I've read some interesting critiques of the SI Crime study that have rightly pointed out some of its many flaws: the fact that they count all crimes the same numerically whether they are misdemeanors or felonies, the fact that they don't provide context for their numbers, the fact that they only chose the Top 25 for their sample pool, the fact that they count people being accused of a crime as part of a total even though they acknowledge that a sizable portion of those accused were never convicted, and the fact that they somehow think criminal background checks would solve this problem.
One thing I noted though is that instead taking a large sample over a long period of time, say five years, they instead looked at the preseason rosters of teams in the Top 25. Now I'm not sure what they think of the state of American collegiate athletics, but I'm pretty sure even the dirtiest program out there doesn't have a roster full of convicted felons. Therefore, doesn't it logically follow that the teams with the more serious criminal offenders would have lower numbers of "criminals" than teams with multiple minor offenders, who stayed on the team and finished their degrees? Iowa, does, after all, have a pretty high graduation rate when it comes to football, and some of these graduates probably made some dumb mistakes as freshman. In this sense, their study really doesn't give a picture of crime on a college team at all.
It's for this reason that a team like Florida, that was notorious for having several criminal players during their salad days under Urban Meyer, scores comparatively well under SI's study methods -- because most of the players who were part of that success and also part of those problems were gone before this season started. Is that really a good indication of how much crime there is within a program when it misses something so glaringly obvious?
One thing I noted though is that instead taking a large sample over a long period of time, say five years, they instead looked at the preseason rosters of teams in the Top 25. Now I'm not sure what they think of the state of American collegiate athletics, but I'm pretty sure even the dirtiest program out there doesn't have a roster full of convicted felons. Therefore, doesn't it logically follow that the teams with the more serious criminal offenders would have lower numbers of "criminals" than teams with multiple minor offenders, who stayed on the team and finished their degrees? Iowa, does, after all, have a pretty high graduation rate when it comes to football, and some of these graduates probably made some dumb mistakes as freshman. In this sense, their study really doesn't give a picture of crime on a college team at all.
It's for this reason that a team like Florida, that was notorious for having several criminal players during their salad days under Urban Meyer, scores comparatively well under SI's study methods -- because most of the players who were part of that success and also part of those problems were gone before this season started. Is that really a good indication of how much crime there is within a program when it misses something so glaringly obvious?
