Football is second to school. If he is a menace in school, then his privilege to play football and represent the school should be removed from him. As an educator, I fully support the school's decision to remove him from the team. Too many of our high school student athletes forget that consequences do apply to them. Yes, many athletes at Hazelwood East are successful, but they wouldn't have had that success without the school. School must always come first. If they can't realize that they must act like civilized human beings and how to function in a community, their football skills mean nothing. We have too many professional, and even college level, football players that are nothing but trouble. Schools are trying to teach students responsibility, accepting both positive and negative consequences, humility, and citizenship. Darris not only threatened a teacher at school, he also threatened a bus driver during summer school and was kicked out of summer school for it. Of course he is not going to admit to threatening a teacher at school because he would get in trouble for it. He is lucky he was allowed to return to school at all this semester because other students have gone through the same disciplinary process he did and were suspended for 30-180 school days. He only received 10, which is a slap on the wrist for everything he has done at school.
He believes consquences don't apply to him because too many times the Hazelwood School District has turned their head when our football players are at fault. As a result, too many of our football players believe they are invincible. Darris' return to school is just one more story for the records that will continually bring about more problems. We have too many football players with good records, who are responsible, who are strong athletes, and are passed by for one reason or another. Too much attention is given to the negativity and those who do something positive are quickly ignored. We need to stop giving so much attention to those causing the problems and begin focusing more on those who are finding success in every area of their lives. We need to show our student athletes that we would rather give attention to those who deserve it instead of those who have single handedly destroyed their own success. We need to show them how to accept consquences instead of passing blame, instead of looking for a scape goat.

I would also like to add that Darris made the choice to say and do everything he has said and done. We, as educators and administrators, did not screw up his chance at playing college football. This is exactly the problem. He made the choice, it was a poor choice, but he made it and now he must serve the consequences for it.
The result of his lawsuit was...it was thrown out of court. He never even went to court because the judge realized, as did everyone else, that it is not a strong case. He has the potential to do better, but his ego clouds his foresight. He still cannot seem to look back and see his errors and fix them. He has not made a single attempt to make things right or to even admit he was wrong in what he did. He simply walks around claiming to be famous and wearing the state championship medal of another football player that did what needed to be done and secured his opportunity to play for East High at the State Games on Friday and win. Even now he feels the need to pretend he is deserving of the state championship medal. Ironically, it was Darris Ford who said, "They won't make it to state without me on the team." Not only did the team make it to state, they won. Football always has been and always will be a team sport. They did not win because of one individual player. The person we should be focusing on is East High's football player #1 who caught the winning touchdown to win state for our boys and all the players who made that catch possible during the game.

What does the football team have to do with anything? I need more information, but if the incident happened off the field and not on team practice time then why is he banned from the sport? If he is cleared to go back to school then he should be cleared to return to the field. Would we be prohibiting a guy on the chess club from going back to that activity if he did something during school hours?

Without any more information the whole thing seems like an arbitrary decision of some random administrator that will screw up the kid's chances of going to college and making something of himself.

Why are so few of us left active, healthy, and without personality disorders?

Well, looking at the pictures (and his clever captions) it's obvious this guy can't spell a lick, so he shouldn't go to college or university until he learns this most basic of benchmarks, anyhow.

At least he didn't punch his own coach repeatedly in the face.

- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson