You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.

A joint investigation by Sports Illustrated and CBS News has found that 7 percent of the players on 25 top college football teams had been charged with or cited for a crime in their pasts. Reporters for the magazine and TV network conducted criminal background checks on all 2,837 players on the preseason rosters of the 25 teams that were ranked before the 2010 season that concluded in January, and found that 204 of them had a criminal record, involving a total of 277 incidents. Of those, "nearly 40 percent involved serious offenses, including 56 violent crimes such as assault and battery (25 cases), domestic violence (6), aggravated assault (4), robbery (4) and sex offenses (3)," the report on the investigation said. Mark Emmert, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, told a CBS reporter that the results were "a set of facts that obviously should concern all of us."