The more I think about this incident combined with this past season, the more questions I have. This team clearly had issues coming out with any sense of focus against inferior opponents, especially at home. For God's sake, we were losing to Portland State at the end of the 1st quarter. PSU, UL-Monroe, SMU, Colorado State...all home games where we stunk up the joint for at least a half.
UNLV and New Mexico were the only games where the team took care of business from the start...and those teams would've lost to half of D1-AA. Outside of sending 9 guys on the field for every play, it would've been impossible to play a competitive game against those teams. By and large, seemed like when we were at home, we just didn't have any sense of focus.
Then the bowl game, where unless you had fingers in both your ears, you heard pretty loud grumblings of guys getting into trouble. A few got sent home. That isn't normal for a bowl trip.
Just seems to me that this problem has existed for much longer than 2 weeks, or whenever the surprise drug test was issued. And I am struggling to figure out how none of the coaches could see this as any sort of an issue before it blew up in the entire university's face.
I understand that the staff cannot watch over these guys like hawks when they're off campus. But these guys were obviously not the sharpest tools in the shed, either. They used their real names. They made calls from their personal cell phones instead of burners (that's what it sounds like from the affadavit, at least). They conducted drug transactions 50 feet from campus. So not one of them slipped up in the midst of the team, and/or not one coach heard or observed something to tip them off?
