You know those pesky DUI arrests that college athletes seem to run into every now and then? They're the kinds of thing that just make you want to look a kid in the eye and say, "boy what are you...stu...stu...stupid!" in your best Coach Red Beaulieu impression from the Water Boy. Those are the kind of guys you'd like to see run stadium steps until they puke, serve a suspension and then earn their way back on the field at some time.
Then there are guys like Oklahoma State's Darrell Wiliams who have the audacity/arrogance/stupidity to do the unthinkable and think they can get away with it. Then there's the coach who plays said athlete out of desperation hoping that he can sneak past the next game before the law drops the hammer.
The weekend started off pretty well for Williams. His career-high 18 points and 12 rebounds helped the Cowboys rally to beat Oklahoma 81-75. It was the type of performance that earned him the Big 12's Rookie of the Week award on Monday morning. Turns out he was motivated to such performances not by team loyalty or a dream to win championships but by the fact that he was going to jail.
Who knew these guys were talking about an OSU basketball player?
The scene was set for Williams to be the big man on campus this week but instead it turns out that he's the big assailant on campus instead. After Monday's conference accolades Williams was charged with four felony accounts of sexual assault. Yeah you read that right, FOUR!!!! He faces three counts of rape by instrumentation and one count of sexual battery.
"It goes without saying that we take the charges very seriously," coach Travis Ford said in a statement. "Darrell will not travel or play while the legal issues are addressed." Perhaps because the who world knows about it now?
I find it hard to believe that Oklahoma State Head Coach Travis Ford didn't know about the charges for a couple of reasons. First of all because this was a scheduled court date that Williams attended. He wasn't arrested over the weekend and rushed into court this morning for arraignment. Rumors of these charges being investigated have been swirling for weeks now. If internet message boards knew about it then why didn't the coach?
Another interesting tidbit is that up to as many as six OSU basketball players are on the prosecution's list of potential witnesses. Police affidavits allege that several of the basketball players attended the party in which the assaults supposedly happened and at one point they "surrounded' on of the victims. Travis Ford had better have known about this or there's a great example of lack of institutional control in the works here.
Finally, there's the fact t hat several of the O-State players showed up to the courthouse to show support for their teammate. I'm willing to bet that in the midst of the locker room celebration Saturday afternoon there wasn't a time in which Williams stood up and said, "Hey ya'll, I need you to do me a solid on Monday. You see there's these two women and..."
Everything about this shows that Wiliams, Ford and the entire team knew about this and instead of dealing with it with integrity they chose to instead reward Williams by letting him play until word got out to the entire world and they were forced to suspend him. In my opinion there's no getting around that fact and it paints Ford as being just about as big of a sleaze ball as William is.
As for OU fans, there's no worse way to rub salt into the wounds of a Bedlam defeat than to flaunt the fact that you used the Big 12's leading rapists to beat us.