Oregon Ducks: “I Smoked It All”

ESPN published an report on the Oregon Ducks and marijuana. The findings in the report aren’t overly shocking for fans of college sports. The culture of smoking weed is on a steady incline over the last few years and not only are more people using the drug but more people are being open about using it.

I will not spend time going into the ethics or issues with smoking weed. That would deviate from the article. And while the findings may not be something that the average fan will be up in arms about. The evidence is more incriminating for Chip Kelly and his organization than anything else.

The reality is; Kelly is already under hot water for some recruiting issues that the NCAA is investigating. The best case scenario would be for the Oregon football team to stay out of the news. There has already been a slew of negative attention their way from the incident which led to the ESPN article; where Cliff Harris and Darron Thomas were pulled over for speeding and Harris proceeds to tell the cop that ‘they smoked all’ the weed. To the incident where an agent, Willie Lyles, was being paid to send recruits the Ducks direction. Kelly claims to not know Lyles.

Now there is a report in which an Oregon football player is lighting up a joint in front of the reporter for ESPN. Unashamed and not worried about repercussions for him or the program. Things were already looking terrible for Kelly, this just makes it look worse.

Kelly now appears to have zero control over his team unless they are on the football field. Marijuana use is against a lot of rules; it is breaking the federal law, Oregon law, NCAA rules, University of Oregon’s rules, and it is breaking team rules. Yet the player, unnamed in the report, says that over half the team smokes weed together.

This isn’t to condone the behavior or not to condone the behavior. This is simply to state that Kelly has no control over his program. It is spiraling out of control and he is now at the point where he can no longer pretend he doesn’t know about issues in the program. At this point if he continues to deny knowing about things, it just makes him look like he has no idea about ANYTHING in his program.

If he doesn’t know about recruiting, he doesn’t know about this agent, he doesn’t know about his players out for joy rides, and he doesn’t know about drug usage. What does he know about?

Granted he hasn’t come out and talked about this particular drug usage article but there isn’t really a way to slip out anymore for Kelly.

This isn’t about the legality of what is happening at Oregon, this is about the downfall of Rome, in this case Eugene. One can almost see the foundation crumbling out from under the Ducks. This may be just small issue, but it is piling up in Oregon and specifically piling up on Kelly.