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And it's a gay sheep!! Unbelievable.
Rein in the drunks on OSU team
The most recent entrant in the "What were you thinking?" category goes to Oregon State University football player Ben Siegert. The junior defensive tackle from Glendale, Ariz., claims to have no memory of wrangling a 200-pound ram from the OSU sheep barns about 1:30 last Friday morning.
Benton County Undersheriff Diana Simpson said that Siegert may have been too intoxicated to remember. He registered a .14 blood-alcohol reading; .6 above the legal indicator of intoxication.
Apparently this isn't the first prank sheep kidnapping at the barns, although the fact that this ram was part of an ongoing research project into homosexuality among sheep makes the incident rich material for late-night comics. That kind of national attention, OSU doesn't need.
For Siegert and whatever other minor OSU celebrity who still needs Public Relations 101 spelled out: This is not the time to be recreating scenes from "Animal House," especially not with real animals. Any football player or other athlete or student leader who isn't studying for finals and toeing the line is missing the big picture: The community's patience with drunken thuggery, especially among OSU's designated representatives, is spent.
The Clemens Foundation's recent petulant withdrawal of scholarships for any student attending OSU misguidedly targeted the wrong miscreants, but it reflected a legitimate and justifiable displeasure over the continuing brutish, drunken behavior of football players. And let's be clear: It isn't all football players, but the ones who aren't misbehaving haven't exerted enough influence over those who are.
Our culture treats football players like local celebrities, but that treatment is based partly on the assumption that their wins on the field reflect their disciplined thinking and personal integrity. That assumption has been shaken, and their wins undermined, by an ugly racially-charged bar fight, followed by a drunken cab brawl, and now, drunken sheep wrangling.
Certainly the specific facts will come out about each of these incidents, and it is important not to let hysteria and a mob mentality overshadow the justice process. Everyone still deserves a fair hearing.
But aside from whatever individual events led up to, influenced, or mitigated these incidents, they share a common factor: drunkenness, especially during the Thursday night binge known as "Thirsty Thursday." That is one tradition that needs to dry up at OSU well before next fall, when we're looking for a more sober and responsible football team to take the field ? or take a hike.
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