The University of Alabama dismissed defensive tackle Jonathan Taylor on Sunday, a day after the football player was arrested in Tuscaloosa on domestic violence charges.
Taylor was arrested Saturday on domestic violence third-degree assault and domestic violence third-degree criminal mischief after a woman called Tuscaloosa police to report that she had been assaulted by her boyfriend. It is Taylor’s second domestic violence arrest that has led to dismissal from a football team: the University of Georgia booted him from the squad in July 2014 after he was arrested and charged with aggravated assault/family violence, the result of a complaint that he had assaulted his girlfriend in a UGA dorm. That case is still ongoing.
Taylor enrolled in Alabama in January after playing a season at Copiah-Lincoln Community College in Mississippi; at the time, the university said no special accommodations had been made to accept Taylor and both head coach Nick Saban and athletic director Bill Battle said they believed he deserved a second chance. But Taylor’s second arrest left them no choice, both said this weekend.
“This will still need to go through the legal process, but when he was given an opportunity here, it was under strict guidelines and we made it clear there was a zero-tolerance policy,” Saban said in a statement Sunday.
“As I noted in my comments when the decision was made to allow Jonathan Taylor to attend the University on a football scholarship, I believe in second chances. I still do,” Battle said in a separate statement. “However, being successful in that second chance requires responsibility and accountability. In Jonathan’s situation, the University and the Department of Athletics set forth very clear standards of accountability and expectations of conduct. Jonathan was afforded a chance to successfully overcome the difficulties that resulted in his departure from the University of Georgia. Unfortunately, it appears that he was unable to do so, in spite of extensive efforts to assist him.”
In the fall, as the Ray Rice domestic violence case enveloped professional football, Saban said his program took the issue of domestic violence seriously. Saban invited an expert to speak to his team about violence against women during a preseason camp in August.
“That is definitely an area where we want to continue to educate the players,” Saban said in August, according to AL.com. “The importance of respect for other people, compassion for other people, and treating people the way you’d like to be treated yourself.”
Giving a second chance is one thing, and it has happened at the college and professional levels for players arrested on domestic violence charges plenty of times before. But to do so this quickly — Taylor is still facing pending charges in Georgia and was arrested just six months before he enrolled at Alabama — and to frame Taylor’s previous offense as a mere “mistake” seems more like an excuse than a second chance. And it sends the message that these programs and their schools take the issue as seriously as they say they do. As much as Saban might want to consider second chances, he and other coaches like him should give more thought to whether they’re needlessly endangering other students. Taylor, after all, isn’t the first player to land in trouble again after getting a second chance. Former Oregon basketball player Brandon Austin was accused of sexual assault last fall after facing similar charges at Providence College.
“This is reprehensible,” Kathy Redmond Brown, the founder of the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes, told CBS Sports this weekend. “For anybody to think it wouldn’t happen again is naive at best and completely false and lying at worst.”
Dismissing Taylor is the right move. But accepting him in the first place was clearly a major mistake, one that sent the opposite message Saban had previously preached about the importance of taking violence against women seriously.