If you feel like a football or basketball player is getting arrested every day -- well, you’re right. A story at SI.com suggests that the rate is about one every other day, and that’s just the “serious” run-ins with the law.
Surprise? 125 Football And Basketball Players Arrested This Year
So far this year through August, 125 college and professional football and basketball players have been arrested on serious charges. By that I mean felonies or misdemeanors involving violence, weapons or substance abuse. ... At this rate, the number will be up around 200 by year’s end.
Most of those arrests -- 85 of them -- come from the college realm, which also has the most players. (That’s about one every three days in the college arena alone.) And the overwhelming majority of those athletes, 70 according to SI’s study, are football players.
A few other notes: College athletes were involved in the overwhelming majority of cases involving a gun, and nearly one in five of the arrests involved domestic violence.
How does that compare with the similar crime rate for the general population? We don’t know, because we don’t know all of the variety of charges SI included in the survey and the article doesn’t identify that. But it’s also hard to argue with the conclusion that there’s something vaguely unsettling about athletes getting arrested at this clip.
Then again, it seems likely that the rate might slow down as we exit the summer and enter the regular season for football and, soon enough, basketball; players won't have quite as much "free time" on their hands.
See More:
