Sanford Wagner Has an Opinion

I've read this letter to the editor at the Knoxville News Sentinel's website about ten times now and I still cannot, for the life of me, figure out whether he's being tongue in cheek.

You may think you are doing a noble and valuable service by bringing us the intimate details of a purported attack by a University of Tennessee football player on a 16-year-old girl.

Frankly, the people of Knoxville and the surrounding towns are interested in something more important: having a football team with a vastly better record than last year. That 8-5 record included a grand total of two wins against teams with significant ability. You don't think anyone believes that beating Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Kentucky and Mississippi State should actually be counted as wins?

I would like to understand why girls - who should know better and surely should have been taught basic common sense by their parents - go at night to a building occupied by athletic 300-pound men, 6-foot, 4-inch tall, with large muscles? Then, when the oh-so-predictable happens, they cry rape.

We don't need or want to hear the details of these stories dragged out endlessly through the newspaper nor do we want to hear similarly of some half-drunk wise guy who chooses to challenge a large, strong football player in a bar on the Strip and winds up with a broken jaw.

Please, let's concentrate on stories that will give us a winning team. Throwing players off the team because their interest in being a professional football player is greater than their interest in the insipid courses most of them take should not keep them from playing and winning for our university.

Why is pursuing a career as a professional football player not as worthy as becoming a scientist or an engineer or a social worker or a musician? It is certainly more lucrative. If athletes prefer to spend their time honing their skills at what will be their career instead of in study hall, let them be.

Then we will have a football team of which we can be proud.
Sanford Wagner, Knoxville