You don’t have to look beyond the Inland Northwest to come up with examples of college athletes behaving badly.

Earlier this summer, at Boise State, football player Cam Hall removed himself from the team after being charged with three counts of vehicular manslaughter and leaving the scene of an accident in a road rage tragedy in May that killed a young couple and their 5-week-old daughter near Boise.

Although they were cleared of criminal charges, young Washington State basketball players Robbie Cowgill and Alex Kirk triggered on-campus protests earlier this year with juvenile antics directed against a minority woman at the multicultural center that were seen by some as racially motivated. A few months later, WSU running back Kevin McCall had his third-degree rape charge reduced and was sentenced to serve 45 days in the Whitman County Jail.

At University of Idaho, assistant football coach Alundis Brice spent four days in jail for brandishing a handgun in a Moscow nightclub parking lot a year ago.

The list above represents a sampling of the poor judgment and crimes committed by players and coaches in the region. No one but athletic directors, coaches and players know how much athletes really get away with. It’d be nice to think that area college coaches deal appropriately with episodes when players are involved in thuggery, poor behavior and crime – nice, but naïve. Many players, and some coaches, in the competitive environment of college sports aren’t equipped to make ethical decisions. UI ethics researcher Sharon Stoll is right when she says sports programs should add instruction in ethics to their playbook.

Stoll is a pioneer in ethics role-playing that prepares athletes to avoid situations that can ruin them. According to Shawn Vestal of The Spokesman-Review, her research findings include: Athletes are less equipped than others to make good ethical decisions. Male athletes score worse than females in moral reasoning. Big-money, male contact sports produce the most problem players. And athletes become more “morally calloused” the longer they participate in sports.

Athletes who are good enough to play college sports are in a select company. Many have been favored and pampered by starry-eyed coaches and parents since they were small. They’ve been idolized or envied by high school classmates. As teenagers, they’ve been pursued by big-name coaches and universities in ways that aren’t always above board. They’ve gotten away with things that lesser players don’t. Mix in the win-at-all-costs attitude that prevails in college sports, and many young athletes believe that they should be treated like stars, that rules don’t apply to them, that there aren’t consequences for poor behavior.

College athletes should be ambassadors for their colleges and role models for younger players and children. However, they often don’t have the life experience, common sense or humility to stay out of trouble. A course on ethics that focuses on a modern version of the golden rule could help them experience a successful college career. It couldn’t hurt.