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Another scarlet letter
Rutgers cyber-fans lose it after Thomas chooses Duke

Wednesday May 10, 2006 - Sports Illustrated - Aditi Kinkhabwala


Lance Thomas is a "bum."

He's "gutless" (etown1000), he's an "attention whore" (joshf8231) and he's apparently missing a uniquely male part of his anatomy (Sleepi...sAwake).

Good thing Rutgers didn't get stuck with him.

Thomas is a 6-foot-8, 17-year-old senior at St. Benedict's in Newark, N.J. He was the MVP of the McDonald's game and one of the top dozen or so senior prospects in the country. He was the kid that made Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski hold a scholarship open longer than he ever had.

Thomas had turned in his prep uniform, and was agonizing over what would replace it -- a jersey from Duke or one that said "Rutgers." Coach K patiently waited, Rutgers fans on Rutgersfan.com pledged their undying adoration and... Thomas chose Duke.

So, Rubball2 hopes he "lives his life of misery as a garbage man." MCohen05 is raising a glass "to Lance Thomas flopping and working at McDonald's," while RutgersMo is praying "LT's girlfriend cheats." It's not all nasty words -- RUDrummer822 plans on giving Thomas more than a mere wish. He wants to know "what size skirt does Lance wear?"

Silly as they may be, college message boards are officially part of our culture now. At Rutgersfan.com, like at any of the hundreds of fan sites, posters cloaked under the protection of anonymity share their passions on message boards. They parry over their prospects, debate their coaches' decisions, and now, hurt the very schools they're supposedly fans of.

"Kids read that stuff," said Danny Hurley, Thomas' coach at St. Benedict's. "If they haven't, coaches have it sent to them."

Of course they do.

Negative recruiting has moved well past the whispered gossip Hurley's famous dad, Bob -- the coach featured in Adrian Wojnarowski's book The MIracle of St. Anthony -- used to avoid and on to a full-blown common practice Danny's players can't ignore. The recruiting game is fierce, and with the hyper Fred Hill and even more hyper Bobby Gonzalez taking over the programs at Rutgers and Seton Hall, respectively, recruiting in New Jersey just amped up about eight notches.

Sure these name-calling nitwits may only be a teeny fraction of Rutgers fans. They're probably only a teeny fraction of Rutgersfan fans. But they're still the ones holding Rutgers' future hostage, superceding the power of real Rutgers fans.

Regular Rutgers fans are the ones that papered the Rutgers Athletic Center with signs reading "Lance=Dance" and "Stay in Jersey, Lance" and "Knights need their Lance" back in January, when No. 9 Pitt came to town and Thomas and his high school teammate Eugene Harvey were in the stands.

Real Rutgers fans are the ones that chanted, "We want Lance" every time he was spotted on campus and the ones that had Lance thinking his state university was so darn intriguing.

This should be stuck to the top of each part of Ponyfans.

Remember, anyone can read what you write

Except UT recruits.

EastStang wrote:Except UT recruits.

*cymbal crash*

Only 28% of them can read.

Just kidding.

BUS wrote:Only 28% of them can read.

Just kidding.

I think you are probably right, that is what is scary.

James Brooks and Dexter Manley!!

Except Brooks went to Auburn and Manley went to Oklahoma State, not Texas.
After leaving school and getting very well paid, they each took it upon themselves to learn to read and write.
Seems to me that for all their shortcomings, they should be commended for that, not mocked.

Red+BlueDude wrote:Except Brooks went to Auburn and Manley went to Oklahoma State, not Texas.
After leaving school and getting very well paid, they each took it upon themselves to learn to read and write.
Seems to me that for all their shortcomings, they should be commended for that, not mocked.

The fact that major academic schools are producing and graduating football players that cannot read is sad. OSU regularly touts how many Rhodes Scholars they have produced, but I have never seen the Dexter Manley commercial. The hypocrisy of those institutions (like UT) is funny.

If it has become the job of a University to teach people to read then our education system should just be scrapped. When I was young, many, many years ago, we were taught to read in first grade or earlier. If I am a University Professor, I am sorry, I am going to assume my students can read.

Theoretically a college athlete at least took the SAT and got more than a minimum score on it. In the case of Dexter Manley, either he was really lucky on the SAT or someone took it for him. Statistically speaking, if you mark all of the boxes with "a" you'll get 25 percent correct which translates into a low grade but higher than the minimum grade.

Red+BlueDude wrote:Except Brooks went to Auburn and Manley went to Oklahoma State, not Texas.
After leaving school and getting very well paid, they each took it upon themselves to learn to read and write.
Seems to me that for all their shortcomings, they should be commended for that, not mocked.

I thought Manley learned to read and write in the penitentiary?.......................

Actually, as I understand it he got his GED in prison. But I heard that Darrell Green did work with him to help him to learn to read when Dexter was with the Redskins. While OSU didn't have an obligation to teach him to read, it is amazing that they kept him eligible for four years when he was completely illiterate. Someone in the school should have flunked him along the way and told the administration that he couldn't read. That way, he could have been given some non-credit remedial work to get up to speed so when his eligibility was over, he at least could read when he left OSU.

EastStang wrote:Actually, as I understand it he got his GED in prison. But I heard that Darrell Green did work with him to help him to learn to read when Dexter was with the Redskins. While OSU didn't have an obligation to teach him to read, it is amazing that they kept him eligible for four years when he was completely illiterate. Someone in the school should have flunked him along the way and told the administration that he couldn't read. That way, he could have been given some non-credit remedial work to get up to speed so when his eligibility was over, he at least could read when he left OSU.

If I am a professor at a major State school(or private for that matter), I do not know if a student can or can not read unless someone tells me. As long as the work is turned in the kid passes. There is no doubt in my mind that most Universities have the means to "make sure" that a good athlete passes if they want to. The ones that fail are the ones that just do not go to class for the most part. Right, of course not, but it happens. I just think the media who made such a big deal about his illiteracy through college should have been investigating his elementary teachers rather than his University.

EastStang wrote:Actually, as I understand it he got his GED in prison. But I heard that Darrell Green did work with him to help him to learn to read when Dexter was with the Redskins. While OSU didn't have an obligation to teach him to read, it is amazing that they kept him eligible for four years when he was completely illiterate. Someone in the school should have flunked him along the way and told the administration that he couldn't read. That way, he could have been given some non-credit remedial work to get up to speed so when his eligibility was over, he at least could read when he left OSU.

That's the way I heard it. Darrell Green, Art Monk, Joe Gibbs and some others within the Redskins organization actually sat down with him and helped him start from scratch .... but yes, ponyplayer, he did continue to work at it in jail (when many wouldn't have done so). I always hated the guy until I saw the clip of him READING a speech HE wrote to a Senate Subcommittee on illiteracy and the monstrous flaws in the schools where he grew up. He was a loudmouthed showboat on the field, but I started to root for him as a person, if not a player, after seeing that.

Yes, there are schools that turn out players every year who are academic weaklings, but he was functionally illiterate -- according to more than one story I've read, he signed his first NFL contract with an "X." There are very few schools in the country that don't have some athletes who merely use up their eligibility, rather than actually graduating. Manley got a degree from OSU, which is shameful.

I guess then-coach Jimmy Johnson was just prepping for his run at Miami.