Seminoles suspend five players after wild on campus melee

Florida State doesn’t have a great team this year—at least not by their lofty standards—but they’ve scrapped to a 7-2 record and have a big game this weekend against Boston College. They’re 4-2 in the ACC and tied with Wake Forest in the Atlantic Division, so a win against the Eagles would greatly enhance their chances of making it to the conference championship game. What better time for a group of football players to get into what is being described as an “on-campus brawl”?

As a result of the melee, FSU coach Bobby Bowden has announced the suspension of five players—all wide receivers. Riding the pine for the BC game are Taiwan Esterling, Bert Reed, Corey Surrency, Cameron Wade and Richard Goodman. The venerable Seminoles coach swung like a hammer and announced the suspensions even before a full police report had been completed:

"The police report has not been concluded, but from the information that I have gathered, I am suspending five players who were apparently involved in the fray.”

Here’s what is known of the fracas: there is apparently some sort of ongoing “feud” between the Seminole football team and members of the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity (not to be confused with the Phi Beta Kappa honorary society, who presumably have better things to do than “feud” with the football team). This “feud” began to escalate last weekend when members of the fraternity and the football team got into a disagreement at a local nightclub over the attentions of an unidentified girl. This unseemly and chauvinistic bone of contention again reared its ugly head at the FSU student union earlier this week.

The aforementioned group of Seminole wide receivers jumped the fraternity members and fisticuffs were enjoined. At one point in the brough-ha-ha, a participant was stabbed in the face with a pencil. A couple of other well meaning ladies (not the Helen of Troy-esque vision that set off the squabble) tried to serve as peacemakers—one was slugged for her efforts, while another was hit over the head with a chair. At one point, the football players began to forcibly drag the fraternity members up the stairs of Moore Auditorium whereupon they attempted to slam them through tables a la pro wrestling tag team “The Dudley Boys”. Not long after the ersatz-pro wrestling escapades began, the campus police arrived to restore order.

Though Bowden suspended the likely instigators, he labors under the mistaken impression that on-campus student union brawls between football players and fraternity members are common occurrences on American college campuses:

"You’re dealing with 17, 18, 19, 20 year olds. Some of them use poor, terribly poor judgment at times when you have to discipline (for) it...It's a black eye. But gee whiz, you name me a school that doesn't have a black eye somewhere down the line. None of us like it. But life is made up of disappointments. It's how you respond to them is what decides whether you are successful or not. So we'll respond to this thing in a positive way and we'll end up making it work in our favor."

Bowden also appears to have forgotten that these students with poor judgment are football players that he and his staff recruited. It does happen at time to time on other college campuses—earlier this year some University of South Carolina players brawled with some wanna-be gang banger types in *their* student union—but it’s hardly the widespread phenomenon that Bowden would have you believe.

Not surprisingly, the school administration isn’t buying Bowden’s “gee whiz, boys will be boys” explanation. Jim Smith, President of the FSU Board of Trustees, isn’t too happy with the football team right now:

“I think a lot of us have forgotten we put ourselves on probation. I don’t think it will be impressive to the people in Indianapolis with the NCAA to see reports of continuing problems. … I believe somewhere down the chain of command somebody is not doing their job. A few people continue to ruin a great football program that is trying to go in the right direction. I want to let folks know this board is concerned,"

FSU President T.K. Wetherell—apparently unaware that per Coach Bowden on campus brawls are practically everyday occurrences at American colleges--added that this undermines the reputation of the university:

"There comes some closure but there is a point when you draw the line and I think we've probably crossed that in a couple of places. It just tarnishes what everybody is doing."