Tennessee Tragic Trio: Leonard Little, Dwayne Goodrich, and Donte Stallworth
Friday, June 19, 2009
Latest FanHouse piece up here.
On Oct. 19, 1998, the St. Louis Rams' Leonard Little drove his Lincoln Navigator through a red light and crashed into a car driven by a 47-year-old mother. Later tests confirmed his blood alcohol level was .19, more than twice the legal limit in the state of Missouri. The next day the mother died.
On Jan. 14, 2003 Dallas Cowboys cornerback Dwayne Goodrich spent a night out with friends at a local strip club. At two in the morning, he hopped on the interstate. That night a car caught on fire on that same interstate and three good Samaritans rushed to aid the motorist caught inside. Goodrich struck all three, killing two.
On March 14, 2009 Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte Stallworth struck and killed a pedestrian in Miami Beach while driving his Bentley at 7:15 in the morning. Stallworth had been out drinking the night before and blood tests later confirmed he was impaired at the time of the accident.
What do all three of these men share in common besides being NFL players who have killed others while operating vehicles? They all played collegiate football for the University of Tennessee.
The trio represent a dark stain on the University of Tennessee's football program. And it leaves some wondering whether there was a culture of alcohol tolerance that aided in the later crimes, whether the players learned in Knoxville that the law didn't apply to them.
Their teammates, all of whom requested their names not be used, dispute the notion. "Alcohol was there, but it wasn't there any more than at any other college. I think it's a coincidence that this happened, 100 percent coincidental," says one.
If so, it's a coincidence that strains the bounds of credulity .On opening day 2008, 38 Tennessee Volunteer football players were on National Football League rosters. Six years ago, Goodrich was also in the NFL. By the spring of 2009, two of those 38, along with Goodrich, had combined to kill three men and one woman while driving a car. In 1998, the year of Little's conviction, 16,673 people died in alcohol related traffic accidents. By 2003, the year of Goodrich's crime, 17,013 motorists lost their lives to alcohol related accidents.
I was so overwhelmed by the freakishness of this coincidence that I contacted a math PhD at the University of Maryland, Chris Shaw, to run a statistical analysis for me. Below I've incorporated his data. Taking as a rough base the 300 million people who live in America and selecting 17,000 as the baseline number of victims, that means every year each of us has a .005667 percent chance of becoming a victim of an impaired driver.
But since all three men were drivers, not the victims, we need to adjust down to the roughly 220 million drivers in the country. And we have to assume that all of these people have a roughly equal chance of making the same mistake as Little, Goodrich, and Stallworth. Running these numbers again for an 11 year period (the length of time these accidents occurred), we discover that around .0052 percent of us would make that mistake.
Now shrink that pool of eligible drivers to around 175 scholarship football players from Tennessee over the six years from 1995 to 2001 and run the numbers to see what the odds are that three men would make this same mistake. To say it defies the laws of probability is an understatement. There's a .016 percent statistical chance of this actually happening. Or, flipping the numbers, a 99.984 percent chance of it never happening. Labels: tennessee trio leonard little dwayne goodrich donte stallworth
Posted by Clay Travis at 7:37 PM
 
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