Tim Abromaitis Arrested In South Bend
Posted by nvr1983 on July 17th, 2010It turns out that there are still kids at college during the summer. Unfortunately for the athletic department at Notre Dame some of the players on the football and basketball team were arrested while attending an off-campus party late last night. According to reports out of South Bend, 44 individuals were arrested (41 for underage drinking) including 11 athletes. While the 8 Irish football players (one of whom was Nate Montana, son of Joe Montana) will garner most of the national headlines because it is Notre Dame (and they play football), there were two basketball players arrested as well (Tim Abromaitis and incoming Irish point guard Eric Atkins). Although Atkins is a talented point guard who should fit in well with Mike Brey‘s system, the bigger news is the arrest of Abromaitis, who was the team’s leading returning scorer (16.1 PPG) and is expected to take over as the team’s star with the departure of Luke Harangody. Given the nature of the crime (underage drinking), his age (turns 21 on September 17th), and the precedent that the Irish administration with Jimmy Clausen, we don’t expect Abromaitis to get much more than a small non-public slap on the wrist. Our guess is that the most Brey and the Irish administration will do is threaten not to make Abromaitis a captain next year if something similar happens again.
Not the image that Mike Brey wanted to see of his star this summer
Not a fan of the current drinking age, but you’d think ND athletes would be super careful given the tragic alcohol related death of one of their football recruits last spring break.
I can understand why it is reported when college athletes are arrested for underage drinking, but it shouldn’t be reported. Underage drinking is almost universal among the kids in college and it doesn’t make the athletes any different from the rest of the population. This is nothing more than a story about kids being kids, but it is reported because these kids are athletes. Now if they had been arrested for drinking and driving, that would have been a much different story, but that is not what happened. When there are things happening in college athletics like what is happening at Tennessee, that is where our attention should be focused and not on a bunch of kids doing what virtually everyone has done at no real harm to anyone else.
Mark W–
Where do you draw the line? Should the media just report crimes where the person arrested could have seriously harmed another individual? If you look back to the beginning of the year we covered the Tennessee/Tyler Smith situation much more thoroughly. Now if you are talking about the recent Tennessee incident involving football players and a bar we would have covered that too. . .if we were a football site. As for how crimes are viewed in society this is generally considered a relatively minor one by most of the population, but I don’t understand how you can expect this to be buried. When a party is broken up on/off-campus there is almost always a story in at least the student paper. Usually the names are not listed, but that’s primarily because the majority of the campus doesn’t know/care to know the names of the people arrested. Abromaitis, Montana, and company were named because they are the BMOC. It comes with the territory. If you expect the person to get mentioned in the newspaper for throwing a ball through a circle ten feet off the ground, which several kids in South Bend who are not on the basketball team can do, then it is fair game to get mentioned when that same person gets arrested.
Should priests also be arrested for drinking in church?