Thanks for making my point...your Sig is quite fitting. Leadership starts from within and that begins with self-policing in the locker room. Not once did I throw the entire team under the bus. In fact, pointed out it was only a few that instigated the entire disaster that followed. I'm sure you were one hell of a teammate with your head buried up your a$$. You exemplify everything that is wrong with this situation...ignore the obvious, blame others and resort to name calling like a 3 year old rather than being part of an active dialogue that has many facets to it with no easy fixes. Stay classy, sir.
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Couldn't agree more with Slim. I need to disagree with Pompous and sm_25 on their last comments.
There is a distinct difference between supporting your teammates and making poor, ill-informed decisions. Sometimes you need to stand behind your teammates and sometimes you need to call them on their bad decisions and, if need be, stand alone. The few "leaders" of the team led the team to the boycott before getting all the facts and they are the ones that threw there lemming teammates under the bus, not the administration.
If you recall, the entire team or the head coach didn't even know all the details of the report before the team meeting(although the entire report was available online that afternoon) with Kaler and the Regents(who stood behind the school's decision) and the team didn't have the Kaler/Regent meeting until later that night. Claeys hadn't read it either before his tweet. After those meetings, when the whole team actually looked at the entire report, the players started to have second thoughts about the boycott. Collect ALL the facts, then discuss the pro/cons of a boycott. Had they done that things may have turned out much differently.
Regarding SM_25's quote above, the players were not charged because the police felt there was insufficient evidence to bring to trial. This has absolutely nothing to do with the EOAA investigation that was still going to proceed internally. Students(athletes or not) are held to the U's Student Conduct Code. At two different D1 schools one of my responsibilities was to enforce the code. The two are independent and Claeys and the entire team should have been aware of that. The public doesn't always understand the difference, but the players and the staff definitely do. If Claeys and his staff cannot clearly articulate that from day one to the team, then that only shows one aspect of the lack of leadership Claeys and his 12+ years of college coaching possessed.
Finally, Claeys was not fired due to his record. He was fired due to his lack of leadership on/off the field. He is supposed to be a leader and mentor in both. Look at Wolitarsky's, Leidner's and other players comments/posts pre/post Claey's firing. It's obvious that they all still think they are larger than the school they represent. They still don't realize that they, the team, played the part in getting their coach fired. You can point to a number of areas that Claeys played a part that was succcessful(don't give him full credit for these since there is a lag in these stats and he was only head coach for over a year)...grad rates, GPA, etc., but ultimately there are times that one or two mistakes are so immense they require the removal of the individual. This was the case. Same thing would have happened if something similar happened in the private sector.
