It's easy to demand players be kicked off the team. It's also lazy. Discipline is more nuanced. Do you kick a college kid off a team and take his scholarship over a driving/traffic offense?
IMO, no.
Is this now a plague in the program that must be addressed? No question. Must we evolve our discipline of these offenses? Absolutely. And Kirby clearly has with these two indefinite suspensions.
Let me stress that I think this problem is serious as hell. I genuinely fear another player is going to die, or will kill someone else. It has to be corrected and now.
What's the real root cause, though? We don't have bad kids. They're the same kids everyone else recruits. And college kids do stupid shit. It's inevitable. My oldest is a model kid, responsible beyond his years, etc and he totaled his car in Athens last November. Was just a matter of inexperience and he luckily was not hurt.
You will not eliminate poor judgment by college males. That's the one factor that is static. The common denominator in all these is a lot of horsepower. These are NIL cars. And with compensation must come terms.
I know some have rolled their eyes at my suggestion before, but there are too many tracking apps available to monitor driving these days not to be utilizing them at this point. I get an alert from Life360 any time my kids speed, hard brake, or rapidly accelerate. Kids do all of these things. I'm not saying they all drag race or drive 100mph because they're certainly don't.
Reckless driving behavior stops immediately once Big Brother holds them accountable, though. I've also got a doohicky from State Farm that tracks their driving habits. I give my kids any money their safe driving does to produce a lower premium price each month.
Data doesn't lie. Data creates accountability. They're driving like this because they don't think anyone will know. The fear of a serious wreck is not a deterrent. They don't think it will happen to them. Having to answer to the data and to Kirby IS a deterrent. It's the same reason they attend class - because it's monitored. If class attendance wasn't tracked, half of them would never go and fail out. Fact.
Give some poor student assistant the job of Big Brother and monitoring these apps. Their driving behavior WILL change.
IMO, no.
Is this now a plague in the program that must be addressed? No question. Must we evolve our discipline of these offenses? Absolutely. And Kirby clearly has with these two indefinite suspensions.
Let me stress that I think this problem is serious as hell. I genuinely fear another player is going to die, or will kill someone else. It has to be corrected and now.
What's the real root cause, though? We don't have bad kids. They're the same kids everyone else recruits. And college kids do stupid shit. It's inevitable. My oldest is a model kid, responsible beyond his years, etc and he totaled his car in Athens last November. Was just a matter of inexperience and he luckily was not hurt.
You will not eliminate poor judgment by college males. That's the one factor that is static. The common denominator in all these is a lot of horsepower. These are NIL cars. And with compensation must come terms.
I know some have rolled their eyes at my suggestion before, but there are too many tracking apps available to monitor driving these days not to be utilizing them at this point. I get an alert from Life360 any time my kids speed, hard brake, or rapidly accelerate. Kids do all of these things. I'm not saying they all drag race or drive 100mph because they're certainly don't.
Reckless driving behavior stops immediately once Big Brother holds them accountable, though. I've also got a doohicky from State Farm that tracks their driving habits. I give my kids any money their safe driving does to produce a lower premium price each month.
Data doesn't lie. Data creates accountability. They're driving like this because they don't think anyone will know. The fear of a serious wreck is not a deterrent. They don't think it will happen to them. Having to answer to the data and to Kirby IS a deterrent. It's the same reason they attend class - because it's monitored. If class attendance wasn't tracked, half of them would never go and fail out. Fact.
Give some poor student assistant the job of Big Brother and monitoring these apps. Their driving behavior WILL change.
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