Tennessee football has had an embarrassing week with the Peyton Manning story, the sexual assault lawsuit, and the charges against Mack Crowder.
It seems like things are getting more embarrassing by the second for Tennessee.
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On Wednesday, with the sexual assault lawsuit against the school and the resurfacing of Peyton Manning’s 1996 incident already out there, and in many cases connected, the news surrounding former Vol Mack Crowder managed to add to the embarrassment.
The offensive lineman, who just completed his fifth-year senior season with the Vols, was arrested in a child sex sting operation in Florida Tuesday.
According to a report from the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Crowder, who was in Florida working out in hopes of making it to the NFL, was booked on multiple felony charges. Here is an excerpt from the story.
"In a release on the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office website, detectives said that Crowder was arrested “after he sought out and engaged in an online sexual conversation with whom he thought was a 14-year-old female.”The release says the arrest was made through the office’s “Operation Wayfarer” which targets adult males seeking underage females online for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity. According to a previous release, Operation Wayfarer was initially a five-day operation run from Jan. 20-24 in which investigators went into various online classified pages, social media sites and chatrooms and posed as minors."
To be clear, there is nothing that anybody should say to blame Tennessee football or the athletic program in general for what happened with Crowder.
But it is still a bad look given what has gone on the past week. And it is like this has been a complete 180 for the program during that time.
Remember, back in January we wrote an article about Tennessee capping off the best two weeks in offseason history after a period of time in which Butch Jones had hired Larry Scott and Bob Shoop and then Jalen Reeves-Maybin, Cameron Sutton, and Alvin Kamara all announced their decisions to skip the NFL Draft and return to the Vols.
At the start of the month, the Vols had a dominating Outback Bowl victory to finish 9-4 and in the Top 25 for the first time since 2007.
And following that two-week period, a Top 15 National Signing Day class in a year in which the Vols could give out limited scholarships combined with Peyton Manning’s run to the Super Bowl made for the best start to a year in history for the program.
On Feb. 8, 2016, the day after that game, Tennessee football fans were sitting pretty. But the hammer came down the next day.
That Tuesday was when the news broke of the sweeping sexual assault lawsuit filed against the university by six unnamed women. We won’t go into all the details, but it was immediately a bad look for the program. Things only got worse from there.
Later in the week, we found out Peyton Manning’s 1996 incident was named in that assault. But that story has been out there for 20 years, so it didn’t seem likely to gain much traction…until Saturday.
New York Daily News reporter Shaun King’s article that day, however fair or unfair, has kept the story a major part of the sports news world, and it has not seemed to go away regardless of the responses to it. On top of it, that story brought back the original lawsuit filed against the university back in 1996, which was even a worse look.
So after Tennessee fans were proud on Monday, Feb. 8, they were in full defense mode by Valentine’s Day.
Then came what happened with Crowder Wednesday.
In the grand scheme of things, none of this is likely to have an impact on the field this Fall. To many people, Manning’s legacy is unchanged as none of this information revealed was new anyway.
Crowder is no longer involved with the program and was arrested for an awful incident that Tennessee has no connection to.
And the lawsuit against the university can be settled.
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But after such a great month and then another week of literally everything going right for the Tennessee football program, it is crazy how just one week has completely reversed the mood.