UCF Scandal

Kyle Hightower, the esteemed reporter at the Orlando Sentinel features a story on his blog on the most recent felony acts available.

Hightower reports that sophomore UCF football player Ricky Kay was suspended from the team after he was charged with a felony and a misdemeanor for an incident that occurred on campus and caused over $5,000 in damage.

Kay, 19, was charged with preventing or hindering firefighter equipment (a third degree felony) and misdemeanor damage of property. He was arrested Saturday night. He posted $1,100 bond and was released from the Orange County jail.

Read all the sordid details at OrlandoSentinel.com.

It just doesn’t seem to end over there at Mickey Mouse U.

which end of the bat Jay Berman was allegedly attempting to cram up the chute of the equipment manager. Yes, call me demented. Call me sordid. Call me anything. My mission is to report on the yahoos to the east at UCF.

What would possess a guy his age to allegedly engage in bat rape? That’s just queer.

A couple years ago he allegedly tried to choke a kid in the dugout, now he allegedly wants bat-sex? Damn right. I’d fire him too.

So what’s next?  O’Leary allegedly shoving a football somewhere inappropriate?

Too much.

Yes indeed, sailing my little yacht in the Atlantic. But who really cares? I do have a volunteer staff here that doesn’t do much. That’ll teach me to consider the lower waged UCF applicants. They’ll write anything, if there is a lunch involved. But UCF ain’t buying lunches these days. Anyway, I have had some email lately. And I know you guys are just teasing, asking me who’s the latest UCF joker to get busted. Well, I don’t know. I guess I need to wade through the obvious candidates and look past the Jay Bergman rape allegations and the George O’Leary/Keith Tribble blatherings to answer these queries. Give me a day or two. The UCF universe is full of fun stuff. It’s hard to keep up and live a life normal for folks that don’t kneel for the UCF bat. Ha. Be back shortly.

According to published reports, UCF continues its backwards slide:

Five teams moving ahead and five in reverse

Five in reverse:

four on the list omitted in the interest of brevity

UCF. A season of hope has been crushed by the death of wide receiver Ereck Plancher during conditioning drills — and players anonymously speaking out against coach George O’Leary’s practice/conditioning tactics. All of that talent — and there’s enough for another C-USA title — means nothing now. The team is fractured, and it will take more than just one season to heal.

Link to SI story 

There. If anyone needed an established mag like SI to confirm the fact UCF is going backwards, now you have it. Happy Muthas Day.

This is too sick EVEN for our staff.

I hope you UCF people find the right vehicle for repentance.

Disgusting.

Friday, May 02, 2008 12:21:45 AM

ORLANDO — News 13 has learned the University of Central Florida fired baseball coach Jay Bergman because of allegegations of harassment.

Bergman has been coaching the Knights for more than 25 years.

The school said he’s being fired because of a personnel issue. But sources close to the school told News 13 it was due to allegations of harassment from a fellow worker in the athletic department.

Bergman did not accompany the team to New Orleans for its most recent round of games.

The school only released a short statement saying a national search will begin for his replacement.

The Knights have 10 games left during this year’s regular season.

Link to story at 13 News

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Man, it just keep getting funnier over there at UCF. Scandal karma killin’ you guys.

From Mike Bianchi’s Orlando Sentinel column:

Short stuff: UCF Coach George O’Leary continues to take shots at the Sentinel for our reporting on the Ereck Plancher story. O’Leary spoke to a booster club in Brevard County Thursday night and questioned the motives and even the authenticity of the four football players who spoke anonymously to the Sentinel in the aftermath of Plancher’s death.

“I don’t want to dignify any comments by responding to unnamed sources,” O’Leary told Florida Today columnist Peter Kerasotis. “Who knows who they were, or if they were even players?”

We have now reached the irony of all ironies: George O’Leary accusing somebody else of making stuff up. . . .

no further comment necessary….

According to reports on local Orlando television WFTV.com’s site, slated starting running back Phillip Smith has left the UCF Football Program:

First Running Back Kevin Smith leaves school early to head to the NFL. Now, it looks like the man called upon to replace him in the backfield might not be around either. Sources close to the UCF football program tell Channel 9, Phillip Smith is no longer with the team, adding they were not sure if he quit or was kicked off. Phillip Smith was UCF’s 2nd leading rusher last season and was expected to be the starter in 2008, but a leg injury had kept him out of action since the 2nd week of spring practice. When asked if Smith was still on the team, a UCF spokesman told Channel 9 he has no information to confim or deny our report.

With information from UCF at a premium these days as the athletic administration continues a “lock-down” on the media, we may not know for several days, if ever, the reason for Smith’s departure. Smith’s departure makes it two Knights to leave the program after the death of Ereck Plancher and the subsequent media firestorm over UCF’s handling of the death itself.

The Orlando Sentinel UCF beat writer Kyle Hightower published an open letter to UCF fans in which he attempted to explain the media responsibility and interest in the untimely death of UCF football player Ereck Plancher. This excerpt alone explains the reason Hightower and his paper have not rested on this story:

“Bottom line, players described a version of events that was different from what George O’Leary and Keith Tribble told the media. We NEVER have said which account is right/wrong or tried to blame ANYONE in anything we have written. “

Therein lies the problem. A coach with limited credibility when it comes to telling the truth describes a situation far differently than the players. The players’ description likely puts UCF in NCAA violation and O’Leary a knowing participant in the eventual collapse of Plancher.

Lying on one’s resume is one thing. Lying at the scene of a young man’s death is fully another. It remains to be seen if that is the case - and the Sentinel is the major party pursuing the truth, or at least trying to reconcile the two sides.

UCF hired O’Leary knowing the faults he’d presented in the past from lying to physically abusing his players. The administration to this day defends that decision and allegedly is crawling in bed right along side their hire, O’Leary.

Kudos to the Orlando Sentinel for seeking the truth, regardless of the maelstrom of insults and profanity being tossed their way by UCF fans.

Plancher story has not ended

Sports columnist Pete Kerasotis

COCOA — Anything written right now about Ereck Plancher needs ellipses dots.

You know what I mean. Those three little dots . . . that indicate a sentence, or a story, is not complete.

This story is not complete. It might never be. The only thing we know for sure is that Ereck Plancher is dead.

Goodness, we don’t even have the autopsy report yet. How can you possibly put a period at the end of a sentence when we still don’t know why or how Ereck Plancher died?

What we do know is that the UCF football player collapsed March 18 during an offseason, on-campus workout, and was pronounced dead about an hour later at Florida Hospital East.

When he spoke to local boosters Thursday night, UCF head coach George O’Leary referred to it as “the incident.” It seemed odd, how O’Leary chose not to say Ereck Plancher’s name, but rather call the player’s death “the incident.”

…

What we do know, though, is that UCF changed its initial depiction of the workout, doubling its duration from the originally stated 10 minutes and 26 seconds, to 20 minutes.

There’s also criticism that in its internal investigation, UCF didn’t interview any of its players. I’ve been told from university spokespeople that this is protocol, and that they also wanted to honor the players’ grieving process.

But wouldn’t you want to be the ones interviewing your players about a teammate’s death, rather than the local newspaper?

Listen, it isn’t uncommon for authorities to tactfully interview grieving family and friends about a death that needs explanation. They do it all the time. UCF should’ve done that, too, and done it right away. They didn’t.

Now it is a month to the day later, and when I asked UCF spokesperson Grant Heston Thursday afternoon exactly how many players the university had interviewed to try to determine what happened, he said he thought there was one player.

One?

“I’ll get back with you on that,” he said.

Later, he sent me an e-mail telling me he was still trying to find that information. At 9:22 p.m., he sent another e-mail telling me he was still “looking into” my question.

I still don’t have an answer.

“I’m confident,” O’Leary said, “that in the long run things will come out that will prove what I said to be true.”

You know what that means?

To be continued . . .

Read the full story at FloridaToday.com