Sports Illustrated Wraps Up OSU Series With 'The Fallout'

The final part of SI's series on Oklahoma State football examines kicked off and cast away players.

Monday, September 16th 2013, 12:53 pm

By: News 9

Sports Illustrated posted Part 5 a day earlier than scheduled. In the final part, SI examines players who, when no longer useful to the football program, were cast aside, returning to worlds they had hoped to escape. Some have been incarcerated, others live on the streets, many have battled drug abuse and a few have attempted suicide.

Sports Illustrated

Here are the critical points to the final piece of SI's Oklahoma State series.

Artrell Woods waits tables part-time and lives with his mother and her foster children. He concedes that he drinks too much and smokes too much marijuana. He is spending more and more time with what he calls "hustlers," people he knows he should avoid and he thought he'd left behind when he went to Oklahoma State. He is also in constant pain from a back injury he suffered while in college, which he can't remedy because he doesn't have health insurance.

Between 2002 -- the year of Les Miles's first full recruiting class at Stillwater -- and 2010, 43.5% of the players who enrolled at the school left before exhausting their five years of eligibility, not including one player who died and those who declared early for the NFL.

In the summer of 2003 reserve offensive lineman Jonathan Cruz's scholarship was revoked because of academic troubles -- troubles that many more prominent players avoided by having substantial coursework done for them. Cruz says he contemplated suicide when his scholarship was revoked.

SI says former running back/linebacker Kevin White was run out of town because he was an introvert and at the bottom of the running back pecking order. White says Mike Gundy kicked him off the team in 2006 after marijuana was found in a car White was riding in. White says he wasn't charged in the incident. White later considered enrolling at West Texas A&M but he says he couldn't get his transcript because he owed hundreds of dollars in miscellaneous charges to OSU.

Former safety Thomas Wright also said he tried to take his life after being released from the team.

SI says OSU doesn't do basic background checks on recruits.

Top recruit Herschel Sims (2011-12) says Gundy gave him a chance to repay the teammate he had stolen $700 from. When Sims did not, the teammate called the police and Sims was charged with two felony counts of second-degree forgery, to which he would plead guilty and receive a deferred sentence.

Full Sports Illustrated Article here