USC misplayed the Josh Shaw lie, but he’s the only one paying for it
Both USC and college football media outlets never thought twice to look into a player’s dramatic story about how he hurt his ankles. He’s the one who suffers for their mistake.
Thearon W. Henderson
BREAKING: A college student did something dumb.
Josh Shaw, a talented cornerback for USC, hurt his ankles somehow, possibly jumping off a balcony. If that's how he got hurt, that's a dumb way to get hurt. He compounded the dumbness by telling his coach a ridiculous lie about how he got hurt, saying he was jumping to save his nephew from drowning.
We can make fun of Josh Shaw for doing something dumb. In fact, we are obligated to. However, let’s not make him out to be history’s greatest monster, or history’s dumbest person. College students do dumb things and make up dumb lies about those dumb things every single day.
Have you told a parent/teacher/coach/school official/cop/other authority figure something untrue that you thought would help you get out of a bind? Did it end up making things worse? If your answers to both of those questions are “no,” you got an F in being 17-22 years old, and need to retake the course.
However, after making fun of Shaw, we should talk for a second about the way USC handled his tall tale. When Shaw presented to USC his heroic legend of himself, USC had three options.
- Tell media Shaw suffered an injury, with no details. Leak Shaw’s story to one of the team’s reporters. This reporter could’ve investigated on his or her own. If it turned out the story was true, wow! There’s gonna be a glowing story about your team’s star in ESPN/the LA Times/whatever, and you have a reporter who’s grateful you gave him or her a great story! If it’s false, nobody hears about it.
- Vet the story in-house. When it turned out to be false, USC could’ve suspended Shaw, then told the media he was suspended for violating team rules, something that happens approximately 40,000 times a year. Nobody finds out about Shaw’s story.
- Run a gushing story on the school website about the heroic player, replete with quotes from admins and the player about how great he is and how he’s an example of everything that’s right about your program. It’s a story so amazing that everybody is guaranteed to love it.
USC opted for the third. We’d love to show you the story they put on their site, but USC has deleted it. There’s now another about how Shaw lied, which ends with the phrase “USC regrets the posting of the initial story on Monday (Aug. 25).”
And the national media, including SB Nation, didn’t follow through on the lessons we should’ve learned from Manti Te’o. We thought an official school mouthpiece was legit enough to trust, but we’ve now been reminded otherwise.
But USC isn’t the one paying for its error. The national conversation is about Josh Shaw, The Stupid College Football Player. It’s not about the USC media department that exacerbated Shaw’s mistake by being too eager and not vetting a story before running it, or every coach and staff member who nodded along without thinking, “Hey, uh, maybe we should look into what happened to our player.” A bunch of people who get paid to do jobs messed up, and a kid’s the only one looking like an idiot.
Hey, we finally joined Facebook!
I think it’s generally agreed that a football team is supposed to help the kids on the team grow as people and as football players. A player doing a dumb thing is a good opportunity to do that. You can discipline the player for the dumb thing he did. Instead, Josh Shaw has become famous for being a liar, and a bad one at that.
Perhaps he’ll learn from the experience. But at the very least, by running with the story for self-serving reasons, USC passed on the responsibility to help their player grow by letting the realm for judgment leave the locker room.
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