7th Floor Crew: More "Life Experience" for the Student-Athlete

Martin Edwards of the Chuck and Doug Show on 620 AM The Score Jackson Mississippi alerts me to a recent ESPN column on the "7th Floor Crew," a student band at the University of Miami. (Pat Forde, "Rap recording could threaten Miami's Progress," ESPN.com, 11/18/05). The band features a number of Hurricanes' football players, and its music is described as, "spectacularly profane and stunningly offensive." Its most popular song is about group sex, with a group of men ganging up on one woman.

At one point during the song, junior linebacker Tavares Gooden (number 52 on your Hurricanes' roster) croons:

Then He said baby that's not how it begins
and he brought in all his 7th floor friends
She found it was [unintelligible] the Miami Football Team
It's also the 7th floor king ding-a-lings
She thought 52 was just my number then she realized
you multiply the b**** up then you get my d*** size

It's stories like this that help explain why the longer an athlete stays in college, the more likely he may engage in criminal behavior (and our recent study on NBA player arrests appears to evidence that trend). When you are a freshman player, and your role-models are junior and senior players who gleefully disregard norms or who break rules or laws, and who suffer no material consequence for doing so, guess what kind of lesson you internalize?

Alan Milstein and I are currently co-authoring a law review article for the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law that will hopefully amplify this discussion (although the article will primarily be about Eddy Curry and DNA testing). Alan, as many of you know, is Allen Iverson and Eddy Curry's attorney and was Maurice Clarett's lead counsel in his lawsuit against the NFL. We hope to have a completed draft in the near future, and it will be posted on SSRN.

Posted in: