When Mississippi State decided to admit Jeffery Simmons to campus, it revealed the ugly truth about big time college athletics fans so often ignore.
When the news broke yesterday about Jeffery Simmons being admitted to Mississippi State with a simple one game suspension against South Alabama, I was very disappointed. If you read my piece when we first heard about the incident, that probably comes as no surprise to you.
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I was disappointed because the university I love was repeatedly dragged through the mud, and I couldn’t say one thing in its defense. Because admitting Jeffery Simmons to play football, receive a free education, and receive only a slap on the wrist with a one game suspension against a team the Bulldogs should win with or without him is emblematic of the dirty truth about college athletics.
Winning trumps everything.
We all knew the Bulldogs were going to accept Simmons on the team. I was hopeful Scott Stricklin and Dan Mullen could hand out some sort of stiff punishment as a requirement for his admittance to the football team, but they went for the wrist slap. Most of us also saw that coming as well.
What many people did not see coming was Scott Stricklin taking questions from the media while at the SEC Meetings in Destin regarding the situation. As poorly as I think Stricklin handled the situation, I’ll give him lots of credit for being man enough to sit there and answer questions he knew he wasn’t going to have a good answer to. If you want to hear it, you can watch the entire grueling 15 minutes here.
But the most telling part of the entire question and answer session comes right around the 13:00 minute mark. Stricklin is asked whether the fact that if the Bulldogs had not taken him, someone else would have, played into the decision to take Jeffery Simmons. And what was his answer?
"You know, I think that crosses your mind."
That is followed up with a question that if there had been such a rule in place, where Mississippi State could be assured no one else would be allowed to take Jeffery Simmons, would the decision had been different.
"It’s hard to answer that because we don’t have that rule. But again, you consider those things."
I don’t know if Scott Stricklin and Dan Mullen would have opted to cut Jeffery Simmons loose if they knew another SEC team would not have had the option to pick him up. But I think it at least would have been more strongly considered.
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And let’s be clear, the Bulldogs could have made such a stand. They could have said if Alabama or Ole Miss want to pick him up, then let them do so. But if Jeffery Simmons were to play his college career at one of those schools without any further incidents, and he were instrumental in one of those schools beating Mississippi State, then Mullen and Stricklin would have been run out of town.
And that’s the sad truth. And it is so sad on multiple levels. It’s sad that we as fans would have been incensed if Jeffery Simmons had been let go because we had a highly talented player on our roster but we turned him away. And it’s sad that the fans of the teams who are getting such a kick out of throwing stones at the Bulldogs would have been chomping at the bit to get Simmons to come to their school since Mississippi State turned him away.
I love college football. I’ll be happy if Jeffery Simmons sacks the quarterback 15 times a season over the next three years and helps the Bulldogs win more games than they have already won under Dan Mullen. I’ll be happy because I love Mississippi State and love our football team.
But the things we have to ignore as college football fans and come up with lame excuses makes me feel a little worse more and more each year. So while many Mississippi State fans might call for second chances, or try to say he was just defending his family to make ourselves feel better for taking Jeffery Simmons without any real repercussions, I just can’t bring myself to do it. I’ll just know we decided to take a really bad hit to the image of our school all in the name of winning football games.
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Brian Hadad of Bulldog Sports Radio has often called taking Simmons similar to eating a turd sandwich. It tastes terrible going down and you just have to find a way to choke it down. He was completely right, but I’m not even sure I could anticipate how difficult this would be to swallow once we got here.