And you've got to love that the trustees of the school seem to be over it with Bowden and his circus--guess losing will do that for a guy!
http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=ap-floridastate-campusfight&prov=ap&type=lgnsTALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP)—Five Florida State wide receivers will miss Saturday night’s homecoming game against Boston College for their roles in a midweek campus fight, coach Bobby Bowden said Friday.
Taiwan Easterling, Bert Reed, Corey Surrency, Cameron Wade and Richard Goodman will sit out Saturday’s crucial Atlantic Coast Conference contest.
“The police report has not been concluded but from the information that I have gathered, I’m suspending five players who were apparently involved,” Bowden said.
Maj. James Russell of the Florida State University Police Department said Bowden’s decision was based on independent information obtained by the coach and that the department’s investigation was going forward.
Russell said no arrests were imminent, but that he expected multiple charges sometime next week based on results from the investigation.
“You have to piece through the truths, inaccuracies and outright lies,” he said.
Russell had earlier said the melee apparently stemmed from bad blood between some of the athletes and members of the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.
No charges have been announced by campus police, who are trying to find out who threw a chair that injured a female bystander during Wednesday’s altercation.
The incident infuriated the school’s trustees who were meeting Friday in Tallahassee.
“There’s a problem,” said trustees chairman Jim Smith. “We’re kind of fed up with it.”
Easterling is the team’s leading receiver with 26 catches and has been a favorite target for sophomore quarterback Christian Ponder. Easterling, Reed and Surrency have combined for 51 catches good for 722 yards and eight touchdowns— four by Surrency.
The suspensions leave senior wideout Greg Carr and juniors Rod Owens and Preston Parker as the remaining experienced receivers. Junior college transfer Louis Givens and freshman Jarmon Fortson are likely to see increased playing time.
It’s the seventh game this season that the Seminoles (7-2, 4-2 ACC) will be without suspended players. Nineteen different athletes have now been suspended for at least one game for a violation of team or university policy.
The latest incident couldn’t come at a much worse time for the school as the NCAA is in the process of deciding Florida State’s fate for a classroom cheating scandal in 2007 that involved some five dozen athletes, including two dozen football players.
“If I’m sitting up there in Indianapolis (at NCAA headquarters) looking at this, I’d say ‘those guys down there aren’t taking this thing very serious,”’ Smith said.
It’s the third suspension in a month for Reed and the second for Surrency, a 24-year-old junior college transfer. Reed’s first suspension was for skipping classes. The other suspensions for Reed and Surrency were for unspecified violations of team rules.
“The suspensions don’t seem to be working very well,” Smith said Friday. “You’ve got to be a good citizen. You can’t go around beating people up.”
