Once again, Bobby Bowden will have to replace a star player for academic reasons.
You might be thinking that this is just another sign of supposed student-athletes failing to live up to the billing, but this time, Bowden isn’t suspending the player for cheating, failing classes or sleeping through an exam – Ã la Chris Rix. This time, that player, junior safety Myron Rolle, will be missing the first half of next Saturday’s clash with Maryland because he will be interviewing with the Rhodes Scholarship committee, which chose him earlier this month as a finalist for the scholarship, completing the final step in his application process.
That’s right, the football program that brought you Peter Warrick and Sebastian Janikowski, and which Steve Spurrier referred to as “Free Shoes University” after some players went on a Footlocker shopping spree in 1993, has a star player – not just a practice player, but a potential first-round draft pick – who is poised to become a Rhodes Scholar. Florida State has actually had great success with the Rhodes Scholarship committee recently. Joseph O’Shea won the scholarship last year, and Garrett Johnson, a former Seminole track and field star and Rolle’s mentor and close friend, won it in 2006. Unfortunately, the football team, which is currently awaiting an NCAA ruling on academic fraud charges last year, has not been known for academics.
Therefore, it may come as a shock to most to see a big-time college football player up for this award – the last Division I football player to win was USC quarterback Pat Haden in 1975 – but to those that know him, winning the Rhodes Scholarship would simply be the next logical accolade for Rolle.
“Myron’s special, there’s no doubt about it,” Florida State President T.K. Wetherell told Sports Illustrated in July. “To listen to him talk about everything from football to organic chemistry, you think you’re talking to a faculty member sometimes.”
A pre-med major with a 3.75 grade point average, Rolle has come to embody everything that a student-athlete should be. In a span of just days, he was alerted that he was one of 32 finalists for the Rhodes, as well as one of 15 semifinalists for the Chuck Bednarik Award, which is given to the top college defensive player. When he is not studying or making plays for the Seminoles on the field, he is on the Seminole tribe’s reservation – the tribe that is the basis for Florida State’s mascot – volunteering at a charter school to teach fifth graders about various health-related issues. It seems like a lot, but he’s been balancing his workload since high school where, as a senior at the Hun School of Princeton, he was an All-American in football and earned a 4.0 GPA. And sang the lead in the school’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” And worked as the sports editor of his school’s newspaper. Yeah, he can do a lot of things at once.
It’s a good thing that Rolle can balance his time so well, because next Saturday will require him to do his best juggling act of academics and athletics. He will spend his afternoon answering questions from the Rhodes Scholarship committee before taking a chartered flight, which the NCAA gave him permission for, to Florida State’s game in College Park. There, he will have to switch from his “Dr. Rolle” persona to “Rolle the one-man wrecking crew” in a game that may have a spot in the ACC championship on the line. It could turn out to be the greatest day of Rolle’s life to date.
The fact that Rolle will have this opportunity is a testament to him and his family, but also, to a much lesser degree, it speaks to the fact that Florida State and the NCAA made the right, albeit obvious, decisions. With the ACC championship on the line, Florida State could have said, though it would have been an atrocious decision, that his tuition was paid because of football, not academics, and refused to let go. But it did not. The NCAA – the same organization which prohibits the use of computers in the coaching box and stopped Nick Saban from using a cell phone to send recruits messages like, “Wut R U Doin’?” – could have dug deep into its bag of restrictions, but it chose not to, and is going to allow Rolle to board the plane from Birmingham to College Park. It sometimes seems as if colleges and the NCAA treat athletes as just athletes and not students, but this time they got it right.
If Rolle does win the scholarship, though, it will create another conflict for him. Some think he could get drafted as high as the first round in the NFL draft in April. It’s hard to imagine that any franchise in the No Fun League would allow a first-round draft pick, who they are paying millions of dollars, to spend his spring at Oxford instead of training, but Rolle will probably find a way. He has been balancing academics and athletics all his life; it’s hard to imagine that even the NFL could take the student out of this student-athlete.
Ryan Travers is a junior in the College. He can be reached at traversthehoya.com. Illegal Procedure appears in every other Friday issue of HOYA SPORTS.
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