Hlas column: In college football, championships and compromise go hand in hand

On Saturday, The Gazette published a letter to the editor from someone insisting Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz be fired because of what he called “a discipline problem” in Ferentz's program.

Last week's arrest of former Hawkeye wide receiver Derrell Johnson-Koulianos on multiple drug charges inspired the letter. The writer noted “nearly 20 of his players were perp-walked before rolling television cameras” in Ferentz's tenure.

Obviously, the ideal number of arrests per major-college football team each and every year would be zero. It would also be great to find a kicker who could be counted on to make 60-yard field goals in a pinch.

Lots of fans want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want their team competing for national-titles and doing so with only the highest-quality of human beings. The problem is, opponents will always be willing to compromise.

Auburn's Cam Newton is this year's Heisman Trophy winner. Never mind the shenanigans involving his father that put young Cam's services up for bid last year when Newton was a junior college player. Newton had an actual rap sheet.

In November 2008 while a backup quarterback at the University of Florida, Newton was arrested and charged with felony counts of burglary, larceny and obstruction of justice.

Newton was suspended from the Gators' team and turned up at Blinn Junior College. It's been reported he already had a foot on a banana peel at Florida, that he'd had three different instances of academic cheating and faced potential expulsion from the university.

He can sure play ball, though, and Auburn is in the national-title game.

So is Oregon. Its star is LaMichael James, a Heisman finalist and the winner of this year's Doak Walker Award as the nation's top running back. James pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor domestic violence charge earlier this year.

Now, there are two sides to every story. Dennis Dodd of CBSsports.com, a college sports writer whose work I highly respect, recently wrote “James doesn't come off as innocent, but he certainly isn't the monster that the initial reports painted.”

But Oregon had four players arrested and three dismissed from the team in the first two months of 2010.

You're supposed to have nothing but 100 percent choir boys off the field who have laser-like focus on the field when it comes to dominating opponents in a physical, violent sport.

I guess coaches should be able to look into every recruit's soul, project how their character will evolve over the next four or five years, and have some sort of 24-hour surveillance system in place over each of them.

Now, the criticism that poured Ferentz's way in 2007 wasn't unwarranted. There were so many arrests of Hawkeye players that year, and some of the crimes were truly heinous. It was totally justifiable to ask just who it was that Iowa coaches were recruiting, and why.

Since that bad year of 2007, things had been subdued for the football team from a police blotter standpoint. But can you keep bringing in 25 or so college-aged males every year without someone going off the tracks?

Doesn't the law of averages given the mental wiring of 18- to 22-year-old men make that difficult to avoid, no matter the amount of counseling, tutoring and rules they have in place?

But then comes this thing with Johnson-Koulianos, this unseemly, highly publicized arrest. If it's just this one player and the story ends there, Hawkdom can exhale and move along soon enough. Until the next one.

Many fans want to believe that the young men they cheer for, the players who wear the colors those fans love so much, are all noble warriors. And it's just not so. It never has been and never will be.

Many are downright fine people, of course. I think the percentage is amazingly high, in fact.

Those are the players the coaches send forward to the media week after week during the season. They are then presented to you as the standard of their teams via warm and gooey portraits. I've written plenty over the years, and I'll stand behind nearly all of them.

But it's not a total picture of any squad, and I daresay there's no way it could be.

Teams that are truly chasing national-championships take a few recruiting risks. I'm not saying they recruit from prison yards, but they take marginal students whose home lives aren't exactly the American dream.

Florida, which won two national-titles in Urban Meyer, had over two dozen players arrested in Meyer's 6-year tenure. Alabama, last year's national-champion, had 10 players busted during Nick Saban's first year-and-a-half at that school including a team captain.

By ESPN's tabulation, Penn State had 46 players arrested on 163 charges between 2002 and Aug. 1, 2008. That program is led by college football's paragon of virtue, Joe Paterno.

Big men on campus don't spend Saturday nights at the campus malt shop. And they never have.

So, you probably have to decide if you want to be a genuine national-title contender, or merely as good as you can possibly be by playing it as safe as possible in recruiting.

But we all know everybody wants it all. Good luck with that.