There is something about the way we consume college football that makes it remarkably easy to forget the people involved. We evaluate players through statistics, judge coaches through wins and losses and construct elaborate explanations for events based on whatever information happens to be available at the moment. When someone succeeds, we celebrate their character. When they fail, we begin questioning whether they ever possessed any in the first place.
I’ve never been particularly comfortable with that approach, partly because I’ve spent enough time working with people to understand that the difference between who someone is and what they do in a particular moment can be substantial. Success doesn’t automatically make someone a good person, and failure doesn’t necessarily reveal some previously hidden deficiency in their character. Most people are considerably more complicated than the versions of themselves we construct from the limited circumstances in which we observe them.
That distinction has been on my mind since Saturday night, first because of what Dylan Raiola accomplished against Nebraska and then because of the increasingly sensational rumors surrounding Oregon football players following the game. The two situations are very different, and I don’t intend to suggest that struggling in a football game is remotely comparable to an allegation involving impaired driving.
But both stories offer an opportunity to consider something that often gets lost in the noise surrounding college athletics: how quickly we turn individual moments into sweeping judgments about people we don’t actually know.
Take One: Dylan Raiola Deserves a Little Grace
I like Dylan Raiola.
