The Final Straw: Is Isaiah Crowell Done as a Dawg?

Fans of the Georgia Bulldogs woke up to some unpleasant news this morning, as troubled Bulldogs back Isaiah Crowell was arrested in Athens around 3:00 this morning and charged with possessing a concealed weapon, having a weapon in a school zone and having an altered ID mark on that weapon.

Reports have indicated that Crowell drove his 2005 Mercury Grand Marquis to a road block in Athens, where an officer smelled marijuana in the car and asked to search the vehicle. Crowell, who was accompanied by freshmen Josh Harvey-Clemons, Blake Tibbs and Sheldon Dawson as well as sophomore Quintavius Harrow, consented to the search, which resulted in the officer finding a 9-mm Luger handgun with an altered serial number under the driver’s seat. Despite Crowell saying that he let other people drive the car (one report has said that the other driver’s were not any of the four riding with Crowell), he was taken to jail. None of Crowell’s passengers were charged.This is another sad chapter of the Isaiah Crowell Story, and although we should remember that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, is anyone who knows who Crowell is actually surprised by this young man ending up in the back of a cop car? Isaiah may be telling the truth that the gun belonged to someone else, but even if it does you should have the thought capacity to know everything in your car and to get rid of anything that doesn’t belong to you, especially when you’re such a bigshot like him. As if Crowell getting caught wasn’t bad enough, he had four other young pups with him, including one of the Bulldogs’ biggest signees of the last recruiting season in linebacker Josh Harvey-Clemons. According to the University of Georgia’s Student-Athlete handbook, a felony arrest means “immediate suspension from athletic competition”, leaving Crowell indefinitely suspended as soon as he was brought in by the Athens-Clarke County police, but a larger question for those who cheer for Georgia on Saturdays lingers: Is Isaiah done in Athens?

I’m a person that believes in second chances for everyone, but I think the Isaiah Experiment should not reach year number two for Georgia. I know that Crowell has a tremendous amount of talent and has potential to wow crowds across the nation with his ability, but his off-the-field issues (don’t forget, he was suspended last season for failing a drug test) just make him way too big of a distraction for him to be worth keeping. I know that head coach Mark Richt is a Bobby Bowden disciple, which means that star players usually get as many second chances as legally possible, and that the many times I’ve called for him to kick someone off he has rarely done so, but this move would send shockwaves across the campus and would let everyone know that it doesn’t matter how many stars you had when you signed with the team: if you get in trouble again and again, you will be shown the door.

With that said, I’m not holding my breath on Crowell’s career at Georgia being over with, as Richt will more than likely suspend him for 4-6 games, which could mean missing the South Carolina game, and then reinstate him, leaving him room to learn from his mistakes and to possibly straighten up (again, not holding my breath). However, if Crowell has in fact played his last down as a Bulldog, his legacy is clear: he will be forever remembered as a Jasper Sanks-sized bust that had trouble both taking hits from opposing SEC defenses and from staying out of the headlines for all the wrong reasons.