Matt Johnson: You can't make this stuff up

This has not been a good week for Falcon football.  The storyline moved from the serious to the ridiculous with news that Matt Johnson has been charged with filing a false burglary report as part of a prank on his roommate, Ryan Burbrink.  Apparently, both young men had won money at the casino, and Johnson stole Burbrink's and the concocted the story to flesh out the joke.  The Sentinel-Tribune has the most complete take on this.

Chris Kingston said that he is sure it will be learning experience and it doesn't sound like Johnson will be officially sanctioned.

A couple things.  Obviously, Johnson let this go too far when he involved the police, which was a very dumb thing to do.  As far as that goes, young people do dumb things sometimes.  Compared to the other three police-related incidents this year, this one is relatively minor.  It is an embarrassment to the program and the University, however, and that's not acceptable.

The other thing kind of buried in here is the Casino.  There had been some chatter on azz.com about a contingent of BG players going to the Casino on a regular basis...right from practice in their warm-ups.  I hadn't said anything because I didn't have any way of knowing if it was true, but this seems to confirm it, at least partially.  I was initially surprised because all I have read recently about college athletes is that they can't afford to get a pizza or a snack at night, so I wouldn't have thought they had money to gamble with.  I guess that's my fault for believing what I read.

Burbrink won $1,500 and Johnson won $3,000, which to me are not small amounts of money.  Nothing illegal about it if you are 21, so it isn't that.  If it is true that our players are "regularly" going to the casino, I can't believe people in the program don't have problems with that.