Academic Cheating Scandal Rocks Florida State Seminoles …25 Football Players Involved and Will Miss the Music City Bowl Against Kentucky

If you were planning on picking Florida State over the Kentucky Wildcats in the Music City Bowl, you may want to rethink that choice. At least 25 FSU Seminole players will be suspended for the game after their involvement in an academic cheating scandal. FSU had earlier reported to the NCAA in September an investigation by the school revealed at least 23 athletes in various sports were implicated for cheating on tests. Obviously, that was only the tip of the sugar coated iceberg.

An academic cheating scandal could leave Florida State without as many as 25 players when the Seminoles go against Kentucky in the Music City Bowl on Dec. 31.

“We have some players not traveling for one reason and some for another, including those who are ineligible for the bowl because of academic issues,” coach Bobby Bowden said in a statement released by the university Tuesday.

Bowden put the number of players involved in the 25-player range. Many of the players could also be ruled ineligible for some games next season for their connection to the cheating scandal earlier this year.

Federal privacy laws prohibit the school from releasing names.

Fla. St. shaken by fraud scandal

Stink of FSU academic fraud sticks to Bowden

The FSU players allegedly were given answers. They had papers written for them. In other words, pure, unadulterated cheating — of a sort that could not be mitigated by an athlete’s cruelly long odds in life or a family’s good intentions.

And the rest of us can start to wonder about — or choose to ignore — the pervasiveness in big-time college athletics of Internet courses as a means to push bad students through the system. Not that all Internet courses, or all student-athletes, are phony, although I am more suspicious in general of the former.