Montana State athletes' legal problems

[JackJD]

Saw this link on the Montana Grizzlies' fan message board...link to a Sports Illustrated Story about trouble in paradise: the criminal problems of Montana State athletes and former athletes.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...813/index.html

The article's author, George Dohrmann, joined Sports Illustrated several years ago, moving from the St. Paul Pioneer Press where he won three Pulitzer Prizes in journalism...he was the guy who dug out the facts about Jan Ganglehof writing papers etc for U of Minnesota basketball players which eventually led to the downfall of Clem Haskins.

An interesting read. One has to feel a little sorry for the long-time citizens of Bozeman who feel their safe little town has a certain unwelcome element due to MSU athletics.

[Haldersham]

Re: Montana State athletes' legal problems

A very interesting article and well written. You can not help think of Brookings and SDSU when reading this article. Will there be a similar situation down the road? Only time will tell, but we could learn from this experience and do some things to prevent this from happening. I have no problems with additional background checks and passing on athletism if there is not otherwise a good fit of a student athlete. We need to ask does SDSU exist just for athletic accompolishments or do we offer education too? A little sarcastic, but a realistic question to be asked. I think too that it is exploitive to ask an athlete to participate just to use his athletic body to fill a staduim or an arena, with out a thought that this individual has a productive life after eligibilty to live. How can we prepare him for that part of his life? We need to do that also and we can do this with a quality education that is earned by completing the requirements of each course.

We need to use every once of diversity resouces to make our student athletes from urban areas fit in which apparently was not done in Bozemen. It looked to me that there was a big push to have the football program to be a winner at any price. A price has been paid and its going to take a long time to recover.