Uch

Get a fucking clue

Addle-minded Jason Whitlock proposes his solution to the Colorado football sexual assault crisis as follows:

Unfortunately, the real criminal in this whole affair is still lurking around the CU campus and just about every other campus in America. We all know him. Most of us have loved him at one time in our lives. He's so powerful and seductive that we rarely speak against him ... even after he's whipped us to our knees, made our heads spin and throb in pain, and forced us to do unimaginable things we'd never tell our children.

Alcohol.

CU's problems would be solved simply by outlawing the use of alcohol by its athlete-students. Any scholarship athlete caught consuming alcohol and/or failing a randomly-administered breathalyzer test would lose his or her scholarship, permanently. Zero tolerance.

Would the athletes try to sneak and cheat? Absolutely. I'd make them blow into a breathalyzer every morning before class. End of cheating. End of problem.

Getting drunk is the No. 1 sport in college; it's bigger than football and the NCAA Tournament combined. I did it. I could binge-drink with the best of them when I was a college football player at Ball State. Every stupid thing I ever did in college happened as a result of binge-drinking. Luckily, I survived.

I didn't get pinched for beating up a kid at Papa Lou's Chug because he had the audacity to dance with a girl with whom I had flirted in one of my journalism classes. (She got ticked at me and went home with our three-time MAC defensive player of the year.) I never got pinched for drinking and driving, or for walking into Village Pantry with no money and leaving with a sandwich and a drink.

I was a drunken fool, and so were many of my teammates (and classmates). It was stupid and dangerous.

C'mon, Jason. Get real. Prohibition is a silly "you're grounded, go to your room" response to a legitimate problem on campuses and in society. Booze isn't the culprit. Football playing, 'roid popping, entitlement-expecting assholes are the problem. Sure, alcohol can exacerbate the situation. But a bunch of football recruits aren't going to gang rape, date rape, hook up with, jump (call it what you will) co-eds merely because they've been imbibing. Hell, the culture of football breeds an arrogance that feeds their "get what you want, when you want it" attitude and expectations.

I was a binge-drinking fool while I was in college (and last night, for that matter) and so were most of my friends. Guess what? Alcohol didn't make me try to rape anyone. Or shoplift. Or get into a fight. Bad things happened to all of us, sure. But none of them came close to felonies. Alcohol made me sick. On many occasions. Many. Many. And, yes, I drove when I absolutely had no business behind the wheel of a car. But guess what?

Underlying the .2 BAC, I'm not a reprobate or an aggressive asshole (superficial as hell, yeah . . . but that's a whole other post), while a significant number of these football players and recruits are. And that's year-in and year-out, on campuses across the country. Sure, you may be a nice guy now (not a great writer, but a nice guy nonetheless), but, face it, you were probably a hell of a prick at Ball State. And wanna know something? It wasn't the hooch. It was the individual.

Alcohol's the heart of the problem [ESPN.com Page 2]