Athletes’ moral decline bad for everyone

Every day’s sports page seems to bring another reminder of the misconduct that plagues big-time athletic programs.

In Wednesday’s Spokesman-Review, for example, suspended football player Romeo Pellum asserted that he was leaving Washington State University because coaches treated him unfairly. He goes on trial next week on burglary charges. Meanwhile, Cougar coach Paul Wulff has written a letter of recommendation to help Pellum find another school that will let him play.

Also from Wednesday, star Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is named in a lawsuit by a woman who accuses him of raping her (for the record, the woman never reported the incident to police), and former Atlanta Falcon quarterback Michael Vick is waiting to hear if the National Football League will let him play pro football again, now that he’s served 23 months on a dogfighting conviction.

So it goes, day after day. The more that marquee athletes are lionized and paid, the more entitled they feel to stray outside the boundaries of conduct that apply to others.

The anecdotes are backed up by research. University of Idaho professor Sharon Stoll has been tracking athletes’ “moral reasoning” for 22 years, and she says the numbers for males have plunged as low as they can go. Female athletes do better, but their numbers are declining, too.

The public at large is following a similar pattern, says Stoll. No wonder Los Angeles Dodger fans welcomed star slugger Mannie Ramirez back from a 50-game suspension over banned substances as though he were pilot Chesley Sullenberger bringing a disabled airliner to a safe landing in the Hudson River.

Ramirez violated a rule, broke a promise. He betrayed his fans and teammates, but instead of being angry, they were adulatory. There’s a pennant at stake.

Athletes regularly score lower than the general public on moral metrics, notes Stoll, because they function in a world where winning is what matters. But she considers the depth of the current chart lines scary.

Fortunately, there’s an upside in the form of intervention programs that teach participants to recognize, value and do “the good.” Such efforts have been shown to improve moral reasoning scores, and Stoll has long pushed for more ethical training for student athletes. As bad as the trends have become, maybe more of the institutional stakeholders will accept her challenge.