ATHENS, Ga. — A University of Georgia football staffer was arrested Friday night for speeding and reckless driving charges, records show.
Jarvis Jones, a former Bulldogs star linebacker who played four seasons in the NFL with Pittsburgh, is the latest member of the program to have a run-in with law enforcement for speeding and other driving violations.
Records show Jones, 33, was arrested late Friday night on misdemeanor charges and released shortly after midnight Saturday.
In media availability Monday afternoon, Coach Kirby Smart said: “There’ll be internal discipline, it’s a personnel matter, I can’t really comment further on it.”
The UGA program has been under particular scrutiny since a crash in January after their championship parade that killed a player, Devin Willock, and the staffer who was the driver in the crash, Chandler LeCroy. Another staffer and player were involved in that, and police said it resulted from a racing incident between LeCroy and former UGA star Jalen Carter.
LeCroy had a history of speeding violations, and an 11Alive investigation in March confirmed a football team official stepped in to try and help reduce fines and punishments related to at least one of her tickets.
Despite the gravity of the crash’s fallout, subsequent speeding incidents with players currently on the team have made headlines in the past few months.
“I’m disappointed any time we have traffic incidents,” the coach said back in July on the issue. “What concerns me most is the safety of our players and when you drive at high speeds, it’s unsafe, and we don’t want that to happen.”
He said the school would “do all we can to take that out and make sure that’s eradicated,” framing the program’s emphasis on harm reduction.
“I’m smart enough to understand and know that 18-20-year-olds is when this happens, it’s when it happened with me as a student-athlete, that’s when speeding happens,” Smart said. “What we wanna do is take that out and make it safe and not have high speeds – if somebody’s gonna get a speeding ticket, it should not be a super speeder.”
Addressing a later question, Smart said, “We don’t wanna be just a football factory, we wanna produce people that are quality citizens, that do a great job in the community.”
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