Stoops on thin ice with Jarboe

NORMAN — By now, you've probably seen Josh Jarboe's YouTube video, and if you haven't, consider yourself lucky.

Jarboe's jabbering about shooting people — two months after he pleaded guilty to carrying a gun onto a Georgia high school campus — shows that he is undeserving of an Oklahoma scholarship.

But that doesn't mean he won't get a third chance. Bob Stoops is not the most sentimental of souls, no Father Flanagan, but he has a solid track record turning troubled players into solid citizens, or getting rid of them before they embarrass the school and the state too much.

Stoops indicated Thursday he won't remove Jarboe from the squad.

"Kick a guy off the team for what he says?” Stoops said. The whole Internet culture frustrates Stoops. "We're starting to talk about everything kids say and do,” Stoops said. "Now we're in people's homes, in their private spaces.”

Maybe so. But the same youth culture that makes this kind of video acceptable also knows that YouTube is the destination of any interesting video. Jarboe himself took this from private to public.

Jarboe's status certainly is a reasonable debate.

It was no clear choice for Jarboe to even be welcome in Norman in the first place, after he was charged with a felony in March and pleaded guilty in May. A judge reduced the conviction to a misdemeanor under Georgia's First Offender's Act, otherwise Jarboe would not even have been eligible for a scholarship, under OU policy.

Oklahoma media did not chastise Stoops for taking the gamble; he had earned the right to be trusted on such dicey decisions.

Now, Jarboe has burned Stoops. The video calls into question whether Jarboe has any clue of the gravity of what he did last spring.

Among the lyrics of his rap:

"...Shoot ya in you head, you might be dead, with a halo.

"I put his a** in a coma.

"I'll shoot ya a** up like a damn pool table.

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