August 7, 2024
You may have heard the reverberations from a recent post on the platform formally known as Twitter: a tweet from @NFL_Memes claimed that 41 members of the 2008 Florida Gators national championship college football team have been arrested at some time in their lives. Shocking.
Or is it?
By my reckoning, if the Florida roster was that of a typical big-time college football team, it carried about 120 players. So, about one-third of the team was arrested at some point.
What percentage of Americans have ever been arrested? According to the Brennan Center for Justice, nearly half of black males and about 40 percent of white males have been arrested by the age of 23.
Perhaps the tweet should have said “playing football at Florida reduces the odds that you’ll be arrested.”