminoles wide receivers received improper discounts at a clothing store in 1997. There was also the 1994 Foot Locker scandal at FSU and Penn State running back Curtis Enis' $1,100 shopping spree courtesy of an agent. More recently, USC came under scrutiny after the Reggie Bush scandal of 2005 was reported, Alabama was busted for the textbook scandal of 2007 and Florida State's online music history class scandal committed between 2006 and 2007 cost the program 14 wins.

There have been plenty of on the field/in the tunnel brawls amongst the nation's top schools--1971 USC/Notre Dame, 1983 USC/Clemson, 1988 Miami/Notre Dame, 1993 Miami/Colorado, 1997 Ole` Miss/Mississippi State, 1998 Florida/Florida State, 2004 Clemson/South Carolina--not to mention plenty of arrests.

In 2008, Gators backup quarterback Cameron Newton was arrested after he stole a laptop from a fellow student and threw it out of a window after being questioned by police. Newton was the fourth Gator arrested in 2008.

The next step for JSU is to find a bad boy to call their own.

Check! Quarterback Ryan Perrilloux, who transferred to JSU after being kicked off of the LSU football team for constantly violating team rules, has been suspended for violating his new team's rules and will sit out the season opener against Georgia Tech before returning to face Florida State the following week.

When it comes down to it, though, every school has slipped up at some point in their program's history. Even the smaller football programs we never hear about have had issues (Dartmouth and Holy Cross brawled on the same day of the infamous Miami/FIU brawl). Too little attention is given to programs trying to clean up their act, play by the rules and/or set higher standards for their athletes; rather, like suburban housewives reading Us Weekly,we find ourselves enthralled by the latest scandal. - Danny Hobrock

Danny Hobrock is a sports journalist who primarily covers college football and professional baseball. He is a contributor for several sports related blogs and is the former editor of a political and current events website.