Friday night’s game with South Florida went pretty well for the most part. Gunner Kiel got knocked out, but Munchie Legaux stepped in and played well to lead the Bearcats to a huge 34-17 victory. Unfortunately, things turned for the worst for the program after the game. Sophomore Alex Tappan was arrested. Cincinnati.com has the story.
Marcus Tappan, a sophomore linebacker for the Bearcats, was stopped during a breaking and entering investigation and displayed behavior “consistent with being intoxicated,” Hamilton County Municipal Court documents show.
Tappan, from Pasadena, Calif., and Walsh, from Monrovia, Calif., allegedly broke a window while intoxicated to retrieve property from inside a home that caused an alarm to go off, reports show. The homeowner did not want to press charges, the court complaint states.
The court documents state that Tappan and Walsh knowingly consumed alcohol, a first degree misdemeanor.
Tappan has been suspended indefinitely. From the mouth of Tuberville to the keyboard of Tom Groeschen’s computer:
“He just obviously made a mistake,” Tuberville said Monday. “You make a mistake with us, you forfeit the opportunity to play with the Bearcats. I think everybody kind of understands the situation in sports. You’ve got to be held accountable.”
Jarred Evans was suspended indefinitely after last week’s game against SMU. Alex Thomas got arrested, Hosey Williams got cited and Leviticus Payne and Ey’Shawn McClain were found to have outstanding warrants because they were at a party where someone was shooting a gun. Apparently McClain has been kicked off the team.
This makes 6 Bearcats running afoul of the law in a month. It’s embarrassing. There is no other word to use. Cincinnati players are ending up in blotter every weekend it seems. Some complained about the lack of punishments for Williams and Payne, but now Evans and Tappan are suspended indefinitely. Tappan wasn’t playing anyway, so his suspension really hurts him because he’s not allowed to be around the team while he’s gone. When all you can do is learn, you should learn, not be a jackass.
One can’t really blame these incidents on the coach Tommy Tuberville and his coaching staff, but the way things work out is that we can blame them on the coach and the coaching staff because they are the face of the program. A program that now has multiple black eyes for player misconduct. Some incidents are worse than others, but all of these incidents have made national waves. If you don’t believe that, set up a google alert so every time something like this happens, you get the emails with every major site in the country talking about how another Cincinnati player has been arrested.
This news and suspension could be viewed in a more negative light if you are like me and were already upset at the coaching staff for the way they handled the end of the South Florida game. If you weren’t watching at this point, the Bearcats were running out the clock against USF. With under 30 seconds to go, time when UC could have just taken a knee and ended the game, they chose to ran a play. That play ended with Chad Banschbach suffering a shoulder injury. Hearing his screams as he went down was incredibly upsetting. I don’t know Chad Banschbach outside of he’s a Bearcat running back that’s a walk on. What I do know is seeing the personal welfare of a player being risked for no reason at all and one of the worst results possible happening to him upset me greatly. Tommy Tuberville and some people tried to defend the senseless play by saying they were trying to get him reps. Good, they got him reps the first half of the drive where he carried the ball 6 times. With under 30 seconds left on a second down where USF wasn’t going to call timeout, that doesn’t strike me as the time for more reps. One of my twitter friends who calls USF games for their student broadcast said this:
@BearcatsBlog I got overly emotional about it on the air when it happened.
— Josh Appel (@JoshAppel) October 25, 2014
If reps were important to the coaching staff regarding Banschbach, putting him in a situation where he could get injured and get no more reps in a completely meaningless situation is not a good way to get him reps. I have no problem with UC running the ball with under a minute left. I do have a problem with them calling a play with 20 or so seconds left. Player safety is a very important issue. People on twitter argued “do you think Banschbach would have wanted to take a knee there?” and various points like that. My response was WHO CARES. The coaching staff has to look out for the greater good of the players. I feel like in this scenario, they did not do that. I feel like they were negligent and it got a player hurt. It got a player, who only plays in garbage time, hurt. And for what? So UC could run a 14th play on that drive instead of a 13th? If getting off one more play is that important to the coaching staff, that’s fine. What will happen as a result of that is that this won’t be a coaching staff I support.
The on the field actions of the coaching staff was embarrassing on Friday night. The off the field actions of yet another player was embarrassing on Saturday night. This weekend really soured me on Cincinnati football. That is hard to say, but it’s also true. It’s grating to see over 6% of your roster ending up in police news. It’s infuriating when you feel like the coaches put a player in harm’s way and harm punished. I’m sure that some of this will go away with time, mostly everything does, but for right now, it’s hard to write about UC football without some form of anger seeping through. I don’t want to write like that and I definitely don’t want to feel like that. Yet, here we are.
Hopefully something better happens and we can cycle away from this. Rescue a kitten from a tree, Eric Lefeld. It’s our only hope.
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