Filed under: Football
Johnson-Koulianos is currently in the Johnson County Jail in Iowa City, being held on $8,000 bail. His first court appearance was set to occur Wednesday morning. Clearly, the city and coaching staff are in shock over recent events.
University of Iowa football Coach Kirk Ferentz issued the following statement in response to recent activities:
"I am highly disappointed to learn of the charges. Derrell has been suspended from all team activities."
One cannot begin to describe the depth of my personal disappointment in the actions of Derrell Johnson-Koulianos. It seems that every single week, a story comes across my desk about a college athlete getting arrested, shot, shooting someone or doing something else to ruin his life. I keep wondering when the cycle is going to stop. The black community needs more Rhodes Scholars like Myron Rolle and fewer men like Johnson-Koulianos, who choose to fit the athlete-entertainer-criminal stereotype that continues to pollute the mind of the black athlete in America.
Now, with that said and without condoning the actions of Johnson-Koulianos, I want to ask these questions: Was this player selling drugs because he simply wanted the thrill or is there a possibility that he also felt that selling drugs could be an important source of supplementary income? Also, do we think that the inability of Johnson-Koulianos to pay his basic expenses, in conjunction with any financial pressures he might have been feeling from home, played a role in his decision to risk everything by selling drugs after football practice? I don't know the specifics of this player's financial situation, but I do know that roughly half of all black college athletes in revenue-generating sports come from poverty.
Coach Ferentz signed a contract last year paying him $3.675 million per year. He earns most of this money because players like Derrell Johnson-Koulianos are able to run and jump on television in front of millions of people. All the while, the NCAA has made it illegal for Johnson-Koulianos or his family to earn any piece of the billions in revenue generated by his brilliant play on the field.
In fact, if players had access to the same free labor market given to the rest of us, Johnson-Koulianos would have a salary as high as his coach. So while it appears that Johnson-Koulianos may have certainly engaged in criminal activity, the NCAA has been nothing short of criminal in its own behavior as well.
The NCAA's steadfast commitment to academic and athletic apartheid (where the majority of black men serve as field hands being deprived of both human capital and the opportunity for a real education, and the majority of coaches and athletic directors are white) serves as an incubator for situations where desperate, impoverished young athletes may make bad decisions in order to get a piece of what rightfully belongs to them in the first place.
This is not Communist China or Socialist Cuba. This is the United States of America, where our values as a society are allegedly built upon individual liberties and capitalist ideologies. The NCAA's professional sports league gives it the right to run a government-sanctioned sweat shop in a country that claims to condemn this kind of activity.
Had Johnson-Koulianos been granted even a semblance of his labor rights, he likely would never have committed this crime. Even being paid a fraction of the millions the University of Iowa earns from his stellar play on the field would have likely led him to pass up the risk of engaging in the drug trade and spending several years in prison. While we can never condone the stupidity of selling drugs on a college campus (unfortunately, nearly every campus has at least one drug dealer, including the Ivy Leagues), we also cannot condone the economic abuses that may lead some to engage in illegal activity in order to get what they need. The NCAA's racist and exploitative behavior makes them an accomplice in this terrible, terrible crime.
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action Resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.